Wow, was this text a slog. It took me almost a year — and that's with it sitting on my bedside table, every night! Why didn't I give up? Because the subject matter seemed so fundamental, so timelessly and universally applicable to human life.

We are cogs in these social machines. There is no way around it. To sit alone, in silence, is still to machinate social constructs for all but the most enlightened bodhisattva.

This text was a thorough, albeit labyrinthian, exploration of the simple machines comprising our inescapable social enterprise.

I cannot recommend it for fun. I did not hardly enjoy this effort. The fruits of my intellectual labors — a picnic compared to the labors of the author — were dry, but nutritious.

After having read this text, reflected on it, and tried to work it into conversations — a more difficult exercise than for most other books I've read — I do feel as though I can "see the matrix" in my daily life.

Just a bit.

Perhaps I need to re-read this, but I cannot bear the thought of juggling such terms as "regulative/constitutive rules", "brute/social/institutional facts", "agentive/nonagentive functions", or "ontologically/epistemologically objective/subjective facts".

By the end, we're crunching ostensibly whole schools of thought into radically dense terms like "disquotation" and "correspondence theory" — which Searle labels tautological predicates.

I don't know. It made me feel like an undergraduate philosophy student, and I struggled to incorporate it into my praxis.

I only rate it so highly because it does seem to be aimed directly at the core of society. If only that path were less grueling. ( )

Searle is an analytic philosopher, and he attempts to employ those techniques to explain social institutions. It doesn't really work. His basic intuitions are credible, but he ignores the work done by better equipped social scientists to explain the same territory (e.g., he devotes a chapter to something he calls "Background assumptions," which anyone else would recognize as schemata). His effort to describe social rules via symbolic logic might capture some general insights, but he overreaches and fails to account for the complex fluidity of social interactions.

Perhaps of more enduring interest are the final chapters that he had originally intended as a preface, in which he rebuts the postmodern denial of external reality. That is less of a problem than it used to be, but he does a nice job of showing the incoherence of that line of thought. ( )

This is a clear demonstration of the obtuse and pointless quality of a certain kind of ontological work. ( )

Searle is deeply interested in how we enrich the raw reality of our physical world with complex cultural trappings such as cathedrals and ceremonies, games and government, language and licenses, money and marriage, and tax and tickets. The functioning and relevance of such concepts rests entirely on a communal belief in their validity. That acceptance affords a societal status to certain people, associations, processes, acts and objects. Without this added status, the social entities are absent. His explanations of how these come about are careful and well presented.

Indeed, it is a pleasure to read Searle’s account. He is not one of those modern philosophers who tries to impress, shock or confuse. Instead he makes a lot of sense. However, be prepared, he does sometimes intend a technical meaning for some everyday words (eg intentional, propositional and aspectual). That he feels it is necessary to defend an existence for external reality is a sorry state for modern philosophy. Nevertheless he explains clearly why one should assert there is an external world that impinges on our senses, a rational world we all share. This world is the necessary base stock upon which our society grafts our rich and interesting cultural world. ( )