The Gospel According to Speech Act Theory — Or: How Searle Tries to Pull Himself Out of the Ontological Swamp by His Own Speech Acts (and Fails)

A Critical Rationalist Intervention Against John Searle’s Speech Act Theory

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — Gospel of John, 1:1. Or, in Searle’s version: “In the beginning was the Speech Act, and the Speech Act was with the Institution, and the Speech Act was the Institution.” Note the subtle but decisive difference: at least John invokes a God. Searle doesn’t need one. He has language.

I. What This Is About

John Searle is among the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. His work spans from the philosophy of mind to the philosophy of language to social ontology, and in all of these fields he has drawn important distinctions — some of which he then proceeded to consistently ignore. Speech act theory, which he inherited from J. L. Austin and developed further, is today a standard tool in analytic philosophy, linguistics, jurisprudence, and even computer science.

In this essay I will identify five problems in Searle’s theoretical edifice that, in my view, are not merely technical deficiencies but have contributed to a fundamental misdevelopment in modern philosophy — a misdevelopment with real societal consequences. These five problems are:

1. The circularity problem of constitutive speech acts
2. Normative positivism — Searle’s failure to explain why institutions ought to be recognized
3. The missing distinction between primary existence and constructs
4. The disregard for the evolutionary function of language
5. The contradiction between Searle’s rejection of reductionism and his commitment to naturalism

The good news: solutions to each of these problems already exist — one merely has to take notice of them. The bad news: academic philosophy has not done so yet.

II. Searle’s Correct Distinction, Which He Himself Fails to Follow

Before we turn to the problems, Searle deserves credit. In his social ontology he draws a distinction that is genuinely brilliant: the distinction between ontological and epistemic subjectivity and objectivity, respectively (Searle 1995, 2004).

Ontologically subjective is something whose existence depends on an experiencing subject — such as pain. Without a being that feels it, there is no pain. Epistemically subjective is a statement that is not intersubjectively verifiable — such as “Van Gogh was a better painter than Picasso.”

The crucial point: something can be ontologically subjective and epistemically objective at the same time. The statement “Patient X is in pain” concerns an ontologically subjective state, yet it is epistemically objectively testable — through behavioral observation, neuroimaging, self-report, and the correlation of these.

Searle formulated this distinction clearly. And then — one might say: with a certain performative irony — he failed to apply it consistently in his own theory.

For although Searle acknowledges that epistemically objective knowledge of ontologically subjective domains is possible, he treats normative statements as if they were epistemically subjective. Why? He provides no explicit argument for this. The tacit auxiliary premise seems to be the is-ought problem — the assumption that an unbridgeable logical gap exists between descriptive and normative statements.

This is — to put it mildly — questionable. And its consequences extend far beyond academic philosophy.

III. Problem 1: The Circularity of Constitutive Force

Searle’s social ontology rests on a central thesis: social institutions — money, marriage, property, states — are created by constitutive speech acts. The famous formula reads: “X counts as Y in context C” (Searle 1969, 1995). A piece of paper (X) counts as money (Y) in the context of an economy (C). Barack Obama (X) counts as President (Y) in the context of U.S. politics (C). So far, so elegant.

But the elegance conceals a fundamental problem. Where does the constitutive force that speech acts allegedly possess come from? By what mechanism can an utterance — at bottom: a fluctuation of air pressure produced by a biological organism — create ontological reality?

In The Construction of Social Reality (1995) Searle names three building blocks of his theory: collective intentionality, the assignment of status functions, and constitutive rules. In Making the Social World (2010) he condenses this into “Status Function Declarations” — declarative speech acts that bring status functions together with deontic powers (rights, duties, entitlements) into existence. But this merely shifts the problem into collective intentionality: an institution exists because the participants collectively share the attitude that X counts as Y. The question remains: what grounds this attitude?

Three options are available to Searle, and none of them is comfortable.

Option A: The constitutive force is ontologically subjective. It depends on the consciousness of the participants. But then it in turn requires an institutional framework that enables it — which means we need a further constitutive act to ground the first. And so on, ad infinitum. The snake bites its own tail.

Option B: The constitutive force is ontologically objective. It exists independently of human consciousness. But then Searle would have to explain what this objective force consists in. Is it a law of nature? A Platonic idea? A divine order? None of these is compatible with Searle’s naturalism — and he has never seriously engaged with any of them.

Option C: The constitutive force is “just there.” This is not a philosophical position. It is a shrug.

