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There is an old Russian proverb, quoted in Vladimir Medem's autobiography, that says: "an individual in Russia was composed of three parts: a body, a soul, and a passport". It isn't only that there are these three aspects of a person, but moreover that somehow the three are connected or related in some way.I assume that identity theories and reductive strategies about their relationship fail and I remind the reader why this is so. The mind cannot be reduced to body and the social (and this includes social action) cannot be reduced to what goes on in the minds of individuals and to their non-social actions, even when physical environment is added to the allegedly reducing base.I canvass two alternatives: supervenience and constructivism. Supervenience turns out to be too "brute" a relation to account for the mind-body-social relationships. It is essentially a co-variance relation and even if the social supervenes on the non-social, or the mental on the physical, supervenience leaves that co-variance inexplicable and mysterious. I ask whether constructivist solutions could explain the co-variance (I look specifically at the work of John Searle) and raise some issues with regard to their ability to explain these relationships. In particular, I focus on Searle's use of the idea of constitutive rules and on his reliance on the ideas of agreement and consent to such rules.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_21

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