Introduction to Social Reality
Everything in existence belongs to a single world governed by physics and chemistry. This raises a fundamental question about human life and civilization. How can things like consciousness, money, or government exist in a universe made entirely of physical particles? John Searle explores how humans connect basic physical facts to complex social structures to create an objective social world.
The world contains objective facts that exist only because people agree they exist. While things like mountains and atoms are independent of human opinion, things like money, property, and governments are real only because of human belief. These are institutional facts, and they differ from brute facts, which exist regardless of what anyone thinks.
Social reality is often invisible because people are raised to take it for granted. A child learns to see a dollar bill or a car without reflecting on the complex social rules that define them. It is actually harder to see these objects as mere physical matter than it is to see them as money or a vehicle.
To understand this process, we must distinguish between intrinsic and observer-relative features of the world. Intrinsic features, such as mass or chemical composition, exist regardless of what anyone thinks. Observer-relative features, such as being a screwdriver, exist only because conscious agents treat them as such. While the status of being a screwdriver depends on human observation, it remains a publicly verifiable fact.
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