The Construction Of Institutional Facts

The"linguistic turn"in the philosophy of 20th century is a great revolution in the history of philosophy. Speech Acts Theory was born against this background. After finishing his famous book Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), John Searle discovered that language plays an extra role, which he was not aware of when he wrote Speech Acts, that is, language is partly constitutive of all institutional reality. Searle then wrote the The Construction of Social Reality (1995), therefore, to explore the social ontology from the perspective of philosophy of language. In this book, Searle concerned generally about social facts, but mostly devoted to institutional facts. This exceptional approach has attracted extensive scholarly attention and generated heated discussion.Searle proposed that a very large number of institutional facts can be created by explicit performative utterances (performatives). However, it is obvious that explicit performatives can't include all the speech acts which can construct institutional facts, which induces a problem of incomplete induction. Moreover, Searle created considerable controversy when he classified all the performatives as declaratives. Therefore, it is not a sound methodological choice to discuss the construction of institutional facts solely from a performative utterances perspective. This dissertation rather discusses the problem from the perspective of Searle's concept of"direction of fit". In this methodological framework, all the speech acts with the direction of fit"world-to-words", namely, declaratives, commisives, and directives, can construct institutional facts.The dissertation presents a three-level model which shows the macro-mode of the construction of institutional facts by speech acts. The whole process of construction includes first the process of successfully performed speech acts, then the process of transferring the intention to the hearers, and finally the process of assigning the status function. Moreover, in the micro-mode of the construction, the speech acts, which include delclaratives, commisives and directives, create the institutional facts. The logical frame concisely reveals the construction process. On the foundation created by the above analysis, the dissertation moves toward a new understanding of Kuhn's paradigm. Obviously the paradigm is itself an institutional fact according to my analysis above. In Kuhn's eyes, the transformation of the paradigms is the scientific revolution. The replacement of institutional facts, therefore, creates in itself a scientific revolution. The formation of a new paradigm is the construction of institutional fact. The presentation of it is a declaration to scientific community, not only to describe the scientific discovery, which brings about an innovative understanding of the traditional scientific view.