Ontological Dependence and Essential Laws of Social Reality. The Case of Promising

Adolf Reinach, phenomenologist and philosopher of law, developed a social and legal theory (Reinach 1913) which provides an interesting answer––alternative to that of John Searle (1969, 1995, 2010)––to the question of the nature of social and legal reality. For Reinach, social and legal entities—differently from Searle––are not grounded in constitutive rules, collective intentionality and status functions declarations. They are grounded, instead, in a priori structures [apriorische Gebilde] and essential laws [Wesengesetze]. These are the «a priori foundations of law», dependent neither on positive law nor on beliefs, individual or collective, about them. Reinach’s theory is a strongly realistic and absolutely not conventionalist account of social and legal reality, which is based on Husserl’s phenomenology and particularly on his theory of ontological dependence (Husserl 1901). The aim of this paper is to show that Reinach’s account of the a priori foundations of social and legal reality can compete with Searle’s social ontological account, and that, with respect to some issues I will deal with, it is even more convincing than Searle’s.