The Background

Searle says that there is a "background" of pre intentional states or capacities that allows intentional states to exist and to function. He first applies this concept to the meaning and understanding of sentences of ordinary English, then to the way we perceive, then to the way our consciousness itself is structured, and finally to the functioning of human social behavior. In this paper, I will attempt to explain this concept, by way of examples that show how it functions in the above realms, then bring up a seeming paradox involving the background’s relation to constitutive rules and institutional facts. Finally, I will consider what Searle has to say about this paradox and offer a solution to this paradox that he does not consider, as I think one of his own proposed solutions is inconsistent with his other beliefs.

Before examining the role of the background in social behavior, let us first see what the background is and how it functions in an individual. In his book, Intentionality, Searle says that the background is necessary in understanding the meaning of even the most literal (as opposed to metaphorical) sentences. Rather than attempting a formal proof of this, Searle gives examples that are meant to illustrate this necessity. I will invent an example that isn’t Searle’s to see if the concept actually extends to random simple sentences.

If we look at sentences like, "I put the sock on my foot," "I put the book on the table," and "I put the candles on the cake," the literal meaning of the phrase "to put on" does not change from sentence to sentence. However, there is nothing in the meaning of any of these sentences that would block the interpretation in the first sentence that I simply rested the sock on the top of my foot; or, in the second sentence, that I somehow wrapped the book around the table in the same way one puts on an article of clothing; or in the third sentence, that I simply rested the candles on the cake horizontally. Moreover, if I were asked to put the candles on the table I would do something different from the way I would put the candles on the cake. I would not attempt to boar holes into the table to place the candles vertically.

This is meant to show, to put it bluntly, that "what one understands goes beyond meaning." (Intentionality, page 146) In other words, the meaning of the sentences is not enough to assign an interpretation to the sentences in question. Moreover, we do not actually "interpret" the sentences at all; we simply understand them based on our background capacities, or coping skills, regarding socks, feet, books, tables, candles and cakes. In other words we understand not only the meaning of each of these words, but also the way we deal with them constitutes an ability to set them into different relations with each other, in a way that does block the aforementioned bizarre interpretations. Moreover, it would be impossible, without an infinite regress, to state rules for these interpretations linguistically, for then each of those rules would in turn require rules for interpretation, and so on, ad infinitum.

Searle extends this necessity of coping skills beyond understanding sentences to perception and consciousness. I don’t want to spend too much time on these since we want to get on to discussing social behavior and institutional facts. Briefly, when we perceive, we always "perceive as." We perceive an object as a table, not because we have rules for determining the properties of a table but because we bring to bear background coping skills that tell us what counts as a table. This allows us to recognize tables with forms that we have never seen before. This can be extended to the structure of consciousness on the whole, since everything presents itself as familiar do to our background abilities. Searle gives the example of a trip to an exotic land. Although everything looks different, we still recognize houses as houses, people as people, the sky as the sky, etc. This is meant to show that all ordinary states of consciousness are determined by background abilities that are not them selves in the realm of consciousness.

This brings us to an important distinction Searle makes between the "deep background" and a "local background". The former is something all humans share. All humans, due to their similar biological make up, have similar background skills that help them walk and eat, for example, without applying any intentional rules that help them do these things. These skills make part of the deep background. All humans do not, however, share background skills that allow them to cope with cocktail parties, for example. In other words, we know things about cocktail parties, like the fact that you go to them clothed, not naked, that Searle would call background "know-how", beliefs that are neither conscious of unconscious, but simply manifested in our behavior, but this type of know-how is not shared by all humans. This falls in the category of "local background".

Suppose we grant Searle that both of these types of backgrounds do indeed exist and that they are sets of pre intentional skills that allow us to cope with the world, including language, perception, consciousness, and practices used in dealing with other people (I say this because I realize I have not argued conclusively in favor of this thesis). Suppose then we try to apply this concept to institutional reality. We then come upon a very important and seemingly insoluble paradox, which is what I would like to discuss for the remainder of this paper.

