Searle's relativism

In an attack on moral relativism and social constructivism in the New York Review of Books (not online), the famous philosopher John R. Searle writes of Jacques Derrida that he "argues ... that there is no tenable distinction between writing and speech."¹

And I, reading this, can't help thinking that Searle is being intentionally misleading. Searle engaged with Derrida on a number of occasions in well-publicised debates. He must have read a lot of Derrida, so I can only imagine that he is misrepresenting him intentionally. Why? Because that there is a profound distinction between speech and writing and parsing out exactly what that is, is inarguably one of the most central themes of Derrida's work. His early books, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology are all on this theme.

This glaring error is just one of many holes in Searle's line of reasoning, most of which are so vast and obvious you could drive heavy machinery through them. I would have thought Searle would have understood his opponents by now, but he still doesn't. And while one can be forgiven for not understanding Derrida, whose prose style I've sometimes found more than a little irritating and obtuse, his denigration of people like Rorty and Putnam are just badly argued, thought and written. Moreover: he is definitely in a position to know better, so ignorance is not an excuse. He seems to be arguing entirely in bad faith. More on which, maybe, later. I'm guessing you're all not really in the mood for long-winded philosophy when you read blogs.

1. The New York Review of Books, Volume LVI, number 14, p. 90

Et tu, Brute

Here's an 8-part lecture on the philosophy of mind, given by John Searle. I've only seen the first bit (I'll watch the rest if I get the time), but it seems like a nice introduction to the field.

He gets into what he has earlier called the "brute fact vs. social fact" distinction at the end of part 1. This brought up something I was reading about that distinction last year around this time, as I was finishing up my MA thesis. This is how I remember it:

The brute facts are the world, independent of the observer. The social facts are facts that depend on social decisions and, I guess, aesthetics: matters of taste, in the broadest possible sense (what to do: commit mass murder or have a nice cup of tea?).

You kick a rock, Newton says, the rock will brutalise your foot. The rock and its physical nature is a brute fact which bruises your foot. The physical pain is a brute fact too, probably - neural signals and responses. But what the pain means is a social fact. It depends on you and your community's relationship to physical pain and/or rocks.

In general, as a rule, I think we can almost never go wrong if we assume that most facts are social facts. Even things which seem very obviously to be brute facts, like said rock, are, when you think about it, crawling with social facts: what do you think about rocks? What do you think about pain? Why do you kick the rock? Have you kicked rocks before? Does the rock remind you of your mother? Etc. Etc.

Michael Bérubé has an argument which I think I agree with in his book Rhetorical Occasions that the distinction between what is a brute fact and social fact is a social fact, in the day-to-day business of being alive. If you believe the rock is an illusion, the rock doesn't stop being a brute fact, and if you change your mind upon having kicked it, it doesn't care. But in the interaction with your community, there is no solid basis to ever completely arbitrate the dispute over what is a brute fact and what is a social fact. You can change your community's mind, but their state of mind is generally much further from the brute facts than one would think.

I mean, kicking the rock is a pretty damn convincing argument, but it's still rhetoric.