The power is already there in the story, in the collective recognition of the tune, and in the collective ritual standing for the national anthem provides.
It's the collective recognition of our own marred physicality, the acceptance of our shared imperfection, our mortality too horrible to face head-on.
But as an African American woman, I can't help but feel like the collective recognition of Nyong'o as beautiful by a predominantly white media (given this country's complicated history with black imagery) is a sign of some progress.
This question targets not only the PIA in question but Searle's whole account of social entities, because it prevents a clear response to the question of how strong the collective recognition of a declaration has to be.
There are two reasons why we believe that the collective recognition by the organizers alone is likely to be insufficient to create a genuine collective agent during a PIA.
While the assignment of a status function and the collective recognition of the entity's existence are necessary for interpreting it as a social entity at all, it also needs to exhibit collective rationality with regard to the formation of its beliefs and desires or, in short, attitudes.
If, for example, one tries to use some piece of paper as money, even in a context of trading, there could be a lack of collective recognition that this specific piece of paper counts as money, rendering it virtually useless in this context.
Now, one may ask who can create a social entity by means of a declaration, and whose collective recognition of the validity of this declaration is necessary.
This implies that in some cases, a declaration is insufficient for an X to count as a Y in a context C, namely, when collective recognition of the validity of this declaration is absent.
"I was interested in being in a collective recognition of him," he said.