The problem is not merely abstract. Barry Smith, in his analysis of Searle’s social ontology, has shown that it becomes particularly glaring in the case of so-called “free-standing Y terms”: institutional facts without a physical substrate — such as the money in a bank account — where there is simply no physical X to which a status function could be assigned (Smith 2003). Searle himself has conceded that his earlier attempt to identify digital bank money as “magnetic traces on hard disks” was mistaken. His correction — that these are “representations of money” — merely shifts the problem by one level rather than solving it: for what constitutes the representation as a representation of money?

The circle closes wherever one looks. Constitutive rules presuppose collective intentionality, collective intentionality presupposes a shared understanding of the rules, and this understanding in turn presupposes an institution that makes it possible. Searle has no foundation — he has a carousel.

IV. Problem 2: Normative Positivism — Or: Why Should We Recognize This in the First Place?

The circularity problem shows that Searle’s foundation is missing. The second problem shows what fills this vacuum — and why it leads directly into relativism.

Searle’s theory describes that institutions are constituted through collective intentionality. But he never asks the decisive follow-up question: why should a particular institution be accepted? What distinguishes a status function that rightfully obtains from one that is merely factually enforced?

Searle does not answer this question because he does not ask it. For his theory it is irrelevant how collective intentionality comes about — whether through rational agreement, through habit, through wishful thinking, through propaganda, or through sheer top-down repression. All that matters is that collective acceptance obtains. Once enough people share a status function, the institution is constituted. Period. Searle himself states in Making the Social World that institutions create “desire-independent reasons for action” (Searle 2010) — reasons that follow solely from institutional structure. But why these reasons should be binding remains unjustified. They bind because the institution exists. The institution exists because it is accepted. It is accepted because — well, why exactly?

This is not naturalism. This is normative positivism: what is factually accepted counts — regardless of whether there are good reasons for it. And it has a direct relativistic consequence: if collective intentionality is the sole criterion of constitution, then competing institutional orders — for instance, the norms of a democratic society and those of a totalitarian dictatorship — are in principle on equal footing within Searle’s framework, provided each is internally collectively accepted. There is no external standard by which one could be evaluated against the other. Several critics have noted related issues: Miller has argued that Searle’s theory cannot account for human rights, because these hold even when they are not collectively recognized (Miller 2001). And Hindriks has shown that Searle’s concept of normativity is indispensable to his system yet cannot be grounded within it (Hindriks 2013).

The problem can be stated in a single sentence: Searle describes the mechanics of institutional reality but provides no criteriology. He can say how institutions arise — through collective acceptance of status functions — but not which institutions ought to arise. The question of standards is not answered but deferred. And by deferring it, it opens the door to arbitrariness: every institution that prevails — by whatever means — is in his framework equally “real” and equally “valid” and thus, ultimately, “indifferent.”

This is the point at which an academic problem ceases to be merely academic.

V. Problem 3: Primary Existence vs. Constructs

The deeper cause of the circularity problem lies in an ontological distinction that Searle does not draw: the distinction between primarily existing things and constructs.

Mario Bunge developed a clear taxonomy in his scientific ontology — particularly in his Treatise on Basic Philosophy (1977, 1979). He distinguishes between concrete things (material systems with their own processes, which exist primarily) and constructs (ideas, models, theories, concepts, language). Constructs are real in the sense that they have causal effects — but only mediated through the brains and actions of the humans who use them. They are ontologically secondary; they do not exist independently of concrete systems (Bunge 1977, 2003).

Language is a construct. Speech acts are processes carried out by concrete biological systems (humans) that transport constructs (meanings). They cannot create ontological reality any more than a map can create a mountain range.

What actually happens when an institution comes into being is something quite different from what Searle describes: real social processes — habits, patterns of cooperation, power relations, evolutionarily developed dispositions toward norm compliance — are codified and communicated through language, but not constituted by language. The causal direction that Searle assumes is precisely reversed.

Money does not come into existence because someone says “This is money.” Money arises from real exchange processes, from the need for a medium of exchange, from trust relationships and power structures. The speech act that declares a piece of paper legal tender documents an already existing social reality — it does not create it ex nihilo.

VI. Problem 4: Language Without Evolution

Speech act theory treats language as though it fell from the sky. Or more precisely: as though it were a self-contained system of constitutive rules requiring no explanation of its own genesis.

This is not merely historically naive — it is scientifically untenable. Language is a biological phenomenon. It is — as Karl Bühler recognized as early as 1934 in his Sprachtheorie — a tool (organon) by means of which a sender communicates something about objects and states of affairs to a receiver. Bühler identified three functions of the linguistic sign: the expressive function (symptom), the appellative function (signal), and — crucially — the representational function (symbol) (Bühler 1934).

Roman Jakobson expanded this model in 1960 to include three further functions — the poetic, the phatic, and the metalingual function (Jakobson 1960). But the decisive point is this: in both Bühler and Jakobson the functional framework is preserved. Language is understood as a tool that serves specific functions — functions that can be explained in terms of biological evolution.

