A significant part of contemporary social ontology has been focused on understanding forms of collective intentionality. It is suggested in this paper that the contested nature of some institutional matters makes this kind of approach problematic, and instead an alternative approach is developed, one that is oriented towards a micro-level analysis of the institutional constraints that we face in everyday life and which can make sense of how there can be institutional facts that are deeply contested and (...) yet still real. The model is applied to two main examples, sexism and racism, and it is argued that on this approach it can make sense to understand both of them as institutions in our societies. (shrink)

Norms explained as grounds of practical judgment, using example of queue. Some norms informal, inexact, depend on common understanding (‘conventions’); some articulated in context of two-tier normative order: ‘rules’, explicit or implicit. Logical structure of rules displayed. Informal and formal normative order explained, ‘institutional facts’ depend on acts and events interpreted in the light of normative order. Practical force of rules differentiated; either ‘absolute application’ or ‘strict application’ or ‘discretionary application’, depending on second-tier empowerment. Discretion can be guided by (...) values, principles standards. Pervasiveness of institutions and institutional facts, especially but not only in relation to institutions of state-law, including constitution and state-institutions. Searle's and Ruiter's theories of institution, institutional fact, considered: ‘constitutive rule’ rejected in favour of ‘underlying principle’, structure of ‘institutive, consequential and terminative’ rules explained and defended. Ruiter's conception of ‘institutional’régime' considered and adopted, validity of norms and normative 'régimes' considered and differentiated from truth of statements of institutional fact. (shrink)

Facts such as the fact that Donald Trump is the US president or the fact that Germany won the 2014 world cup final are commonly referred to as “institutional facts” (“IFF”). I advocate the view that the nature of these facts is comparatively simple: they are facts that exist by virtue of collective recognition (CR), where CR can be direct or indirect. The leading account of IFF, that of John Searle, basically conforms with this definition. However, in (...) his writings Searle has considered or defended several other conditions as potentially necessary for the existence of IFF. In particular, he has considered whether (a) IFF necessarily involve deontic powers, (b) IFF are necessarily so-called “status functions”, (c) IFF require speech acts of Declaring for their existence, (d) IFF require language for their existence. Each of these considerations, if valid, would seem to render the nature of IFF less simple. In this paper, I argue that none of these considerations stand up to scrutiny. Being unaware of any other serious considerations of this kind, I conclude that the nature of IFF is simple as captured by my definition. There is a respect, however, in which my view is possibly less simple than Searle’s, for he suggests that CR is always direct, and never indirect. I reject this suggestion. Indeed, I think that most of the facts existing by virtue of CR exist by virtue of indirect CR. Some authors have (or at least might be construed as having) objected that CR is not even necessary for the existence of IFF. I argue that the account defended here is immune to these objections. (shrink)

In 1964 Searle argued against the naturalistic fallacy thesis that an ought-statement can in fact be derived from is-statements. From an analysis of this argument and of Searle’s social ontology of 1995 – which includes a full-blown theory of institutional facts – I conclude that this argument is unsound on his own (later) terms. The conclusion that can now be drawn from Searle’s argument is that social or institutional obligations are epistemically objective even though they are observer-dependent. (...) I go on to argue that the strength of such obligations depends on the strength of the underlying collective acceptance, which is a kind of collective intentionality. I also point out that all normativity in Searle’s framework can be traced back to either individual or collective intentionality. This bars him from providing an account of intention-independent moral facts. (shrink)

That certain paper bills have monetary value, that Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia, and that Prince Philip is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II: such facts are commonly called ‘institutional facts’. IFF are, by definition, facts that exist by virtue of collective recognition. The standard view or tacit belief is that such facts really exist. In this paper we argue, however, that they really do not—they really are just well-established illusions. We confront realism about IFF with six (...) criteria of existence, three established and three less so but highly intuitive. We argue that they all tell against the existence of IFF. An obvious objection to IFF non-realism is that since people’s behaviour clearly reflects the existence of IFF, denying their existence leaves an explanatory gap. We reject this argument by introducing a variant of the so-called ‘Thomas Theorem,’ which says that when people collectively recognize a fact as existing, they largely behave accordingly, regardless of whether that fact really exists or not. (shrink)

