In this book, the highly influential philosopher John Searle asks a fundamental question about human beings: how is it that in a universe of physical objects, facts, and laws, we can also have "facts" like lawsuits, summer vacations, and presidents? Those facts exist, but not in the same way a mountain or a river exists. How do these very real things become facts, compared with the brute facts of objective reality? Searle's highly original view proposes that these are collective facts, agreed on by all of us, and that we assign existence to these facts by using language--in effect bringings these facts into existence by declaring them to be true

John Searle is the Slusser Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California, Berkeley. His eighteen books include Mind, Speech Acts, Intentionality and The Construction of Social Reality.