Language arose teleonomically — not teleologically. It was not designed but evolved because it enhances the survival capacity of the group that uses it. The representational function — the ability to communicate about states of affairs that are not immediately present — was the decisive evolutionary advantage. It enables knowledge transfer across generations, the coordination of complex actions, and — yes — also the establishment of norms and institutions. But all of this as a function of a biological tool, not as a mysterious constitutive force.

Speech act theory replaces this natural, scientifically explicable perspective with a quasi-magical metaphysics of constitution. It acts as though speaking itself creates reality, rather than asking: what real processes underlie the social efficacy of language?

VII. Problem 5: Naturalism Without Reductionism — Searle’s Squaring of the Circle

Searle characterizes his position in the philosophy of mind as “biological naturalism” (Searle 1992, 2004). He simultaneously claims:

• All mental phenomena are entirely caused by neurobiological processes in the brain (naturalism).
• Mental phenomena are ontologically irreducible to physical phenomena because they possess a first-person ontology (anti-reductionism).
• He is neither a dualist nor a reductionist.

Numerous critics have noted that these three claims are difficult to reconcile (Kim 1995, Corcoran 2001). If consciousness is entirely causally explained by neurobiology, in what sense is it ontologically irreducible? Searle replies: causal reducibility does not entail ontological reducibility because the first-person ontology of consciousness cannot be translated into third-person terms. But this sounds suspiciously like the very property dualism he rejects.

This problem, too, has a solution — just not in Searle’s toolkit.

Bunge distinguishes between strong reductionism (everything can be reduced to physics) and the recognition of emergent system properties (Bunge 1977, 1979; Mahner and Bunge 1997). Higher-level systems possess properties that their components lack — not because something mysterious happens, but because the organization of the system opens up new causal possibilities. An H₂O molecule is not wet; water is wet — as an emergent property of the system.

Consciousness, in this perspective, is an emergent property of certain biological systems — real, causally efficacious, and fully naturalistically explicable without having to reduce it to neurons. Systemism avoids both naive reductionism and obscure anti-reductionism by acknowledging that there are different levels of organization of reality, each exhibiting its own regularities, without denying the fundamental material unity of the world.

Searle needs precisely this systemism. Instead, he operates within a conceptual framework that forces him into contradictions.

VIII. What This Has to Do With All of Us

“But these are just academic quibbles!” — one might object. Far from it.

The conflation of ontological and epistemic subjectivity, combined with the uncritical acceptance of the is-ought problem as an unbridgeable gap, leads straight into relativism: if normative statements are epistemically subjective, then there are no objectively better or worse norms. Then the expert’s opinion is just as valid as the populist’s. Then values “cannot be argued about” — which de facto means that might makes right.

This relativism has real consequences. It undermines the possibility of rational social critique. It immunizes existing power relations against criticism by disqualifying criticism itself as “subjective.” And it strikes hardest at those least able to defend themselves — such as young people who cannot critically examine philosophical doctrines but adopt whichever one is presented most rhetorically convincingly.

This is — and I say this without satirical distance — an epidemic within academic philosophy. And it is all the more tragic because the cures have long existed.

IX. Summary: Five Problems, Five Solutions

References

• Bühler, K. (1934). Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.
• Bunge, M. (1977). Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Vol. 3: Ontology I: The Furniture of the World. Dordrecht: Reidel.
• Bunge, M. (1979). Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Vol. 4: Ontology II: A World of Systems. Dordrecht: Reidel.
• Bunge, M. (1996). Finding Philosophy in Social Science. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Bunge, M. (2000). “Systemism: The Alternative to Individualism and Holism.” The Journal of Socio-Economics 29, 147–157.
• Bunge, M. (2003). Philosophical Dictionary. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
• Corcoran, K. J. (2001). “The Trouble With Searle’s Biological Naturalism.” Erkenntnis 55(3), 307–324.
• Hindriks, F. (2013). “Collective Acceptance and the Is-Ought Argument.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16(3), 465–480.
• Jakobson, R. (1960). “Linguistics and Poetics.” In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Kim, J. (1995). “Mental Causation in Searle’s ‘Biological Naturalism’.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55(1), 189–194.
• Mahner, M. & Bunge, M. (1997). Foundations of Biophilosophy. Berlin: Springer.
• Miller, S. (2001). Social Action: A Teleological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Searle, J. R. (1964). “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’.” The Philosophical Review 73(1), 43–58.
• Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Searle, J. R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.
• Searle, J. R. (2004). Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Smith, B. (2003). “John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality.” In B. Smith (Ed.), John Searle (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–33.