If we admit the thesis of the background, we must say that it applies to situations where we are coping with what we have described in this course as institutional facts. In other words, in order to deal with money, I require certain background capacities. I might have certain intentional beliefs about money (i.e., that it is valuable) However, this belief is neither necessary nor sufficient to give me the ability to use money at all. Regarding necessity, I can have been raised my whole life to buy things with money, that is, to exchange money for goods, without ever thinking about the abstract notion of "value". As for sufficiency, if I don’t understand the way people use shops and the type of things one buys with money, the belief that it is valuable will not help me. If I go up to a woman with a newborn child with a handful of money and say, "what a beautiful child, can I buy him." In most cases, she will look at me like I’m crazy, even though there is nothing in the concept of money or value that makes it inapplicable to buying babies.

So it seems we deal with institutions in the same way we deal with walking or eating. We might bring to bear the distinction between deep and local backgrounds, saying that institutions function with the presence local backgrounds, but this leads to our paradox. What happens to constitutive rules? In other words, how can we reconcile the idea that we cope with money with a background that has nothing to do with rules, with the idea that money, in order to exist at all, is a manifestation of the rule "X counts as Y in C." Searle says, "I talk and I buy things with money as naturally as I walk, but talk and money seem to have a rule structure that walking does not seem to have." (CSR, p. 140)

So the question is, how does this rule structure fit into the concept of the background? I will give three answers to this question. The first two are Searle’s, one of which I think is right and the other wrong, and the third is my own.

First, Searle explains that although the practices involving institutional facts are "sensitive" to the rules, it does not mean that anybody ever has to think about those rules, or that anybody has mental representations of those rules. This sounds like, but is not the same as the distinction between rule governed and rule describable behavior. It sounds like Searle wants to say that institutional reality is not merely rule describable, but that the rules actually make the behavior possible. So when someone is playing baseball, the rules of baseball are not just some theoretical way of explaining the behavior of the people playing the game, but the rules make the game possible. However, this does not mean that someone has to know all the rules in order to play. Instead, he just has to act according to the rules, whether or not he is aware of them. In fact, once he knows how to act according to these rules skillfully, the rules disappear and his playing is a function of his background capabilities.

When pushed further, Searle stumbles into an inconsistency. Say someone were to object by saying that these rules are completely unnecessary, since we can describe all behavior in terms of background capacities: people just know how to deal with money and people just know how to play baseball, the rules do not play any role at all. To this, Searle says, "the answer is that where human institutions are concerned, we accept a socially created normative component. We accept that there is something wrong with the person who when the baseball is pitched at him simply eats it." (CSR page 146) This answer does not lead anywhere, since the fact that we would see something wrong with the man eating the baseball can be perfectly well explained by the fact that the behavior contradicts certain very basic background expectations. The expectation that someone will not eat a baseball is no more a normative component to baseball as the idea that someone who eats his shoe for lunch is normative. If we say that this "normative component" shows that baseball is sensitive to institutional rules, then we must say the same about eating, which Searle does not want to say is an institution.

My proposal is this: Anytime we have an institutional fact, and people behaving in accord with the constitutive rules that make up that institution, there must have been some point in history when people followed those rules consciously and the rules were explicit. So the first time people played baseball, they actually thought about rules to create the game. Otherwise, the idea of points scored in a certain way, for example, would be impossible. Similarly, the first people to use paper money must have had to be told that it was valuable. They did not just encounter it "as" valuable. This way of looking at it is analogous to the way an individual learns to cope with things. In the beginning he follows rules, and then those rules fade into the background. Similarly, a culture follows certain rules when an institution is created, but once that institution is well established, those rules are no longer necessary. However, the rules are manifested in their behavior since the rules are what made the behavior possible to begin with.

May 1, 1997