Exercise 3.1. Can you see a connection between Emerson’s remarks and the view expressed by Searle in chapter one? Where do their views overlap and where do they differ? You could address this in three columns – one for each author either side of a column of similarities. the difference will be those parts that are not similarities.

John Searle (Construction of Social Reality, 1995)	Common ideas, similarities in views and differences:	Emerson R.W. (The Naturalist, 1934); (Essays, First Series, Self Reliance (1841), Nature (1844), Intellect (1841);
John Searle (page 22): ” The sheer existence of the physical object in front of me does not depend on any attitudes we may take toward it. It has many features that are instrinsic in the sense that they do not depend on any attitudes of observers or users’. John Searle: “I want to defend the idea that there is a reality that is totally independent of us.’(Construction of Social Reality, page 12) “Brute facts exist independently of any human institutions;’	Both admit that there is a physical reality which is absolutely independent on us.	Emerson ( the Naturalist, 1934): “In a generous Education, certainly the Earth, which is the bountiful mother and nurse, the abode, the stimulus, the medicine, and the tomb of us all… fail at our attention. These objects are the most ancient and permanent whereof we have any knowledge”;I
John Searle (page 48):”..if everybody stops believing it is money, it ceases to function as money’. (page 278):” Agents who can do this collectively have the fundamental precondition of all other institutional structures: Many, property, marriage, government, and universities all exist by forms of human agreement that essentially involve the capacity to symbolize”.	Both philosophers clearly share the idea that there is an artificially constructed reality – social reality where the human kind exists along with the independent external reality, the Nature which is a given reality.	Emerson (The Essays, First Series, Self Reliance, 1841,):”These are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible, as we enter the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.the virtue in most request is conformity. Self reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities, but names and customs’. “the relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that is profane to seek to interpose them. …Whenever a mind is simple, and receive a divine wisdom old things pass away, – means, teachers, texts, temples fall“. “Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us’.
(page 52): “the Logical Priority of Brute facts over Institutional Facts…that the social facts in general, and institutional facts especially, are hierarchically structured. Institutional facts exists, so to speak, on top of brute facts”;	Both of them accept the predominance of Nature/Brute facts over the social reality.	“No truth can be more self evident than the highest state of man, physical, intellectual, and moral, can only coexist with a perfect Theory of Animated Nature’;
(page 193): “Realism is the view that there is a way what things are that is logically independent of all human representations. Realism doesn’t not say how things are but only that there is a way that they are”.	Both philosophers shared a certain part of what Searle calls as “Kant’s transcendental idealism’ – a theory that the human’s transcendental ego, constructs knowledge out of sense of impressions of the realities which exist independently of human minds ( Encyclopaedia Britannica, Transcendental Idealism, 1998); However, below is where philosophers further dramatically disagree about the Theory of Transcendentalism :	Intellect (page 253): ‘Our thinking is a pious reception. We do not determine what we will think. We only open our senses, … we carry away in the ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm it. it is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to crest and contrive, it is not truth’. Emerson : “Whatever theology or philosophy we rest in, or labor after, the students of nature have all agreed that in nature nothing is false or unsuccessful;
(page 214):”There is no God’s -eye view which we can survey the relations between our representations and the reality they are alleged to represent , to see whether they are really adequate to reality… we are always inside our representations -our beliefs, experiences, utterances, etc. .. because there is no nonrepresentational stand point from which we can survey the relations between the representations and reality, and because there is not even a possibility of accessing the adequacy of our representations by measuring them against things in themselves, talk of a transcendent reality must be just so much non sense. All the reality we can ever really get at, have access to it , is the reality that is internal to our system of representations. Within the system there is a possibility or realism, internal realism, but the idea of a reality outside the system is as empty as Kant’s notion of the Ding on sich, a thing in itself, beyond the grasp not only of our knowledge but of our language and thought. What external realism offers us is unthinkable, something, indescribable, inaccessible, unknowable, unspeakable, and ultimately nonsensical”.	Here it is clear, that Emerson defends his views as a Transcendentalist which insisted that the world around us ‘transcends’ or goes beyond what they can see, her, taste, touch or feel. Searle finds this view as absurd, basically saying that off we can’t feel something, sense the thing in its broadest meaning – then this thing doesn’t exist.	Nature (page 399): “Literature, poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret…nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God’. Intellect (page 263): “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please – you can never have both”.
(page 217): “There is a simple but deep reason why truth and reality cannot coincide in a way that many philosophers think that the naive external realist is committed to their coincidence.The reason is this: All representation.. is always under certain aspects and not others. The aspectual character of all representations derives from such facts as that representation is always made from within a certain conceptual scheme and from a certain point of view.”	I find a difference in their views on Reality: according to Emerson there is a one kind of truth, an Absolute Knowledge from the Divine, emerging from the Creator and Soul’s duty is to develop her perception to this ultimate truth. Meanwhile, Searle doesn’t put an emphasis on God as any origin of an absolute knowledge at all. He insists that reality doesn’t have to coincide with truth because the reality is always under certain aspect of perception and interpretation. There is no one kind of ultimate truth, according to Searle.	Emerson (The Essays, First Series, Self Reliance, 1841): ” Accept the place the Divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. …And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny”. “the relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that is profane to seek to interpose them. …Whenever a mind is simple, and receive a divine wisdom old things pass away, – means, teachers, texts, temples fall”.

The main difference between Searle and Emerson is that the latter one was a centre and a leader of Transcendentalism – a philosophical, religious and political movement in the early nineteenth century. While Searle defines himself as a ‘balanced agnostic” (Youtube, interview to Closer To Truth channel, 2016), further explaining that he tends to be an atheist, ‘but not absolute”. It means that Emerson believed that there was a Transcendent reality beyond what we could sense, and Searle found this approach to reality as ‘unintelligent’ and ‘nonsensical’. Nevertheless, they both agree on: a) they both were metaphysical realists, i.e. believing that there exists a physical world independent of the human mind; b) their belief that humans construct their reality, including all sorts of knowledge and social reality.

Below I put some notes for myself about the Constructivism and Realism.

Constructivism as a philosophical theory is based on the assumption that people actively construct or make their own knowledge, thus reality is determined by one`s experiences as a learner.

Knowledge is constructed – this is a basic principle of Constructivism.

Knowledge is constructed, built upon another knowledge; Everyone is constructive his=her unique knowledge on the platform of personal unique experiences, previous knowledge, beliefs and insights, conceptual schemes.

Construction of knowledge involves construction of meaning and systems of meaning;

There are two key hypothesis about a philosophical theory of science: 1) It is a social matter, a social enterprise, not an individual. The whole group must agree and accept a new theory, a new approach. And 2) It is not rational ( don’t confuse with irrational; it is not an irrational either) decision, a Judgement, because which theory to follow as an approach to science is not determined by data or experiments, it is a normative issue. It is A DECISION, it is not a rational decision, it is a judgement call, it is an estimate. We dont say it is irrational decision, but it is clearly not dictate by an experimental outcome. (9.23 sec, YouTube lecture);

Positivism – the theory must be empirically tested, observation gives us a direct access to the reality, a theory gives us an indirect access to the reality; Positivists assume the observation is neutral, while constructivists argue that observation itself is never neutral, observations are always very different. Our observations are deeply determined by our cultural background, personal experiences, perception readiness, including our biological sensorial abilities, this is called a Theory-ladenness of Observation.

Therefore Social Constructivists state that the reality itself is conventional. The world we live in is constructed by us. Our scientific theories are socially constructed.

Bibliography:1) Ralf Waldo Emerson, The Naturalist, Lectures, Delivered to the Boston Natural History Society, May, 1934, [online] on http://www.archive.vcu.edu [accessed on 30.04.2021];

2) Ralf Waldo Emerson, Essays, the First Series, Self Reliance, 1841, [online] on http://www.archive.vcu.edu [accessed on May 2nd, 2021];

3) Ralf Waldo Emerson, The Selected Works, essays: Intellect, Nature, Graphic Arts Books, 2011, [online] on http://www.scribd.com, [accessed on May 2, 2021];

3) Searle John R., The Construction of Social Reality, 1993, [online] on http://www.scribd.com [accessed on April 28, 2021];

4) The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, July 20, 1998, Transcendental Idealism, [online] on http://www.britannica.com [accessed on May 1, 2021];

5) Editors of Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism, Feb, 2003, revision Aug.30, 2019, [online] on http://www.plato.stanford.edu [accessed on May 2nd, 2021];

6) Editors of U.S.History, Transcendentalism, An American Philosophy, [online] on http://www.ushistory.org; [accessed on may 2, 2021];

7) John Searle- Arguments for Agnosticism?, interview Of John Searle on Youtube channel “Closer To Truth”, 2016, [accessed on May 2nd, 2021];

8) Philosophy of Science Lecture #6, Constructivism, 11 December, 2014, Professor John T. Sanders, Rochester Institute of Technology, YouTube, accessed on May 12, 2021;