From Language to Institutions? Discussing with John Searle

Abstract

John Searle maintains that social institutions are only possible because humans have language, and once the social institutions are created by means of a certain linguistic logic form, other institutions will appear without the awareness of the language users. In this paper this explanation of the organization of social institutions will be under scrutiny, analyzing the role that the author gives to individual intentionality, to collective intentionality and to the constitutive and regulative rules. The result of the discussion shows that the author does not see that there are institutions that are not created by language, overestimating the power of language, and that he does not incorporate with clarity the function of cooperative behaviour in the collective acceptance of constitutive and regulative rules.