Making The Social World

There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece ofpaper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can wegive an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human realityfits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve tocreate and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language.

"John Searle offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality - a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets, and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts exist onlyb

The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. Congratulations to Daniel F. Chambliss, winner of the ASA Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Prize for 2018. The new Sixth Edition of Making Sense of the Social World continues to be an unusually accessible and student-friendly introduction to the variety of social research methods, guiding undergraduate readers to understand research in their roles as consumers and novice producers of social science. Known for its concise, casual, and clear writing, its balanced treatment of quantitative and qualitative approaches, and its integrated approach to the fundamentals, the text has much to offer both novice researchers and more advanced students alike. The authors use a wide variety of examples from formal studies and everyday experiences to illustrate important principles and techniques. A Complete Teaching & Learning Package SAGE coursepacks FREE! Easily import our quality instructor and student resource content into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. SAGE edge FREE online resources for students that make learning easier.

John Searle offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality - a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox addressed is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line begun in his 'The Construction of Social Reality', Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all 'institutional facts'. His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry & biology.

This book explores a vital but neglected element in the philosophy of social science – the complex nature of the social world. By a systematic philosophical engagement, it conceives the social world in terms of three basic concerns: epistemic, methodological and ethical. It examines how we cognize, study and ethically interact with the social world. As such, it demonstrates that a discussion of ethics is epistemically indispensable to the making of the social world. The book presents a new interpretation of philosophy of social science and addresses a series of related topics, including the role of the human subject in the context of scientific knowledge, objectivity, historicity, meaning and nature of social reality, social and literary theory, scientific methodology and fact/value dichotomy, human and collective agency and the limits to relativism. Examining each in turn, it argues that the social world is constructed through human actions and becomes significant because we ascribe meaning to it. This is organized around discussions on the meaning, agency and the making of a social world. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of philosophy of social science, political philosophy and sociology.

Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective offers the most accessible introduction to the tools and concepts of CMM – Coordinated Management of Meaning – one of the groundbreaking theories of speech communication. Draws upon advances in research for the most up-to-date concepts in speech communication Defines the 'critical moments' of communication for students and practitioners; encouraging us to view communication as a two-sided process of coordinating actions and making/managing meanings Questions how we can intervene in dangerous or undesirable patterns of communication that will result in better social worlds

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a ‘five-pound note’ with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch. In The Construction of Social Reality, eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit.