Documentality
Documentality is the theory of documents that underlies the ontology of social reality put forward by the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris. The theory gives to documents a central position within the sphere of social objects, conceived as distinct from physical and ideal objects. Ferraris argues that social objects are "social acts that have been inscribed on some kind of support", be it a paper document, a magnetic support, or even memory in people's heads. Thus the constitutive rule of social objects is that Object = Inscribed Act. Therefore, documents as inscriptions possessing social relevance and value embody the essential and prototypical features of any social object, and it is on this basis that it is possible to develop an ontology capable of classifying documents and their selective storage, beginning with the grand divide between strong documents, which make up social objects in the full sense, and weak documents, which are secondary derivatives and of lesser importance. This theory is inspired, on the one hand, by the reflection on the centrality of writing developed by Jacques Derrida and, on the other hand, by the theory of social acts devised by Adolf Reinach and the theory of linguistic acts by John L. Austin.
Searle: X counts as Y in C
In the contemporary debate, one of the main theories of social objects has been proposed by the American philosopher John R. Searle, in particular in his book The Construction of Social Reality. Searle's ontology recognizes the sphere of social objects, defining them as higher order objects with respect to physical objects, in accordance with the ruleX counts as Y in C
meaning that the physical object X, for instance a colored piece of paper, counts as Y, a 10 euro banknote, in context C, the Europe of the year 2010. According to Searle, from the iteration of this simple rule the whole complexity of social reality is derived.
Powerful it may be, the theory runs – according to Ferraris – into problems. Firstly, it is not at all obvious how, from the physical object, we manage to get to the social object. If any physical object really can constitute the origin of a social object, then it is not clear what would prevent every physical object to turn into a social object. But clearly it is not the case that, for instance, if you decide to draw a banknote, you thereby produce a banknote. The standard theory relies on key notion of "collective intentionality" to explain the transfiguration of X in Y. However, such a notion – as Ferraris argues – is not at all as clear as it purports to be.
Secondly, how does the reversibility from the social to the physical sphere work? It is fairly intuitive to assert that a banknote is also a piece of paper, or that a President is also a person. As much as it is true that when Searle is alone in a hotel room there is only one physical object, but many social objects. In this case, the passage back from Y to X goes smoothly. However, things change in different, although not very peculiar, situations. How should we deal with vague or vast entities, such as a State, a battle, a university? And how about negative entities, such as debts?
The roots of documentality
Three philosophical theses – inspired, respectively, by the work of the German phenomenologist Adolf Reinach, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida – shape the theory of Documentality.The speech acts thesis
According to the Speech Act Thesis – stemming more from the theory of social acts devised in 1913 by the German phenomenologist Adolf Reinach than from the writings of Austin and Searle – through the performance of speech acts we change the world by bringing into being claims, obligations, rights, relations of authority, debts, permissions, names, and a variety of other sorts of entities, thus making up the ontology of the social world. Given that speech acts are evanescent, the physical basis for the temporally extended existence of its products are – in small societies and in simple social interactions – memory traces and other psychological features of the people involved in these acts; and – in large societies and in more complex social interactions – documents. Documents are the physical entities, which create and sustain the sorts of enduring and re-usable deontic powers that extend human memory, and thereby create and sustain the new and more complex forms of social order, which are characteristic of modern civilization.The "de Soto thesis"
According to a thesis rooted in the works of de Soto , economic development can be boosted by a documental development. Through the performance of document acts, we change the world by bringing into being ownership relations, legal accountability, business organizations, and a variety of other institutional orders of modern societies. As stock and share certificates create capital, so statutes of incorporation create companies. As identity documents create identities, so diplomas create academic ranks. Where for de Soto, it is commercial paper documents which create what he calls the "invisible infrastructure of asset management upon which the astonishing fecundity of Western capitalism rests" Ferraris goes further and asserts that documents, both in paper and in electronic form, create the invisible infrastructure of contemporary social reality.The "Derrida thesis"
elaborated a philosophy of writing that finds its most correct application in the social sphere. Concerning speech acts, Derrida observes that they are mostly inscribed acts, since without records of some sort the performatives would not produce social objects such as conferences, marriages, graduation ceremonies, or constitutions. The point is simple, if we imagine a graduation or a wedding ceremony in which there are no registers and testimonies, it is difficult to maintain that a husband, a wife, or a graduate has been produced. This amounts to saying that social objects turn out to be closely linked to the forms of their inscription and recording. However, Derrida was wrong – according to Ferraris – in claiming that "nothing exists outside the text". Actually physical and ideal objects exist independently from every recording, as independently from there being humanity. This is not the case for social objects, which depend closely on records and the existence of humanity. It is in this sense that, by weakening Derrida's thesis, Ferraris proposed to develop a social ontology starting from the intuition that nothing social exists outside the text. Keeping this in mind, Ferraris advances an innovative approach to social ontology called Documentality.Context and history
The most influential ontology of social reality, formulated by the American philosopher John Searle, is based on collective intentionality, which allegedly ensures that certain physical objects are transformed into social objects. As noted by Barry Smith, this perspective has difficulty in accounting for both negative entities – such as debts, which apparently do not have a physical counterpart – and the new, seemingly intangible, social objects generated by the Web. The theory of documentality proposed by Maurizio Ferraris aims to solve these problems by arguing that social objects are always recordings of social acts. This accounts for both negative entities and the virtual entities of the web, which consist precisely of recordings just like any other social object. For the theory of documentality, the constitutive rule of social reality is "Object = Inscribed Act", where "inscribed" is equal to "recorded". That is: a social object is the result of a social act, which is characterized by its being recorded on some support, including the minds of the people involved in the act . Articulated by Ferraris in a complete ontological theory and by Smith in a theory of document acts, documentality has three main reasons of interest. First, it has been able to account for the substantial growth of documents and recording devices in the Web world, which is very well explained by the proposed constitutive law of social reality. Secondly, it has been able to explain why social reality, while requiring the presence of subjects for the enactment of acts, may develop independently from them and even without their knowledge. Third, instead of making social reality depend on the action of collective intentionality – with an increasing social constructivism – documentality is capable of substantiating a "new realism" that helps continental philosophy come out of the impasses of postmodernism and reconnect with analytic philosophy. .Ferraris: object = inscribed act
According to the ontologist Barry Smith, with documentality, Ferraris advances an innovative approach to social ontology that implies three steps.First step: the recognition of the sphere of social objects
The first step is the recognition – on the ground of the theories developed by Smith himself, – of the sphere of social objects, meaning, entities such as money, artworks, marriages, divorces and joint custody, years in prison and mortgages, the cost of oil and the tax codes, the Nuremberg Trial and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and still, economic crises, research projects, lectures and university degrees etc. These objects fill up our world more than stones, trees and coconuts do, and they are more important for us, given that a good part of our happiness or unhappiness depends on them.Second step: the identification of the law of constitution of social objects
The second step is the identification of the law that brings social objects into being, namely thatObject = Inscribed Act
What this means is that a social object is the result of a social act, which is characterized by the fact of being registered on a piece of paper, a computer file or some other digital support, or even, simply, in the heads of persons.
As Smith recognizes, if taken literally, the OBJECT=Inscribed Act formulation does not make sense. For instance, if taken literally, this formulation implies that the US Constitution "is made of tiny oxidizing heaps of ink marks on parchment, and matters are helped only slightly if we add together all the printed and digital copies of the US Constitution and assert that the US Constitution is the mereological sum of all these multiple inscriptions."