Searle (1995) The Construction of Social Reality Ch. 2

2024-2 Social Ontology 

Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. [31-57]

 

1. Some Apparent Features of Social Reality

To begin, let us identify some of the apparent features of social reality we would like to explain. Because I believe philosophical investigations should begin naively (how they proceed and conclude is another matter), I will simply list half a dozen of what appear to be naive, intuitive features of social reality, including features of institutional facts, such as, for example, the fact that I am an American citizen, as well as features of those social facts that do not require institutional structures, such as, for example, the fact that two men are pushing a car together to try to get it started.

1.1 The Self-Referentiality of Many Social Concepts

The concepts that name social facts appear to have a peculiar kind of self-referentiality. As a preliminary formulation we can say, for example, in order that the concept “money” apply to the stuff in my pocket, it has to be the sort of thing that people think is money. If everybody stops believing it is money, it ceases to function as money, and eventually ceases to be money. Logically speaking, the statement “A certain type of substance, x, is money” implies an indefinite inclusive disjunction of the form “x is used as money or x is regarded as money or x is believed to be money, etc." But that seems to have the consequence that the concept of money, the very definition of the word “money," is self-referential, because in order that a type of thing should satisfy the definition, in order that it should fall under the concept of money, it must be believed to be, or used as, or regarded as, etc., satisfying the definition. For these sorts of facts, it seems to be almost a logical truth that you cannot fool all the people all the time. If everybody always thinks that this sort of thing is money, and they use it as money and treat it as money, then it is money. If nobody ever thinks this sort of thing is money, then it is not money. And what goes for money goes for elections, private property, wars, voting, promises, marriages, buying and selling, political offices, and so on.

 

X is ___ (money/contract/driver’s lic.) because we all believe X to be ___ (money/contract/driver’s lic.).

 

In order to state this point precisely we need to distinguish between institutions and general practices on the one hand and particular distances on the other, that is, we need to distinguish between types and tokens.

A single dollar bill might fall from the printing presses into the cracks of the floor and never be used or thought of as money at all, but it would still be money. In such a case a particular token instance would be money, even though no one ever thought it was money or thought about it or used it at all.

Similarly, there might be a counterfeit dollar bill in circulation even if no one ever knew that it was counterfeit, not even the counterfeiter. In such a case everyone who used that particular token would think it was money even though it was not in fact money.

About particular tokens it is possible for people to be systematically mistaken. But where the type of thing is concerned, the belief that the type is a type of money is constitutive of its being money in a way we will need to make fully clear.

For some institutional phenomena, such as money, what I say applies more to types than tokens, for others, such as cocktail parties, it applies to each individual token. For the sake of simplicity I will assume that the reader is aware of the distinction, and I will speak of the self-referentiality of institutional concepts in general, without making the distinction in every case. Later I will try to explain the difference between self-referentiality as applied to types and as applied to tokens.

But if the type of thing in question is money only because people believe it to be money, if “money" implies "regarded as, used as, or believed to be money," then philosophers will get worried, because the claim seems to produce either a vicious infinite regress or a vicious circle. If part of the content of the claim that something is money is the claim that it is believed to be money, then what is the content of that belief? If the content of the belief that something is money contains in part the belief that it is money, then the belief that something is money is in part the belief that it is believed to be money; and there is, in turn, no way to explain the content of that belief without repeating the same feature over and over again. Later on, I will try to show how to avoid this infinite regress. At this point, I am just calling attention to a peculiar logical feature that distinguishes social concepts from such natural concepts as “mountain" or “molecule." Something can be a mountain even if no one believes it is a mountain; something can be a molecule even if no one thinks anything at all about it. But for social facts, the attitude that we take toward the phenomenon is partly constitutive of the phenomenon. If, for example, we give a big cocktail party, and invite everyone in Paris, and if things get out of hand, and it turns oul that the casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz—all the same, it is not a war; it is just one amazing cocktail party. Part of being a cocktail party is being thought to be a cocktail party; part of being a war is being thought to be a war. This is a remarkable feature of social facts; it has no analogue among physical facts.

