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Nicolas Brisset (2019)in N. Brisset, Economics and Performativity: Exploring Limits, Theories and Cases, pp. 120-154Lien vers la thèse soutenue le 11 décembre 2014Abstract. The objective of this chapter is to redefine performativity in such a way that the difficulties inherent to the standard performativist sociology can be overcome. More precisely, this chapter will develop an approach to performativity that will better consider its failures. Searle’s work, which develops social thought by reconciling subjectivism and objectivism, will serve as the philosophical foundation for my approach. Reviewing Searle’s work is a necessary step towards developing an understanding of performativity as a construction of the social world that is also limited by the social world. This approach is built upon the concept of “institutional fact” and upon the evidence of a “metaphysical burden”. The institutional facts come from individual representations that both make up society and impose a burden on it. This concept will be the basis of a new point on performativity: for performativity to take place, a new institutional fact must be implemented in a world that resists it. The definition of institutional fact deployed by Searle states that it is the support of the assignment of functions taking the form of “X counts as Y in a context C.” An institutional fact is therefore a common representation of the world which allows certain decisions to be made. Following from the above, economics “performs” the social world as soon as it allows the emergence of new assignments of function – for example, “X counts as a commodity”, which means that X will be treated and traded according to a set of rules rooted in a theory of markets. The question of the failure of performativity thus arises: how can a theory fail to become an institutional fact defined as an assignment of function? Searle’s approach will prove to be inadequate in answering this question, particularly as his treatment of the way a function assignment becomes a benchmark for an entire community is too vague. As a result, it will be necessary to redefine institutional fact using the concept of convention borrowed from David Lewis, with the intention of understanding why individuals follow assignments of function. This work will be done in two stages. Firstly, it will clearly express Lewis’ definition of a convention as an essential complement to the assignment of functions; secondly, it will highlight that this notion reveals three conditions necessary for the performativity of a theory: empiricism, selffulfilment and complementarity with conventions already set in place within the social space. This work will require that we define what is meant by a theory in a conventionalist framework.About the book. Economists do more than merely describe an external economic world. They shape it in the image of their theories and models. This idea, following the philosophy of language, puts forward that economic theories are performative, and not only descriptive.This idea has become a powerful critique of the scientificity of economics since it removes the idea of an external world against which our description could be evaluated as truth. If any theory can become true, there are no true theories per se because there is no such thing as a pre-existing economy to describe. Is such a relativist stance a fatality? This is the question at stake in this book. Furthermore, the author asks if any theory is able to ‘perform’ the social reality, or are there actually some limits to performativity? For philosophers, a performative statement is a statement that cannot fail to mean something, but can fail to do what it calls for. The state of the world may or may not be changed; the performative statement may be happy or unhappy. In economic terms, this can be interpreted as: some theories change the world while some do not. This book argues that this possibility of failure, a perspective previously missing from discussions on the subject, should be at the heart of any definition of failure.Taking on the question of why some theories change the world while others do not, this volume will be of interest to those studying advances courses on the philosophy of economics as well as those studying and researching in the areas of the philosophy of sciences and sociology of science and economics.Excerpt: "The notion of convention will be at the heart of our reasoning. Borrowed from David Lewis, in line with the French economics of conventions, it allows the determination of certain mechanisms that lead to the failure of performativity. The idea of convention refers in a first approximation to a social device of perception of the world, indicating to the actors the ways they must act when facing certain situations and circumstances. Thus, to be guided by a technical device is to accept a standard of action. The problem with performativist sociology is therefore not so much the valorisation of the role of technical objects as the evacuation of the social in the definition of the human component of socio-technical devices: considering that technical devices are the prime elements in the construction of reality, we forget the conditions under which they take their place within a social world that precedes them. Our disagreement will be, on this point, as much epistemological as ontological: not only is the convention, as social entity, a concept necessary to the understanding of the life in community, but it is also a real object which it is advisable to approach by our theories. This ontological position will be the philosophical foundation of the approach developed here." (Introduction p. 6)Link to the book