I argue in this paper for a critical social ontology, or an approach to theorizing social reality and social institutions that is more than descriptive of social reality, but is also able to provide practical reasoning with an ontological dimension for judgment. At the heart of this idea is a different take on social metaphysics from most standard current accounts in that it begins with empirical, phylogenetic capacities of human beings for social practices (realizing abstract thought in the world) as (...) well as relationality (the need for attachments to others). The combination of these two essential human capacities, what I call the practical‐relational nexus, is generative of more complex social reality. The ontogeny of any social reality is the result of the ways that this practical‐relational nexus has been organized and shaped by external social structures and systems, themselves the product of certain kinds of social power. I then explore the metaphysics of social power before considering the ways that this approach to social metaphysics can inform practical reasoning with the capacity for social and political criticism. (shrink)

I term ‘institutional monism’ the ontological thesis according to which the distinction between institutions and practices is only a matter of degree and not of kind. This paper criticizes institutional monism and puts forward a dualist theory, which takes institutions and practices as two distinct ontological kinds. For that, I introduce a distinction between the attitude and the content of a mental state. I show there can be normativity at the level of the attitude as well as at the level (...) of the content. In the former case we have a norm, in the latter a rule. This allows me to draw an ontological distinction between practices, understood as systems of norms, and institutions, understood as systems of rules. (shrink)

Social kinds are heterogeneous. As a consequence of this diversity, some authors have sought to identify and analyse different kinds of social kinds. One distinct kind of social kinds, however, has not yet received sufficient attention. I propose that there exists a class of social-computation-supporting kinds, or SCS-kinds for short. These SCS-kinds are united by the function of enabling computations implemented by social groups. Examples of such SCS-kinds arereimbursement form,US dollar bill,chair of the board. I will analyse SCS-kinds, contrast my (...) analysis with theories of institutional kinds, and discuss the benefits of investigating SCS-kinds. (shrink)

Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins (...) Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle's, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution. (shrink)

In the paper, I propose a project of social coordination as naturalistic social ontology (CNSO) based on the rules-in-equilibria theory of social institutions (Guala and Hindriks 2015; Hindriks and Guala 2015). It takes coordination as the main ontological unit of the social, a mechanism homological across animals and humans, for both can handle coordination problems: in the forms of “animal conventions” and social institutions, respectively. On this account, institutions are correlated equilibria with normative force. However, if both humans and animals (...) solve coordination problems in a similar way, and only humans have social institutions, how do the latter evolve? I suggest identifying possible causes of this evolution among cognitive capacities like mindreading and imitation by building dynamic models. Social ontology becomes constrained by the evolution of the forms of coordination and by the cognitive mechanisms involved in the emergence and persistence of social institutions. It means that it becomes bound to what might be derived from social institutions, i.e., social roles, structures and their derivatives. It shows how conceptual relations might emerge from causal. I conclude the paper with the discussion of the relationship between involved types of explanation, mechanistic and equilibrium ones. (shrink)

How is metaphysics related to the empirical sciences? Should metaphysics in general be guided by the sources, methods and results of the sciences? And what about the special case of the metaphysics of the social world: should it likewise be guided by the sources, methods and results of the social sciences? In her paper “Social Science as a Guide to Social Metaphysics?”, K. Hawley raises the question: If we are sympathetic to the project of naturalising metaphysics, how should we approach (...) the metaphysics of the social world? She proceeds by discussing three approaches to social metaphysics: inference to the best explanation from current social science, descriptive conceptual analysis, and normative, especially ‘ameliorative’ projects. At the end of her discussion, she reaches a rather pessimistic conclusion, especially as regards the IBE approach: “a number of phenomena indicate that the prospects for securely basing social metaphysics via inference to the best explanation from social science are currently faint. […] We need to look elsewhere if we are to develop a metaphysics of the social world.” In my comments on her paper, I try to re-animate the program of an inductive metaphysics by defending the idea that the method of inference to the best explanation should be the central method of justification for metaphysics in general and for social metaphysics in particular. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the role that individual and collective acts of interpretation play in shaping a metaphysics of food. Our analysis moves from David Kaplan’s recent contention that food is always open to interpretation, and substantially expands its theoretical underpinnings by drawing on recent scholarship on food and social ontology. After setting up the terms of the discussion (§1), we suggest (§2) that the contention can be read subjectively or structurally, and that the latter can be given three (...) sub-readings. We then lay out (§3) three case studies that, we submit, any viable theory of a metaphysics of food should be able to account for. We show that one structural reading—based on the idea of negotiation—swiftly accommodates for the three case studies. We thus conclude that this reading is most promising for charting a metaphysics of food. (shrink)

In his book, Understanding Institutions, Francesco Guala discusses two solutions to the problem of mindreading for coordination, the solution thinking approach proposed by Adam Morton and the team reasoning approach developed by Michael Bacharach, Robert Sugden, and Natalie Gold. I argue that the family resemblance between the two approaches is even stronger than Guala thinks.

Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala’s critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean version of collective (...) acceptance theory can be defended against Guala’s critique and question the sufficiency of Guala’s account of the ontology of the social world. (shrink)

The paper addresses a popular argument that accounts of assertion in terms of constitutive norms are incompatible with conventionalism about assertion. The argument appeals to an alleged modal asymmetry: constitutive rules are essential to the acts they characterize, and therefore the obligations they impose necessarily apply to every instance; conventions are arbitrary, and thus can only contingently regulate the practices they establish. The paper argues that this line of reasoning fails to establish any modal asymmetry, by invoking the distinction between (...) the non-discriminating existence across possible worlds of types of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and the discriminating existence of those among them that are actually in force, and hence truly normative. The necessity of practices defined by constitutive rules that the argument relies on concerns the former, while conventionalist claims are only about the latter. The paper should thus contribute to get a better understanding of what social constructs conceived as defined by constitutive norms are. It concludes by suggesting considerations that are relevant to deciding whether assertion is in fact conventional. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline and defend the view that variations in compliance levels with one and the same norm represent differentnorms about following norms. In support of this claim, I first argue that classic game-theoretic accounts, which define norms as Nash equilibria of noncooperative games, typically consider variations in compliance levels as separate norms. After that, I suggest a more fine-grained, game-theoretic distinction that accounts for degrees of compliance with the same norm and I show how to incorporate such (...) an account into a psychological framework. Finally, the paper examines what given degrees of compliance can reveal about the dynamics underlying the process of norm change. I will argue that they are indicators of different reactions to the introduction of new norms. (shrink)

Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within (...) the natural world with the help of, e.g., collective intentionality, social individualism, and the like, should neither exclude nor influence the prior description of social phenomena. Just as we need a description of the mental that is not biased, for example, by (anti)physicalist constraints, we need a description of the social that is not biased, for example, by (anti)individualist or (anti)naturalist commitments. Descriptive social ontology, as we shall conceive of it, is not incompatible with the adoption of explanatory frameworks in social ontology; rather, the descriptive task, according to our conception, ought to be recognized as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. If social phenomena are, for example, to be reduced to nonsocial (e.g., psychological or physical) phenomena, we need first to understand clearly what the social candidates for the reduction in question are. While such descriptive or naive approaches have been influential in general metaphysics (see Fine 2017), they have so far not been prominent in analytic social ontology (though things are different outside of analytic philosophy, see esp. Reinach (1913). In what follows, we shall outline the contours of a descriptive approach by arguing, first, that description and explanation need to be distinguished as two distinct ways of engaging with social phenomena. Secondly, we defend the claim that the descriptive project ought to be regarded as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. We begin, in Section 2, by considering two different ways of engaging with mental phenomena: a descriptive approach taken by descriptive psychology and an explanatory approach utilized in analytic philosophy of mind. We take these two ways of approaching the study of the mind to be analogous to the distinction we want to draw in social ontology between a descriptive and an explanatory approach to the study of social phenomena. We consider next, in Section 3, how our approach compares to neighboring perspectives that are familiar to us from general metaphysics and philosophy more broadly, such as Aristotle’s emphasis on “saving the appearances”, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, as well as Fine’s contrast between na¨ive and foundational metaphysics. In Section 4, we apply the proposed descriptive/explanatory distinction to the domain of social ontology and argue that descriptive social ontology ought to take precedence in the order of inquiry over explanatory social ontology. Finally, in Section 5, we consider and respond to several objections to which our account might seem to be susceptible. (shrink)

