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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Role of Searle's Constitutive Rules for the Rational Criticizability of Institutional Reality

subject

description

My hypothesis is that we can derive the normative conditions that institutions and institutional acts have to meet in order to be rationally acceptable/recognizable from the logical structure of institutional reality. Developing Searle's achievements on the constitutive role of speech acts in the construction of institutional reality and on their character of institutional acts, I'll show that the same types of constitutive rules underlying illocutionary acts also underlie institutional reality. I’ll then argue that we can derive a specific set of normative criteria for the rational criticizability of institutional acts from these constitutive rules in the same way that we can derive normative criteria for the rational criticizability of illocutionary acts from the constitutive rules underlying speech acts and communicative interactions If so we could face the issue of the quality of the collective acceptance/recognition (rationally motivated or distorted by external factors) and, therefore, of the “justness” of the institution created and maintained by collective acceptance/recognition. I will therefore propose to integrate Searle's constitutive rules of speech acts with a criterion of “fairness” prescribing a further dimension of assessment concerning the human dignity and the fundamental human rights of all the interested parties. I will show that there are cases where speech or institutional acts can be rationally criticized even though they meet the abovementioned validity claims or criteria: an order, for example, can be given by an institutionally entitled person and addressed to a person who can do the specified action and has deontic reasons to obey. However, it can still be rationally “unfair” I'll argue for the extension of this criterion of fairness to institutional reality.