 

He makes a distinction between type (money) and token ($1 bill) and claims that the self-referentiality applies primarily to types, and not necessarily to tokens. type – money – cannot be thought of as money if no one thinks it is; we cannot systematically be mistaken about token - $1 bill – it will still be $1 bill even if it is not used, even if it slips through the cracks; we can be mistaken about it.

More generally: the attitude we take toward the phenomenon is partly constitutive of it. But no worries, we are not embroiled in a circularity, says Searle later; the self-referentiality is superficial and can be eliminated by appeal to practices. Searle wants us to contrast money with the cocktail party example; each token of a cocktail party, to be what it is, needs to be thought of as such.

1.2. The Use of Performative Utterances in the Creation of Institutional Pacts

One of the most fascinating features of institutional facts is that a very larger number, though by no means all of them, can be created by explicit performative utterances. Performatives are members of the class of speech acts I call “declarations." In declarations the state of affairs represented by the propositional content of the speech act is brought into existence by the successful performance of that very speech act. Institutional facts can be created with the performative utterance of such sentences as "The meeting is adjourned," "I give and bequeath my entire fortune to my nephew,” “I appoint you chairman," "War is hereby declared,” etc. These utterances create the very state of affairs that they represent; and in each case, the state of affairs is an institutional fact.

1.3. The Logical Priority of Brute Facts over Institutional Facts

Intuitively it seems there are no institutional facts without brute facts. For example, just about any sort of substance can be money, but money has to exist in some physical form or other. Money can be bits of metal, slips of paper, wampum, or entries in books. In fact, most of our money in the past couple of decades underwent a revolutionaiy physical transformation that we did not even no tice. Most money is now in the form of magnetic traces on computer disks. It does not matter what the form is as long as it can function as money, but money must come in some physical form or other.

What is true of money is true of chess games, elections, and universities. All these can take different forms, but for each there must be some physical realization. This suggests what I think is true, that social facts in general, and institutional facts especially, are hierarchically structured. Institutional facts exist, so to speak, on top of brute physical facts. Often, the brute facts will not be manifested as physical objects but as sounds coming out of peoples’ mouths or as marks on paper—or even thoughts in their heads.

 

The hierarchy has to bottom out, according to Searle, or there is a risk of an infinite regress. You must impose a status function to something

 

1.4. Systematic Relationships Among Institutional Facts

An institutional fact cannot exist in isolation but only in a set of systematic relations to other facts. 

Having money: society must have a system of exchanging goods and services for money
Having a system of exchange: must have a system of property and property ownership.
Having marriages: must have some form of contractual relationships.
Having contractual relationships: have notions of promises and obligations.

Furthermore, quite apart from the logical or conceptual requirement of interrelationships of institutional facts, it just turns out that in any real life situation one will find oneself in a complex of interlocking institutional realities. The restaurant scene described in Chapter 1 illustrates this: at any instant in the scene, one is (at least) a citizen, an owner of money, a client, a bill payer; and one is dealing with property, a restaurant, a waiter, a bill.

It might seem that games are counterexamples to this general principle, because, of course, games are designed to be forms of activity that do not connect with the rest of our lives in a way that institutional facts characteristically do. Today's philosophy department softball game need have no consequences for tomorrow, in a way that today's wars, revolutions, buyings, and sellings are intended precisely to have consequences for tomorrow and into the indefinite future. Nonetheless, even in the case of games, there are systematic dependencies on other forms of institutional facts. The position of the pitcher, the catcher, and the batter, for example, all involve rights and responsibilities; and their positions and actions or inactions are unintelligible without an understanding of these rights and responsibilities; but these notions are in turn unintelligible without the general notion of rights and responsibilities.

1.5. The Primacy of Social Acts over Social Objects, of Processes over Products

It is tempting to think of social objects as independently existing entities on analogy with the objects studied by the natural sciences. It is tempting to think that a government or a dollar bill or a contract is an object or entity in the sense that a DNA molecule, a tectonic plate, or a planet is an object or entity. In the case of social objects, however, the grammar of the noun phrases conceals from us the fact that, in such cases, process is prior to product. Social objects are always, in some sense we will need to explain, constituted by social acts; and, in a sense, the object is just the continuous possibility of the activity. A twenty dollar bill, for example, is a standing possibility of paying for something.

 

Social objects are always, says Searle, constituted by social acts, and the object is just the continuous possibility of the activity. Process is prior to product. Social objects are designed to serve agentive functions.

1.6. The Linguistic Component of Many Institutional Facts

Related to features 1 and 2 is the further apparent feature that only beings that have a language or some more or less language-like system of representation can create most, perhaps all, institutional facts, because the linguistic element appears to be partly constitutive of the fact.

It is common, for example, to read that certain ant colonies have slaves or that beehives have queens. I think such manners of speaking are harmless metaphors, especially where the so called “social insects” are concerned, but it is important to keep reminding ourselves that for a community literally to have slaves or literally to have a queen, the participants would have to have the apparatus necessary to represent something as a queen or as a slave. Just behaving in certain ways, where behavior is construed solely in terms of bodily movements, is not sufficient for a community to have a queen or to have slaves. In addition, there would have to be a certain set of attitudes, beliefs, etc., on the part of the members of the community, and this would seem to require a system of representation such as language. Language seems to be essential not only to represent these facts to ourselves; but in a way that we will have to explain, the linguistic forms in question are partly constitutive of the facts. But what eyactly is the role of language in the constitution of institutional facts? This is not an easy question, and we will devote the next chapter to answering it.

Linguistic forms are constitutive of institutional facts, not necessarily of social facts. Searle gives the example of ant colony: having a queen or having a servant cannot be literal in an ant colony, because there is no language and therefore no representational apparatus.

2. From Collective Intrnlionality to Inslilutional Facts: The example of Money

The simplest form of social facts involves simple forms of collective behavior. As I said earlier, I think the capacity for collective behavior is biologically innate, and the forms of collective intentionality cannot be eliminated or reduced to something else. For example, it takes no cultural apparatus, cultural conventions, or language for animals to move together in a pack or to hunt together. When hyenas move in a pack to kill an isolated lion, no linguistic or cultural apparatus is necessary, even though the behavior of the hyenas is very skillfully coordinated and the hyenas are responsive not only to the lion but to each other. The selectional advantage of cooperative behavior is, I trust, obvious. Inclusive fitness is increased by cooperating with conspecifics.

The only tricky feature of assimilating collective animal behavior into a general theory of intentionality derives from the fact that in any complex form of behavior, such as the example of hyenas attacking a lion, each animal’s individual contribution to the collective behavior will have a different intentional content from the collective intentionality. In the case of humans, for example, if our team is executing a pass play, and my assignment is to block the defensive end, then my individual intentionaliiy is, “I am blocking the defensive end"; but that has a different content from the collective intentionality, “We are executing a pass play," even though I am blocking the defensive end only as part of our executing the pass play. The content of the individual intentionality, then, may vary from the content of the collective intentionality, even though the individual's intentionality is part of the collective. It takes two to tango and more than two to execute a pass play. As a step in developing a hierarchical taxonomy of social and institutional reality, I have already stipulated that any fact involving collective intentionality is a social fact. Thus, for example, hyenas hunting a lion and Congress passing legislation are both cases of social facts. Institutional facts, it will turn out, are a special subclass of social facts. Congress passing legislation is an institutional fact; hyenas hunting a lion is not.

The next step is the introduction of agentive functions of a collective sort. Given an apparatus that includes both collective intentionality and the intentional imposition of agentive functions on physical objects, it is no big step to combine the two. If it is easy to see how a single person might decide to use some object as a chair or a lever, then I believe it is not difficult to see how two or more people together could decide to use some object as a bench on which they can all sit or to use something as a lever to be oper ated by several people, rather than just one. Collective intentionality can generate agentive functions as easily as individual intentionality. 

The next step is more difficult because it involves the collective imposition of functions on objects where the function assigned to the object cannot be performed solely in virtue of the object's intrinsic physical features, as was the case for a log used as a bench, or a stick used as a lever. In this next type of case, the function is itself performed only as a matter of human cooperation. We will see in some detail that this step, the collective imposition of function, where the function can be performed only in virtue of collective agreement or acceptance, is a crucial element in the creation of institutional facts.