For some sufficiently long-standing institutions, such as the English Crown, there is no single thread, whether specified in terms of constitutive rules or assigned functions, that would connect the stages of that institution. Elizabeth II and Egbert are not connected by an unbroken chain of primogeniture and they have importantly different powers and functions. Derek Parfit famously sought to illuminate his account of personal identity by comparing a person to a club. If Parfit could use our intuitions about clubs to (...) help motivate his neo-Lockean account of personal identity over time, which resists the idea that personal identity requires a common psychological thread, then I argue that an adapted version of his account of identity might, in turn, be reapplied to clubs and other institutions, such as the Crown. (shrink)

The topics of social ontology, culture, and institutions constitute a problem complex that involves a broad range of human social and cultural cognitive capacities. We-mode social cognition and shared intentionality appear to be crucial in the formation of social ontology and social institutions, which, in turn, provide the bases for the social manifestation of collective and shared psychological attitudes. Humans have ‘hybrid minds’ that inhabit cultural–cognitive ecosystems. Essentially, these consist of social institutions and distributed cognition that afford the common grounds (...) for the objectives of we-mode shared intentionality. As such, they stabilize social cognition normatively and offer predictive power in social interaction. Full-blown we-mode shared intentionality fundamentally depends on the functions of social institutions. (shrink)

Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote social change. We argue, however, that an adequate theory of institutions (...) should not be ‘moralized’ in that they should not be defined in terms of the values they are supposed to promote. (shrink)

Institutions are often regarded either as rules or as equilibria sustained by self-interested agents. I ask how these two theories can be combined. According to Philip Pettit’s _Virtual Control Theory_, they explain different things: rules explain why regularities persist; self-interest why they are resilient. Thus, his theory reconciles the two theories by adjusting their domains of application. However, the available evidence suggests that rules and self-interest often combine as sources of motivation. Because of this, it is better to integrate the (...) theories rather than to reconcile them. Inspired by Cristina Bicchieri’s theory of social norms, I incorporate the notion of rule-following into a game-theoretic account of institutions. According to the resulting _Rules-and-Equilibrium Theory_, institutions are rule- or norm-governed social practices. The theory does not only explain their persistence and resilience, but also their fragility, which provides another reason for preferring the proposed integration to Pettit’s reconciliation. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Institutions can be strong or weak. But what does this mean? Equilibrium theories equate institutions with behavioural regularities. In contrast, rule theories explicate them in terms of a standard that people are supposed to meet. I propose that, when an institution is weak, a discrepancy exists between the regularity and the standard or rule. To capture this discrepancy, I present a hybrid theory, the Rules-and-Equilibria Theory. According to this theory, institutions are rule-governed behavioural regularities. The Rules-and-Equilibria Theory provides the basis (...) for two measures of institutional strength. First, institutions that pertain to coordination games solve problems of information. Their strength is primarily a matter of the expected degree of compliance. Second, institutions that concern mixed-motive games solve problems of motivation. Their strength can be measured in terms of the weight people attribute to its rule. (shrink)

Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, group rights often serve to eradicate individual unfreedom. Furthermore, generic measures (...) sometimes provide the most appropriate solution to a problem of group unfreedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEpstein compares models of group agents that focus on their internal organization to models that focus on the statuses they have. He argues that status models are inadequate because agency is not something that can be attributed by fiat. Even if this is true, however, certain agential powers can be attributed to group agents. I argue that Epstein’s arguments stand to benefit a lot from recognizing that some group agents have statuses and constitute corporate agents. For instance, only corporate agents (...) can exist without having members. (shrink)

Hindriks argued that Searle’s theory of institutions suffers from a number of problems pertaining to the notions of constitutive rule, status function, Status Function Declaration, deontic power, and human right. Lobo argues that these criticisms are not sufficiently charitable. In response, it is argued here that the problems that were identified earlier are sufficiently severe to call for substantial revisions of the theory.

The purpose of this article is to argue for a position holding that epigenetic responsibility primarily should be a political and not an individual responsibility. Epigenetic is a rapidly growing research field studying regulations of gene expression that do not change the DNA sequence. Knowledge about these mechanisms is still uncertain in many respects, but main presumptions are that they are triggered by environmental factors and life style and, to a certain extent, heritable to subsequent generations, thereby reminding of aspects (...) of Lamarckism. Epigenetic research advances give rise to intriguing challenges for responsibility relations between the society and the individual. Responsibility is commonly understood in a backwards-looking manner, identifying causally responsible actors to blame for a bad outcome. If only a backwards-looking responsibility model is applied, epigenetics might give rise to arduous responsibility ascriptions to individuals for their health and the health of their future descendants. This would put heavy responsibility burdens on actors constrained by unequal social and economic structures. In contrast, a forward-looking responsibility notion takes account of structural conditions and pay attention to who is best placed to do something about conditions contributing to bad outcomes. A forward-looking responsibility notion would partly free disadvantaged individuals from responsibility, and identify actors with power and capacity to do something about structural factors constraining genuine choice. (shrink)

I answer the questions raised by commentators, and clarify what Understanding Institutions tried to achieve.

The notion of multi-functional kind is introduced to explain how social scientists may be able to draw inferences across historically unrelated societies or cultures. Multi-functional kinds are neither eternal nor purely historical, support non-trivial inductive generalisations, and allow to overcome scepticism about the inductive potential of multiply realised (functional) properties. Two examples, from monetary economics and anthropology, provide support for a pluralistic ontology of the social world.

Hindriks’ paper raises two issues: one is formal and concerns the notion of ‘cost’ in rational choice accounts of norms; the other is substantial and concerns the role of expectations in the modification of payoffs. In this commentary I express some doubts and worries especially about the latter: What’s so special with shared expectations? Why do they induce compliance with norms, if transgression is not associated with sanctions?

Understanding Institutions offers a theory that is able to unify the two dominant approaches in the scientific and philosophical literature on institutions. Moreover, using the ‘rules-in-equilibrium’ theory, it tackles several ancient puzzles in the philosophy of social science.

The folk conception of money as an object is not a promising starting point to develop general, explanatory metaphysical accounts of the social world. A theory of institutions as rules in equilibrium is more consistent with scientific theories of money, is able to shed light on the folk view, and side-steps some unnecessary puzzles.

The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies (...) on Rawls’s distinction between types of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case. (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)

Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued that this neglect can be traced to how (...) a particular approach that favors ahistorical reconstructions in making sense of social entities has come to dominate social ontology. If we think beyond the parameters set by this approach, however, we can see that recognizing indeterminacy as a pervasive phenomenon in the social realm might open up new interpretative possibilities in relation to different social categories. This argument is at least partly in line with recent calls for a move towards nonideal social ontology. (shrink)

Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of institutions, which neither assumes that institutions are beneficial or oppressive, and where ideology is understood as a (...) structuring and stabilizing phenomenon that helps maintain specific distributions of rights and duties by conferring perceived legitimacy onto them. (shrink)

In considering patriarchy as potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an explication of informal institutions. When applied to the phenomenon of patriarchy, such an approach can (...) then also allow us to ontologically make sense of gray areas and hierarchies of authority, as well as the intersectionality of social positions. (shrink)

