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)

We have taken a look at the rules of games in order to acquire some knowledge concerning constitutive rules and, probably, institutional phenomena in general. In this paper we tried to elaborate a system account of constitutive rules. We claim that all accounts that put emphasis on the form of rules are vulnerable. It appears that constitutive rules are interconnected and always form a system that can be internally differentiated. Thanks to adopting certain qualitative criterion we were able to distinguish (...) central and peripheral constitutive rules. Moreover, that very account makes it possible to distinguish between different types of practices that are determined by types of systems of rules. Secondly, it appears there are three “layers” of games that should not be confused: deep conventions, constitutive rules that establish the game and determine games’ identities, and “rules of efficiency” that are some sort of recommendations as to how to play well. (shrink)

It is a commonplace within philosophy that the ontology of institutions can be captured in terms of constitutive rules. What exactly such rules are, however, is not well understood. They are usually contrasted to regulative rules: constitutive rules (such as the rules of chess) make institutional actions possible, whereas regulative rules (such as the rules of etiquette) pertain to actions that can be performed independently of such rules. Some, however, maintain that the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules is merely (...) a linguistic one. In this paper I present the status account of constitutive rules in order to address this criticism. According to the status account constitutive rules pertain to institutional statuses and statuses are to be understood in terms of status rules. Status rules concern the enabling and constraining roles of institutions, and constitutive rules specify the preconditions that have to be met in order for them to play these roles. Even though I end up endorsing the claim that the distinction mentioned is a linguistic one, I go on to argue that there is an underlying reality that constitutive rules serve to make apparent. (shrink)

Current debates in social ontology are dominated by approaches that view institutions either as rules or as equilibria of strategic games. We argue that these two approaches can be unified within an encompassing theory based on the notion of correlated equilibrium. We show that in a correlated equilibrium each player follows a regulative rule of the form ‘if X then do Y’. We then criticize Searle's claim that constitutive rules of the form ‘X counts as Y in C’ are fundamental (...) building blocks for institutions, showing that such rules can be derived from regulative rules by introducing new institutional terms. Institutional terms are introduced for economy of thought, but are not necessary for the creation of social reality. (shrink)

Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.

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)