Consider for example a primitive tribe that initially builds a wall around its territory. The wall is an instance of a function imposed in virtue of sheer physics: the wall, we will suppose, is big enough to keep intruders out and the members of the tribe in. But suppose the wall gradually evolves from heing a physical barrier to being a symbolic barrier. Imagine that the wall gradually decays so that the only thing left is a line of stones. But imagine that the inhabitants and their neighbors continue to recognize the line of stones as marking the boundary of the territory in such a way that it affects their behavior. For example, the inhabitants only cross the boundary under special conditions, and outsiders can only cross into the territory if it is acceptable to the inhabitants. The line of stones now has a function that is not performed in virtue of sheer physics but in virtue of collective intentionality. Unlike a high wall or a moat, the wall remnant cannot keep people out simply because of its physical constitution. The result is, in a very primitive sense, symbolic; because a set of physical objects now performs the function of indicating something beyond itself, namely, the limits of the territory.* The line of stones performs the same function as a physical barrier but it does not do so in virtue of its physical construction, but because it has been collectively assigned a new status, the status of a boundary marker.

I would like this step to seem a most natural and innocent development, but it is momentous in its implications. Animals can impose functions on natural phenomena. Consider, for example, the primates that use a stick as a tool to get bananas that are out of reach. And some primates have even developed traditions of agentive functions that are transmitted from one generation to the next. Thus, most famously Imo, a Japanese macaque, used water to get the sand off her potatoes and eventually salt water both to get the sand off and to improve the flavor. Thanks to Imo, “today," writes Rummer, “potato-washing in salt water is an established tradition which infants learn from their mother as a natural adjunct of eating potatoes." Anthropology texts routinely remark on the human capacity for tool using. But the truly radical break with other forms of life comes when humans, through collective intentionality, impose functions on phenomena where the function cannot be achieved solely in virtue of physics and chemistry but requires continued human cooperation in the specific forms of recognition, acceptance, and acknowledgment of a new status to which a function is assigned. This is the beginning point of all institutional forms of human culture, and it must always have the structure X counts as Y in C, as we shall see later.

Our aim is to assimilate social reality to our basic ontology of physics, chemistry, and biology. To do this we need to show the continuous line that goes from molecules and mountains to screwdrivers, levers, and beautiful sunsets, and then to legislatures, money, and nation-states. The central span on the bridge from physics to society is collective intentionality, and the decisive movement on that bridge in the creation of social reality is the collective intentional imposition of function on entities that cannot perform those functions without that imposition. The radical movement that gets us from such simple social facts as that we are sitting on a bench together or having a fistfighl to such institutional facts as money, property, and marriage is the collective imposition of function on entities, which—unlike levers, benches, and cars—cannot perform the functions solely by virtue of their physical structure. In some cases, paper currency, for example, this is because the structure is only incidentally related to the function; in other cases, licensed drivers, for example, it is because we do not allow people to perform the function of driving unless they have been authorized.

The key element in the move from the collective imposition of function to the creation of institutional facts is the imposition of a collectively recognized status to which a function is attached. Since this is a special category of agentive functions, I will label these status functions. In the case of the boundary, we imagined a causally functioning physical object, a wall, evolving into a symbolic object, a boundary marker. The boundary is intended to function in the same way that the wall did, but the means by which it performs this function is the collective recognition of the stones as having a special status to which the function is attached. In the extreme case, the status function may be attached to an entity whose physical structure is only arbitrarily related to the performance of the function.

As an illustration, consider the case of money and especially the evolution of paper currency. Standard textbook accounts of money identify three kinds: commodity money, such as gold, is regarded as valuable, and hence as money because the commodity itself is regarded as valuable; contract money consists of bits of paper that are regarded as valuable because they are promissory notes to pay the bearer in valuable commodities such as gold; and fiat money consists of bits of paper that are declared to be valuable as money by some official agency such as a government or a central hank. So far, though, it is not clear what the relationship among these three is, or even what fact about all three makes it the case that they are all money. In the case of commodity money the stuff is a medium of exchange because it is valuable; in the case of liat money the stuff is valuable because it is a medium of exchange.