The concept of wild food does not play a significant role in contemporary nutritional science and it is seldom regarded as a salient feature within standard dietary guidelines. The knowledge systems of wild edible taxa are indeed at risk of disappearing. However, recent scholarship in ethnobotany, field biology, and philosophy demonstrated the crucial role of wild foods for food biodiversity and food security. The knowledge of how to use and consume wild foods is not only a means to deliver high-end (...) culinary offerings, but also a way to foster alternative models of consumption. Our aim in this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for wild foods, which can account for diversified wild food ontologies. In the first section of the paper, we survey the main conception of wild foods provided in the literature, what we call the Nature View. We argue that this view falls short of capturing characteristics that are core to a sound account of wilderness in a culinary sense. In the second part of the paper, we provide the foundation for an improved model of wild food, which can countenance multiple dimensions and degrees connoting wilderness in the culinary world. In the third part of the paper we argue that thanks to a more nuanced ontological analysis, the gradient framework can serve ethnobiologists, philosophers, scientists, and policymakers to represent and negotiate theoretical conflicts on the nature of wild food. (shrink)

We compare Guala’s unified theory of institutions with that of Searle and Greif. We show that unification can be many things and it may be associated with diverse explanatory goals. We also highlight some of the important shortcomings of Guala’s account: it does not capture all social institutions, its ability to bridge social ontology and game theory is based on a problematic interpretation of the type-token distinction, and its ability to make social ontology useful for social sciences is hindered by (...) Guala’s interpretation of social institution types as social kinds akin to natural kinds. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a game-theoretic solution to the rule-following paradox in terms of what I will call basic constitutive practices. The structure of such a practice P constitutes what it is to take part in P by defining the correctness conditions of our most basic concepts as those actions that lie on the correlated equilibrium of P itself. Accordingly, an agent S meant addition by his use of the term ‘+’ because S is taking part in a basic (...) constitutive practice of adding where quus-like answers are ruled out by not lying on the equilibrium. The resulting picture of language will preserve the objectivity and correctness conditions of meaning, all the while providing room for the community as a whole to make a mistake. I also argue that by accepting the account presented, we have a strong reason to reject the idea that language is rule-governed. (shrink)

According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...) ontological foundations. Unfortunately, these two research trends have often not communicated systematically enough to understand the specific ontology of collective aims. It is still unclear whether some irreducible social goods exist and how the answer to this question can set up a consistent understanding of cooperative actions. This dissertation addresses this issue, drawing on philosophical investigations about collective intentionality. It claims that a coherent ontological taxonomy of irreducible and reducible social goods is theoretically viable and can reframe prevailing approaches to collective action dilemmas influenced by the traditional economic categorisation of goods. The research begins by analysing how the influential theory of public goods has paved the way for some social and moral impasses. Furthermore, some theoretical proposals suggesting the existence of relational goods and common-pool resources are scrutinised. Hence, a refutation of the ontological reduction of all social goods to individual ones is developed, arguing that a specific form of cooperation, grounded in we-intentions and we-reasoning, shows the plausibility of the existence of some kinds of irreducible collective goods. Expanding on that view, a refinement of this categorisation of social goods is put forward by underlying the function of some relational entities, such as trust and shared sensemaking processes, in making cooperation robust in uncertain environments. Finally, by applying the taxonomy to collective action gridlocks regarding climate change, digital information, and public education, the consistency of this hypothesis is tested, showing that a pluralistic ontological account of social goods might improve the moral understanding of current social dilemmas. (shrink)

In this article I am going to argue that despite the fact that (1) there is nothing specific to the form of constitutive rules and (2) that in some broad sense every rule has a constitutive aspect, there is a substantial difference between what might be called trivially and genuinely constitutive rules, and the difference can be spotted by looking at practices that rules are supposed to constitute, not at these rules.

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this (...) sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions. (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)