Some Remarks about Social Ontology and Law: An Interview with John R. Searle

• Date: 01 June 2017
• Author: John R. Searle,Angela Condello
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12161
• Published date: 01 June 2017

Some Remarks about Social Ontology

and Law:

An Interview with John R. Searle*

ANGELA CONDELLO and JOHN R. SEARLE

AC Let us start from the origins of your career as a philosopher and your theory of speech

acts. Why do you think the relationship between law and speech acts is relevant?

JRS The promulgations of laws are always types of speech acts, but once promul-

gated the laws themselves are linguistic representations and thus they fall into the

category of speech acts. As far as positive law is concerned, it seems to me that

there are two categories. There are laws that are regulative,

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like “Drive on the

right-hand side of a road,” and laws that are constitutive, like “We form a corpora-

tion that has such and such procedures.” Regulative laws regulate the forms of

behaviour, and constitutive laws enable us to create new institutional facts, or cor-

porations, and everything that can be created by a legal procedure.

This is how I would roughly describe the interconnections between law and

speech act theory: The promulgation of law is a speech act, but once promulgated,

the law is itself a speech act and it either regulates an existing form of behaviour

(drive on the right) or enables us to create a new form of behaviour like the crea-

tion of governments, departments, and so on.

* On 18 October 2015, in Paris, John Rogers Searle and I met at Gare de l’Est, in a caf

e, for an

interview on how his theory of social ontology can influence legal theory. Searle was about to

leave France to reach Heidelberg, after the Web and Social Reality conference held at the FSMH

and co-organizedby Maurizio Ferraris, Sara Guindani, Enrico Terrone,and me. The idea of ask-

ing John R. Searle what he thinks about legal reality and normativity stems from a growing

interest in legaltheory and philosophy forontology, epistemology, and normativity. Such issues

are cornerstones of legal discourse and have a strong impact on the interconnection between

law, politics,and philosophy of language. Searle’sanswers highlight the basicquestions at stake

in the relationship between languageand law and they suggest to insist onsuch issues through

more thorough and broader research, in particular for what concerns the relationship between

ontology and epistemology in law and the concept of normativity. I am deeply grateful to John

Searle for hiskindness and for the passion hedemonstrated in answering myquestions.

1

I use italics in J. R. Searle’s answers in order to emphasize words or expressions particularly

relevant fromhis perspective.

V

C2017 The Authors. Ratio Juris V

C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 30 No. 2 June 2017 (226–231)