The logical relations among these three can be illustrated by the standard account of the evolution of paper currency in medieval Europe. I will assume this account is true, but it does not really matter much for our present purposes. I am using the account only to illustrate certain logical relations, which do not depend on its historical accuracy. Here is how it goes. The use of commodity money, such as gold and silver, is, in effect, a form of barter, because the form that the money takes is regarded as itself valuable. Thus the substance in question performs the function of money solely because of its physical nature, which will typically already have some function imposed on it. Thus, gold coins are valuable not because they are coins but because they are made of gold, and the value attached to the coin is exactly equal to the value attached to the gold in it. We impose the function of “value" on the substance gold because we desire to possess that kind of substance. Because the function of value has already been imposed on gold, it is easy to impose the function of money on top of the function of value. And that is just a fancy way of saying that because people already regard gold as valuable because of its physical nature, they are willing to accept it as a medium of exchange. We thus have a system of exchange where objects are held for the purposes of barter, even though the people holding those objects may have no interest in them or use for them, as such. A similar situation existed, by the way, in the former Soviet Union at the time of its collapse. In Moscow, in 1990 and 1991, packs of Marlboro cigarettes had attained the status of a kind of currency. People would accept payment in Marlboros, even though they did not themselves smoke. The combination of paper and tobacco already had an agentive function, named by the word "cigarette," and on top of that function was imposed the agentive function named by “medium of exchange."

The story told about medieval Europe is that bankers would accept gold and store it for safekeeping, and in return for the gold they issued paper certificates to the depositors of the gold. The certificates then could be used as a medium of exchange, just as the gold itself was. The certificate was a kind of substitute for the gold. It had complete credibility as an object of value, because at any point, it was exchangeable for gold. Commodity money had thus been replaced by contract money.

A stroke of genius occurred when somebody figured out that we can increase the supply of money simply by issuing more certificates than we have gold. As long as the certificates continue to function, as long as they have a collectively imposed function that continues to be collectively accepted, the certificates are, as they say, as good as gold. The next stroke of genius came when some body figured out—and it took a long time for people to figure this out—we can forget about the gold and just have the certificates. With this change we have arrived at fiat money, and that is the situation we are in today. On old Federal Reserve notes it said we could take the bill to the Treasury and they would "pay the bearer” the equivalent in "dollars.” But suppose we gave them a twenty dollar Federal Reserve note, what exactly would they give us? An other twenty dollar Federal Reserve note!

3. Constitutive Rules: X counts as Y in C

I think we can better understand what is going on in the evolution of money if we explore the relation of constitutive rules to the creation of institutional facts. I said that the form of the constitutive rule was “X counts as Y in C"; but as I am using this locution, that only determines a set of institutional facts and institutional objects where the Y term names something more than the sheer physical features of the object named by the X term. Furthermore, the “counts as" locution names a feature of the imposition of a status to which a function is attached by way of collective intentionality, where the status and its accompanying function go beyond the sheer brute physical functions that can be assigned to physical objects. So, for example, as I am using this formula, it would not be a statement of a constitutive rule to say “objects that are designed and used to be sat on by one person count as chairs,” because satisfying the X term is already sufficient for satisfying the Y term, just from the definition of the word “chair." The “rule" does not add anything but a label, so it is not a constitutive rule.

Furthermore, it does not express a constitutive rule to say "objects of a certain shape count as chairs," because the functions assigned can be assigned independently of any human agreement. If it has a certain kind of shape, we can use it as a chair regardless of what anyone else thinks. But when we say that such and such bits of paper count as money, we genuinely have a constitutive rule, because satisfying the X term, "such and such bits of paper," is not by itself sufficient for being money, nor does the X term specify causal features that would be sufficient to enable the stuff to function as money without human agreement.

