John Searle on the Logical Structure of Human Civilization
This is a great lecture. He makes the same jokes he was making in 1998, but he clearly enjoys telling them. See Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society . It's quite a claim though, that this applies to all of human civilization. I suppose one could just declare this to be the case in some appropriate context, ... but which one? 46:52 . His answer to the question at 59:06 seems to me to put particles such as protons and electrons fairly squarely into the category of products (i.e. theories) of social institutions: they are produced by people who have machines the development and manufacture of which are funded at least in part by income tax! You need to have been immersed in a very peculiar (I can't say particular ) culture to have even a vague notion of what a proton or an electron are. Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose .