ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses and uses a view of language that is closer to the common instrumental view, but still takes significant distance from it: Searle’s social ontology. Searle’s view of language is part of a linguistic turn in philosophy, which no longer sees language as an entirely neutral instrument, but as a tool we use to create social reality. A first and perhaps most obvious application of Searle’s view is to regard technological artefacts as potentially socially and normatively significant if they are given a particular status by humans as language users, if they are given meaning and “life.” A second way of using Searle’s view is to see language as a technology, and to then to apply his view of language to technology and to explore analogies between language and other technologies in order to say something about technology in general.
