Abstract

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.