The construction of social reality.

The Construction of Social Reality can be read at different levels, and this makes it hard to assess. At one level, it is a stunningly clear, comprehensive, and extremely simple introduction to the foundations of the social sciences. At another level, it is an idiosyncratic and interesting statement by a philosopher of note who writes in a field with which he is barely acquainted. And at yet another level, it is a philosophical treatment of certain philosophical problems that Searle's independent reflections on the nature and possibility of social reality have disclosed. Different readers will find different things in Searle's book. What I found is an original contribution to a theory of institutional facts and to a certain kind of restricted idealism that Anscombe (1976) called "linguistic idealism.".