Legal Facts and Dependence on Representations
Keywords:
social ontology, legal facts, documents, institutions, John Searle, Barry SmithAbstract
Barry Smith has recently argued against John Searle’s thesis that institutional facts exist because they are represented as existing in a certain community. Smith argues that institutional facts can exist even though they are not represented as existing and that institutional facts can fail to obtain even though they are represented as obtaining. In this paper it is argued that Smith’s challenge can be met for a certain class of legal facts. I argue that in order to solve the problem posed by Smith, we must distinguish between three different kinds of institutional facts and between three different kinds of representation which sustain their existence.
References
Andersson, Åsa (2007): Power and Social Ontology. Malmö: Bokbox.
Celano, Bruno (1999): “Collective Intentionality, Self-Referentiality and False Beliefs: Some Issues Concerning Institutional Facts”. In: Analyse & Kritik 20, p. 143–158. https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-1999-0206
Hindriks, Frank (2012): “But Where is the University?” In: Dialectica 66, p. 93–113.
Lagerspetz, Eerik (2006): “Institutional Facts, Performativity and False Beliefs”. In: Cognitive Systems Research 7, p. 298–306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2005.11.004
Moural, Josef (2002): “Searle’s Theory of Institutional Facts: A Program of Critical Revision”. In: Günther Grevendorf and Georg Meggle (Eds.): Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality. Discussions with John R. Searle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, p. 271–286. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0589-0_18
Roversi, Corrado (2010): “Constitutive Rules in Context”. In: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 96, p. 223–238.
Searle, John R. (1995): The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.
Searle, John R. (2001): “Reply to Barry Smith”. In: Philosophical Explorations 4, p. 75–77.
Searle, John R. (2003): “Reply to Barry Smith”. In: American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62, p. 299–309.
Searle, John R. (2008): “Social Ontology and Political Power”. In: Barry Smith, David M. Mark, Isaac Ehrlich (Eds.): The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, p. 19–34.
Searle, John R. (2010): Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195396171.001.0001
Smith, Barry (1992): “An Essay on Material Necessity”. In: Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary volume 18, p. 301–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1992.10717307
Smith, Barry (2001): “The Chinese Rune Argument”. In: Philosophical Explorations 4, p. 70–75.
Smith, Barry (2003): “The Ontology of Social Reality”. In: American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62, p. 285–299. https://doi.org/10.1111/1536-7150.t01-1-00012
Thomasson, Amie (2003): “Foundations for a Social Ontology”. In: Protosociology 18–19, p. 269–290. https://doi.org/10.5840/protosociology200318/199
Zaibert, Leo (2004): “Toward Meta-Politics”. In: The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 7, p. 113–128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12113-004-1007-9
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2016 Jan Almäng
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.
