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Living in One World: Searle’s Social Ontology and Semiotics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Phila Mfundo Msimang
Phila Mfundo Msimang*
Affiliation:
The Natal Society Foundation
*
Contact Phila Mfundo Msimang at P.O. Box 11093, Dorpspruit 3206, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa (p02msimang@gmail.com).
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Abstract

Searle’s social ontology concerns the question of how it is that we are to reconcile different aspects of reality but takes for granted a particular kind of naturalism based on his unexplicated “basic facts” of nature. The consequence of this approach is that Searle’s ontology deals specifically with social reality and its institutions, and never directly with the basic facts upon which his position rests. Paradoxically, this naturalistic assumption alienates his theory from its connection with the basic facts because the nature of this connection is taken for granted and not explicitly shown how nature is connectable to the social world. I hope to show that Searle’s project is redeemed by biosemiotic theory that makes an explicit connection between the beginnings of sociality, which is where Searle’s work starts off, and the biological and physical nature of things, which is what Searle’s work takes for granted but what biosemiotics explicates.

Type
Research Article
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Fall 2014 , pp. 173 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

This article has been funded by a research grant from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA) for the development of a book of which the theme of this article is a part. I would like to thank Ndumiso Dladla of the University of South Africa (UNISA) for his assistance in making research materials available to me.

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