Money, marriage and medieval knights exist only because enough of us agree
Philosopher John Searle listed marriage, property, cocktail parties, parliaments, taxes and medieval knights as things that exist only through shared human agreement. None is made of atoms the way a rock is. Each lasts precisely as long as enough people keep recognising it, which makes social reality both fragile and astonishingly durable.
Social reality is the layer of the world built from a community's accepted rules, laws and shared representations, as opposed to physical, biological or private mental reality. Herbert Spencer called this level super-organic, sitting above biology and psychology. Émile Durkheim wrote that in the social realm, more than anywhere else, the idea is the reality.
The phenomenologist Alfred Schütz called it the social world and split it in two: the part we meet directly, the umwelt, and the part beyond our immediate horizon that we could still reach if we went looking. Ethnomethodology then examined the unspoken everyday skill people use to navigate it. Peter Berger described its construction in three steps, externalisation, objectivation and internalisation, and R. D. Laing noted that shared structures of experience come to feel like independent objects, even though a group is nothing more than the combined views and actions of its members.
Searle built his account on speech acts. Language, he argued, is designed to label institutional facts, a public system of symbols that outlasts the moods of the people using it, and institutions such as governments, churches, armies and universities interlock into a layered whole. He also insisted that constructed reality rests on a reality independent of any construction, and that institutional facts survive only while enough members of a community continue to accept them. Theorists still argue over whether social reality exists apart from human involvement or is continuously produced by interaction.
Psychoanalysts located a child's entry into this world in the passing of the Oedipus complex, when parental figures are absorbed as conscience; Jacques Lacan described it as culture being laid over nature. Sociologists who want to measure social reality often turn to trust, which Francis Fukuyama treats as part of a community's social capital with deep historical and cultural roots.
Source: Social reality
