How Not to Save Searle

We are of course flattered that Elijah Weber (“Context-Dependence in Searle’s Impossibility Argument: A Reply to Butchard and D’Amico,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42:1-12) has written a reply to our article almost the same length as the original article (‘Counting as’ a Bridge Principle: Against Searle Against Social-Scientific Laws,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 41:455-69). Normally, we would take the view that our job is to get out of the way and allow further discussion to take its course.

But Weber’s reply misses the core thrust of our argument, and therefore we feel that we must offer further explanation as briefly as we can. Weber’s account of Searle on social kinds is seriously misleading. While Searle has written a good deal of the wider issues of social ontology that are of interest to Weber, we note in our article that a number of those topics do not impinge on the argument we considered, and we see no need to discuss them.

We will not repeat much of what is in our original article, as it is there for all to read. But it is important to note that Weber’s reply has sentences with our names in parentheses afterward (i.e., citations), and in many case these sentences are neither quotes nor paraphrases of what we say. For example, Weber’s central point seems to rely on distinguishing two sorts of physical open-endedness. He thinks that we focus on the wrong sort when we spell out Searle’s original argument for the conclusion that social-scientific laws are impossible. Weber distinguishes the following types of physical open-endedness:

There is no physical feature that is sufficient for money, though some physical features are necessary for money. (Weak open-endedness)

There is no physical feature that is either necessary or sufficient for money. (Strong open-endedness)

We attribute point 1 to Searle, but we show that it is not the position that secures Searle’s conclusion that social kinds are radically open-ended. The view we attribute to him is this:

3. The lawlike regularities that govern physical phenomena that we might treat as money could never explain lawlike regularities that govern money, were there any.

When we attributed to Searle the view that there are some physical features that money must have, that was simply an all-things-considered exegetical judgment based on works other than Minds, Brains, and Science. There is nothing in our objection to Searle that hinges on reading him in this way. As we stress in the article, all that is needed for bridge principles is bottom-up entailment (as opposed to biconditionals), so even if Searle does not—and never did—believe that there are physical features money must have, our objection stands.

Here is one statement of Weber’s criticism: “I will argue that ‘counts as’ social-scientific laws pass Searle’s prediction test only if our attitudes regarding a social phenomenon are held fixed. Since our attitudes about social phenomena are not fixed, the claim that ‘counts as’ social scientific laws pass Searle’s prediction test should be rejected” (p. 2). Weber claims that a simple example makes clear that we have not grasped what it means for money to be physically open-ended. He points out that Confederate money ceased to be a currency. He thinks, we take it, that this historical example proves that money cannot fit into scientific laws even with our account of bridging principles.

We certainly do argue that it is not the physical features alone but those features plus our attitudes toward them that, taken together, count as money (counting as being an explanatory connection). But nothing in this claim requires our attitudes to be fixed. Our attitudes can change, and if they change in the right way, there will be a physical phenomenon that no longer contributes to an explanation of the existence of some money. But that physical phenomenon would be only a portion of the one that was playing an explanatory role when it comes to the existence of laws about money. Our attitudes are underwritten by our brain states, and when our attitudes change, so do our brain states. Thus, were one to predict the relevant social phenomenon on the basis of certain physical laws and conditions, the laws and conditions would have to be such as to secure the brain states that accompany our attitudes. For this reason, the possibility of a change in our attitudes has no bearing on whether social scientific laws might be embodied by lower-level laws.

Of course, the possibility of a law’s being uninstantiated because the relevant conditions do not obtain squares perfectly well with widely held views about scientific methodology. Assuming for the moment that there were economic laws, economists could proceed as follows: “Imagine an economy A of such and such a size with such and such productivity. Now further imagine that its currency has a fixed or pegged exchange rate to the currency of economy B of such and such size and with such and such productivity. Under these conditions and given these economic laws, the rate of exchange would produce a rate of inflation in economy A of such and such.” In fact, economists engage in such theoretical exercises all the time. We ask: In light of the fact that our picture allows for the possibility of a change in attitudes (and hence physical conditions), would Weber want to insist that Searle should say that the above economic laws are conceptually impossible on the grounds that the currency discussed in the example does not actually exist? If it were to follow from Searle’s account of social ontology that no economist could do what we just described (and we do not believe that does follow from Searle’s account), then that would be a good reason to reject Searle’s account of social ontology, not embrace it. It would also follow that any use of scientific laws in this manner in any field would suffer the same criticism. But that result is unacceptable, and we doubt that Weber would disagree with us on that point.

In his conclusion, Weber states, “Even if Butchard and D’Amico’s challenge to Searle were successful, their argument would not have much bearing on the methodology of the social sciences” (11). We simply do not grasp his dialectical move here in conceding why what we say fails even if we were correct about our thesis. We do not claim that you need laws to have social explanations; we do not even claim that you need laws for there to be science. Rather, we simply demonstrate that the existence of social-scientific laws is compatible with Searle’s social ontology, and we show it in a way that we consider definitive. By “definitive,” we mean that to argue that such laws are impossible, as Searle had hoped to demonstrate, would require introducing contentious and controversial claims about bridging principles or even the nature of scientific laws themselves. But then the argument would be neither interesting nor informative. We can’t speak for everyone, but certainly Searle would not find such a result either interesting or informative.