Norms explained as grounds of practical judgment, using example of queue. Some norms informal, inexact, depend on common understanding ; some articulated in context of two-tier normative order: `rules', explicit or implicit. Logical structure of rules displayed. Informal and formal normative order explained, `institutional facts ' depend on acts and events interpreted in the light of normative order. Practical force of rules differentiated; either `absolute application' or `strict application' or `discretionary application', depending on second-tier empowerment. Discretion can be guided (...) by values, principles standards. Pervasiveness of institutions and institutional facts, especially but not only in relation to institutions of state-law, including constitution and state-institutions. Searle's and Ruiter's theories of institution, institutional fact, considered: `constitutive rule' rejected in favour of `underlying principle', structure of `institutive, consequential and terminative' rules explained and defended. Ruiter's conception of `institutional `régime' considered and adopted, validity of norms and normative `régimes' considered and differentiated from truth of statements of institutional fact. (shrink)

Under John Searle’s theory of institutional facts, the law can be understood both as an institution governed by foundational documents and practices, and as a method for creating new institutions through the codification of the assignment of functions, usually of the form ‘X counts as Y in circumstances C’. The architect Christopher Alexander’s notion of pattern languages, schematic templates for problem-solving widely adopted by computer programmers, can be developed within a legal system as a coherence constraint on the assignment (...) of functions such that codified legal solutions do not conflict with other legal solutions to related or distinct problems. (shrink)

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional (...) approach against more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Presence as ordinarily understood requires spatio-temporal proximity. If however Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is understood in this way it would take a miracle to secure multiple location and an additional miracle to cover it up so that the presence of Christ where the Eucharist was celebrated made no empirical difference. And, while multiple location is logically possible, such metaphysical miracles—miracles of distinction without difference, which have no empirical import—are problematic. I propose an account of Eucharist according to which Christ (...) is indeed really and objectively present in the religiously required sense, without benefit of metaphysical miracles. According to the proposed account, which draws upon Searle’s discussion of “social ontology” in The Construction of Social Reality and The Making of the Social World, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is an institutional fact. I argue that such an account satisfies the requirements for a real presence doctrine. (shrink)

According to Ron Mallon (2004), any adequate account of race must meet three constraints: passing, no-traveling, and reality. "Passing" describes the fact that persons who are treated by others as belonging to one race, may "actually" belong to a different race. "No traveling" refers to the fact that racial concepts such as "white" may pick out different sets of persons in different cultures. "Reality" refers to the fact that racial designations enter into explanations of how people's lives (...) go. However, Mallon argues that no account can simultaneously satisfy all three constraints. I argue that an account of race as an institutional fact, based on Searle's theory of constitutive rules, can satisfy all three constraints. Furthermore, the institutional account provides an enlightening explanation of these three features of race. (shrink)

Let us show how property is grasped as an institutional fact. If Jones steals a computer, he does not own it in the sense of property, but only exercises control towards it. If he buys the computer, he controls it too, and moreover owns it in the sense of property. In other words, simply exercising control towards something is a brute fact. This control counts asproperty only in a certain context: the computer counts as Jones’s property only (...) if he got it through a licit transfer. This is why property is not a brute fact, and is therefore an institutional fact. The same kind of reasoning applies to privacy. When a personal information P about Jones is openly diffused, it seems that P becomes public. From this point of view, a violation of privacy equates to a publication. The problem about this account is the following: who would call “publication of a book” the hacking of it on its author’s computer? No one, because the word “publication” is an institutional word that only refers to a licit diffusion. Considering this answer, we may conclude as follows: if the diffusion of P is illicit, P still countsas private, even if everyone knows about it. If that conclusion is true, privacy is an institutional fact. (shrink)

This book includes ten original essays that critically examine central themes of John Searle’s ontology of society, as well as a new essay by Searle that summarizes and further develops his work in that area. The critical essays are grouped into three parts. Part I (Aspects of Collective Intentionality) examines the account of collective intention and action underlying Searle’s analysis of social and institutional facts, with special emphasis on how that account relates to the dispute between individualism and anti-individualism (...) in the analysis of social behaviour, and to the opposition between internalism and externalism in the analysis of intentionality. Part II (From Intentions to Institutions: Development and Evolution) scrutinizes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic credentials of Searle’s view that, unlike other kinds of social facts, institutional facts are uniquely human, and develops original suggestions concerning their place in human evolution and development. Part III (Aspects of Institutional Reality) focuses on Searle’s claim that institutional facts owe their existence to the collective acceptance of constitutive rules whose effect is the creation of deontic powers, and examines central issues relevant to its assessment (among others, the status of the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, the significance of the distinction between brute and deontic powers, the issue of the logical derivability of normative from descriptive propositions, and the import of the difference between moral and non-moral normative principles). Written by an international team of philosophers and social scientists, the essays aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle’s work on the ontology of society, and to suggest new approaches to fundamental questions in that research area. (shrink)

SOCREAL 2013 : 3rd International Workshop on Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality 2013. Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 25-27 October 2013. Session 2 : Imperatives and Norms.

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle develops a theory of institutional facts and objects, of which money, borders and property are presented as prime examples. These objects are the result of us collectively intending certain natural objects to have a certain status, i.e. to ‘count as’ being certain social objects. This view renders such objects irreducible to natural objects. In this paper we propose a radically different approach that is more compatible with standard economic theory. We claim (...) that such institutional objects can be fully understood in terms of actions and incentives, and hence the Searlean apparatus solves a non-existent problem. (shrink)

In our earlier work, we argued, contra Searle, that institutional facts can be understood in terms of non-institutional facts about actions and incentives. Butchard and D’Amico claim that we have misinterpreted Searle, that our main argument against him has no merit and that our positive view cannot account for institutional facts created via joint action. We deny all three charges.

It deals with the question of what a moral judgment is. On the one hand, a satisfactory theory of moral judgments must take into account the descriptive character of moral judgments and the realistic language of morals. On the other hand, it must also meet the non-descriptive character of moral judgments that consists in the recommending or condemning element and in the fact that normative statements are derived from moral judgments. However, cognitivism and emotivism or “normativism” are contradictory theories: (...) If moral judgments are descriptive, it is not possible to deduce norms from them. But if one can deduce norms from moral judgments, they are not descriptive. As a solution to this problem, the paper suggests that moral judgments represent institutional facts; the corresponding theory is moral institutionalism. A moral institutional fact – “an act X is Y”, Y means “morally right” or “morally false” – is a hybrid of descriptive and prescriptive elements: It is stating a fact in descriptive language (“is”) and at the same time, it is short for the prescriptive constitutive rule “X is Y according to the moral rules of the language community C”. Institutional facts contain normative presuppositions without letting them appear in their grammatical form. Institutional facts are now (in relation to the language community C) objective and intersubjective and they can be generalized (cognitive aspect), although they cannot be reduced to brute physical or psychological facts, and it is also possible to deduce norms from them because they are built into them. The meta-ethical concept of moral institutionalism, which is evolved further in the paper, preserves the best intentions of emotivism and cognitivism without leading to contradiction. As a by-product, the article shows exactly the still undetected error in J. R. Searle’s alleged counterexample against the so-called naturalistic fallacy from “is” to “ought”. This lies in the normative “are” of the analytic premise or definition in “2a. All promises are [that is ought to be] acts of placing oneself under (undertaking) an obligation to do the thing promised”. (shrink)

John Searle’s conception of institutional facts figures centrally in his latest works. It is defective for several reasons: (1) Searle’s argument for philosophical realism is inconsistent. (2) Searle’s conceptions of consciousness and collective intentionality are problematic. (3) The notion of normativity is indispensable in Searle’s system, but cannot be accounted for and makes wide parts of his theory superfluous. (4) It is not clear what entities might be regarded as institutional facts. These problems have a common source: The (...) philosophical basis of Searle’s theory, his combination of realism and physicalist monism, clashes with his thesis that both the 'first-person-ontology' and normativity are irreducible. (shrink)

In order to account for the mode of existence of social rules and norms, the author develops a theory of the emergence of institutional facts. Just as other kinds of institutional fact, rules and norms are meanings. Therefore, insight into the emergence of social rules and norms can be achieved by studying the recognition and the communication of meanings. Following accounts of meaning and factuality, institutional facts are characterized as unquestionable shared typifications. It is argued that, (...) in becoming an institutional fact, a typification goes through two phases. First, it becomes a social habit. Second, this habit turns into an obligation by being objectified. (shrink)

Economic theories of team reasoning build on the assumption that agents can sometimes behave according to beliefs or preferences attributed to a group or a team. In this paper, I propose a different framework to introduce collective intentionality into game theory. I build on John Searle’s account, which makes collective intentionality constitutive of institutional facts. I show that as soon as one accepts that institutions are required to solve indetermination problems in a game, it is necessary to assume a (...) form of collective intentionality that comes from what I call a common understanding of the situation among the players. This common understanding embodies the epistemic requirements for an institution to be a correlated equilibrium in a game. As a consequence, I question recent claims made by some economists according to which game-theoretic accounts of institutions do not need to assume collective intentionality. (shrink)

The first issue raised in the paper is difference between social and institutional facts; both exist only because we believe they are real. Second is the claim that belonging to collectives is always a social fact, not necessarily as a result of any decision-making process; it might also become institutional through actual, sometimes only implicit, acceptance of some constitutive rules. Third, accepting constitutive rules functions by setting an irreversible point in time after which the scope of available (...) justificatory reasons for deciding and doing narrows. The implication is that reality of collectives cannot be reduced to individuals. Individuals often participate in this reality by belonging. Belonging thus becomes a social and sometimes also an institutional fact. (shrink)

Kenneth Silver has recently argued that backwards causation is common in the context of social institutions. I consider this claim in detail and conclude that backwards causation is not the most plausible interpretation of what is going on in the cases Silver considers. Nonetheless, I show that these cases can teach us some interesting lessons about institutional facts. In particular, I argue that in order to avoid contradiction due to conflicting declarations in these cases, we must conclude that the (...) properties involved in institutional facts are relational properties. (shrink)

Abstract: It deals with the question of what a moral judgment is. On the one hand, a satisfactory theory of moral judgments must take into account the descriptive character of moral judgments and the realistic language of morals. On the other hand, it must also meet the non-descriptive character of moral judgments that consists in the recommending or condemning element and in the fact that normative statements are derived from moral judgments. However, cognitivism and emotivism or “normativism” are contradictory (...) theories: If moral judgments are descriptive, it is not possible to deduce norms from them. But if one can deduce norms from moral judgments, they are not descriptive. As a solution to this problem, the paper suggests that moral judgments represent institutional facts; the corresponding theory is moral institutionalism. A moral institutional fact – “an act X is Y”, Y” means “morally right” or “morally false” – is a hybrid of descriptive and prescriptive elements: It is stating a fact in descriptive language (“is”) and at the same time, it is short for the prescriptive constitutive rule “X is Y according to the moral rules of the language community C”. Institutional facts contain normative presuppositions without letting them appear in their grammatical form. Institutional facts are now (in relation to the language community C) objective and intersubjective and they can be generalized (cognitive aspect), although they cannot be reduced to brute physical or psychological facts, and it is also possible to deduce norms from them because they are built into them. The meta-ethical concept of moral institutionalism, which is evolved further in the paper, preserves the best intentions of emotivism and cognitivism without leading to contradiction. As a by-product, the article shows exactly the error in J. R. Searle’s alleged counterexample against the so-called naturalistic fallacy from “is” to “ought”. This lies in the normative “are” of the analytic premise or definition in “2a. All promises are [that is ought to be] acts of placing oneself under (undertaking) an obligation to do the thing promised”. In “Key concepts in philosophy”, Sankt Augustin 2015, institutionalism is explained further (p.184-191) and confined to what Hegel has called “Sittlichkeit” that is customary morality in in distinction to the “morality” of my personal consciousness (p.212-213):. (shrink)

In institutional legal theory, norms and facts are reciprocally operating elements: an interplay in which meaning construction is closely connected with acting: the pragmatic understanding of legal language in terms of its uses. With the semiotic elements of institutional theory, extended by the notion of ‘semiotic groups’, an analytical framework can be constructed to analyze a case study on the shifts in the concept of war which have taken place since the 1945 UN Charter and in the aftermath (...) of 9/11. The semiotic aspects of the institutional approach can offer insight into the complexity of the processes of meaning attribution in the field of law and war. (shrink)

In two articles, Smits, Buekens, and du Plessis have argued that John Searle’s account of institutional facts suffers serious flaws and should be replaced with a reductive account they call “incentivization.” We argue against their view in two ways. First, the specific flaws they find in Searle are based on misunderstandings. Second, “incentivization,” as they present it, fails as a reduction of strict collective actions and, thus, cannot account for institutional facts such as money or property.

In two articles, Smits, Buekens, and du Plessis have argued that John Searle’s account of institutional facts suffers serious flaws and should be replaced with a reductive account they call “incentivization.” We argue against their view in two ways. First, the specific flaws they find in Searle are based on misunderstandings. Second, “incentivization,” as they present it, fails as a reduction of strict collective actions and, thus, cannot account for institutional facts such as money or property.

In order to account for the mode of existence of social rules and norms, the author develops a theory of the emergence of institutional facts. Just as other kinds of institutional fact, rules and norms are meanings. Therefore, insight into the emergence of social rules and norms can be achieved by studying the recognition and the communication of meanings. Following accounts of meaning and factuality, institutional facts are characterized as unquestionable shared typifications. It is argued that, (...) in becoming an institutional fact, a typification goes through two phases. First, it becomes a social habit. Second, this habit turns into an obligation by being objectified. (shrink)

J. R. Searle’s general theory of social and institutional reality, as deployed in some of his recent work (The Construction of Social Reality, 1995; Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society, 1998}, raises many deep and interesting problems. Four issues are taken up here: (1) Searle’s claim to the effect that collective intentionality is a primitive, irreducible form of intentionality; (2) his account of one of the most puzzling features of institutional concepts, their having a self-referential component; (3) (...) the question as to the point, or points, of having institutions; (4) Searle's claim to the effect that false beliefs on the part of the members of the relevant community are compatible with the existence of related institutional facts. It is argued that, under all four respects, Searle's theory proves to be hardly satisfactory. (shrink)

John Searle’s conception of institutional facts figures centrally in his latest works. It is defective for several reasons: (1) Searle’s argument for philosophical realism is inconsistent. (2) Searle’s conceptions of consciousness and collective intentionality are problematic. (3) The notion of normativity is indispensable in Searle’s system, but cannot be accounted for and makes wide parts of his theory superfluous. (4) It is not clear what entities might be regarded as institutional facts. These problems have a common source: The (...) philosophical basis of Searle’s theory, his combination of realism and physicalist monism, clashes with his thesis that both the 'first-person-ontology' and normativity are irreducible. (shrink)

In spite of contemporary theoretical disagreement on the nature of language, there is a widespread informal agreement about what linguistic facts are. This article argues that a functional approach to language can provide the foundation for an explicit account of what the informal consensus implies. The account bridges the ‘internalist’ and the ‘externalist’ views of language by understanding mental constructs such as those involved in human languages as aspects of a dynamic social equilibrium. As in evolutionary biology, processes of selection (...) can work to stabilize certain features while others vary; and this process (in which ‘function’ plays a key role) is a necessary supplement to a purely mentalist account. This position is seen as a development of the position of Searle on social facts and Keller on language change. (shrink)

Because there are governments, societies, and laws we have various obligations we otherwise would not have. This is at best trivial. But what is not trivial is how it is that we have these obligations. In this paper, I shall sketch an answer to this question.

The book provides a novel account of the ontological foundations of institutional facts, and argues that there are some important epistemic and methodological implications that follow from this ontology. The first part of the book offers a detailed reductive account of institutional facts by way of metaphysical grounding. It shows that an ontology of institutional facts requires an ontology of social rules, and the latter depends on a reductive account of collective attitudes. The book offers a grounding-reductive (...) account of collective attitudes that comports with methodological individualism. It argues for a functional explanation of the constitutive relations between rules and practices, challenging John Searle’s influential distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. The second part of the book aims to show that there are a number of important epistemic and methodological conclusions that follow from the ontology of institutional facts. First, that there are certain types of widespread errors about the socially constructed aspects of reality that are not metaphysically possible. The second methodological argument is that a metaphysical account of institutional reality does not have to provide an explanation of the relevant social practices in terms that would rationalize the practice for the participants themselves. Finally, the last chapter explains the idea of hierarchical practices, arguing that basic social power-structuring rules function to transform brute power into an elaborate normative framework, constituting authoritative institutions that are central to our institutional reality. (shrink)

Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit”, synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity—irrespective of (...) whether the account is interpreted as involving causal generation or non-causal grounding of worldly institutional facts—and should be replaced by a more modest theory which interprets the results of Status Function Declarations in terms of mere Cambridge change and institutional truth. I end the paper by indicating the import of this more modest theory for theorizing about the causal potency of institutional phenomena generated by declarations. (shrink)

In Speech Acts, John Searle argues that institutional facts presuppose, for their existence, the existence of certain institutions (understood as systems of constitutive rules). In this paper I extend Searle’s theory of institutional facts arguing that a further level is needed for the investigation of the structure of institutional reality: the level of meta-institutional concepts. The meta-institutional concepts are concepts that go beyond (Greek: metá) the institutions of which they are conditions of possibility. An example (...) of meta-institutional concept is the concept of game. In a culture which does not have the concept of game, we could move the chess-men according to the rules of chess, we could also perform a castling, but it would be impossible to play chess. (shrink)

INSTITUTES OF Moral Philosophy. INTRODUCTION. » SECTION I. Of Knoivledge in general. * AL L knowledge is either of particular facts, or of general rules. ...

Institutions undertake a huge variety of constitutive purposes. One of the roles of legitimacy is to protect and promote an institution’s pursuit of its purpose; state legitimacy is generally understood as the right to rule, for example. When considering legitimacy beyond the state, we have to take account of how differences in purposes change legitimacy. I focus in particular on how differences in purpose matter for the stringency of the standards that an institution must meet in order to be legitimate. (...) An important characteristic of an institution’s purpose is its deontic status, i.e. whether it is morally impermissible, merely permissible, or mandatory. Although this matters, it does so in some non-obvious ways; the mere fact of a morally impermissible purpose is not necessarily delegitimating, for example. I also consider the problem of conflicting, multiple, and contested institutional purposes, and the different theoretical roles for institutional purpose. Understanding how differences in purpose matter for an institution’s legitimacy is one part of the broader project of theorizing institutional legitimacy in the many contexts beyond the traditional context of the state. (shrink)

Being part of the life of institutions requires a considerable amount of conceptual knowledge. In institutional settings, we must learn the relevant concepts to act meaningfully, and these concepts are internal in a peculiar way, namely, they are strictly relative to the rules of a given institution because they are constituted by those rules. However, institutions do not come out of nothing: They are inscribed in a social setting and this setting determines, at least in a broad sense, what (...) is the nature of the institution. Our social life therefore creates more or less defined contexts for meaningful institutional activities, and these contexts in their own turn involve concepts. In this paper, I address this question by distinguishing between three kinds of concepts relevant for an institution and trying to identify the different relations that these concepts have with constitutive rules. I then proceed to explain how this distinction can improve our understanding of practical reasoning in institutional context. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct the development and the complex character of Zilsel’s conception of scientific laws. This concept functions as a fil rouge for understanding Zilsel’s philosophy throughout different times (here, the focus is on his Viennese writings and how they pave the way to the more renown American ones) and across his many fields of work (from physics to politics). A good decade before Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was going to mark the outbreak of indeterminism in quantum physics, Edgar (...) Zilsel started to develop a complex logical-philosophical theory in which statistical and causal laws were given an indeterministic foundation (Zilsel 1916). However, in developing his thoughts on the emergence of regularities from disorder, Zilsel arrives at a profound ambiguity with respect to the ontological or the epistemic nature of laws and order in the world: Whether this order is to be conceived of as an empirical finding or as the product of reason – this would have to remain unclear. This tension between rationalism and empiricism, as well as a tension between a realist and an anti-realist conception of lawfulness, can be identified in both Zilsel’s Viennese and American writings: a tension which touches the core of the “application problem” that would keep haunting Zilsel until his premature death. (shrink)

When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, we were taught economics almost as though it were a natural science. The subject matter of economics might be different from physics, but only in the way that the subject matter of chemistry or biology is different from physics. The actual results were presented to us as if they were scientific theories. So when we learned that savings equals investment, it was taught in the same tone of voice as one teaches that force (...) equals mass times acceleration. And we learned that rational entrepreneurs sell where marginal cost equals marginal revenue in the way that we once learned that bodies attract in a way that is directly proportional to the product of their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. At no point was it ever suggested that the reality described by economic theory was dependent on human beliefs and other attitudes in a way that was totally unlike the reality described by physics or chemistry. Some years ago, when I published The Construction of Social Reality, I was aware that it had implications for the ontology of economics, but I was not aware that there had already been an important revival of the tradition of institutional economics. It would be an understatement to say that I welcome this interest in institutions; I enthusiastically support it. But I think that in the institutional literature there is still an unclarity about what exactly an institution is. What is the ontology, the mode of existence, of institutional reality? This article tries to add to this discussion. Economics as a subject matter, unlike physics or chemistry, is largely concerned with institutional facts. Facts about money and interest rates, exchange and employment, corporations and the balance of payments, form the very heart of the subject of economics. When Lionel Robbins, in a classic work, tells us that “Economics is a study of the disposal of scarce commodities,”2 he takes for granted a huge invisible institutional.... (shrink)