So the application of the constitutive rule introduces the following features:

① The Y term has to assign a new status that the object does not already have just in virtue of satisfying the X term; and there has to be collective agreement, or at least acceptance, both in the imposition of that status on the stuff referred to by the X term and about the function that goes with that status.

② Furthermore, because the physical features specified by the X term are insufficient by themselves to guarantee the fulfillment of the assigned function specified by the Y term, the new status and its attendant functions have to be the sort of things that can be constituted by collective agreement or acceptance.

③ Also, because the physical features specified by the X term are in sufficient to guarantee success in fulfilling the assigned function, there must be continued collective acceptance or recognition of the validity of the assigned function; otherwise the function can not be successfully performed. It is not enough, for example, that we agree with the original assignment, “This stuff is money"; we must continue to accept it as money or it will become worth less.

Our sense that there is an element of magic, a conjuring trick, a sleight of hand in the creation of institutional facts out of brute facts derives from the nonphysical, noncausal character of the relation of the X and Y terms in the structure where we simply count X things as Y things. In our toughest metaphysical moods we want to ask “But is an X really a Y?" For example, are these hits of paper really money? Is this piece of land really somebody's private property? Is making certain noises in a ceremony really getting married? Even, is making noises through the mouth really making a statement or a promise? Surely when you get down to brass tacks, these are not real facts. We do not have this sense of giddiness where the agentive function is performed entirely in virtue of physical features. Thus, we do not have any metaphysical doubts about whether or not this is really a screwdriver, or this is really a car, because the sheer physical features of the objects in question enable them to function as screwdrivers or cars.

At this point I am simply describing the structure whereby in stitutional reality actually works in real human societies. Because this step is crucial for my argument, I will go through it slowly, using the example of U.S. paper money; and since I hope to be able to generalize certain features of the example, I will list its most salient general characteristics. Certain sorts of bits of paper are widely circulated in the United Slates. These pieces of paper satisfy certain conditions that constitute satisfying the X term. The pieces must have particular material ingredients, and they must match a certain set of patterns (five dollar bill, ten dollar bill, etc.) They must also bo issued by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing under the authority of the U.S. Treasury. Anything that satisfies these conditions (X term) counts as money, i.e., U.S. paper currency (Y term). But to describe these bits of paper with the Y term “money’’ does more than provide a shorthand label for the features of the X term; it describes a new status, and that status, viz. money, has a set of functions attached to it, e.g., medium of ex change, store of value, etc. In virtue of the constitutive rule, the paper counts as “legal tender for all debts public and private." And the imposition of this status function by the Y term has to be collectively recognized and accepted or the function will not be per formed.

Some of the most salient generalizable features of this example are as follows:

① First, collective intentionality assigns a new status to some phenomenon, where that status has an accompanying function that cannot be performed solely in virtue of the intrinsic physical features of the phenomenon in question. This assignment creates a new fact, an institutional fact, a new fact created by human agreement.

② Second, the form of the assignment of the new status function can be represented by the formula “X counts as Y in C." This formula gives us a powerful tool for understanding the form of the creation of the new institutional fact, because the form of the collective intentionality is to impose that status and its function, specified by the Y term, on some phenomenon named by the X term. The “counts as" locution is crucial in this formula because since the function in question cannot be performed solely in virtue of the physical features of the X element, it requires our agreement or acceptance that it be performed. Thus, we agree to count the object named by the X term as having the status and function specified by the Y term. The sorts of functions and statuses that can be assigned by the Y term, therefore, are seriously limited by the possibilities of having functions where the performance of the function contains an element that can be guaranteed simply by collective agreement or acceptance. This is, perhaps, the most mysterious feature of institutional facts, and I will have a good deal to say about it later.

③ Third, the process of the creation of institutional facts may proceed without the participants being conscious that it is happening according to this form. The evolution may be such that the participants think, e.g., "I can exchange this for gold," “This is valuable," or even simply “This is money." They need not think, “We are collectively imposing a value on something that we do not regard as valuable because of its purely physical features," even though that is exactly what they are doing. There are two points about the relation of this process to consciousness. First, obviously, for most institutions we simply grow up in a culture where we take the institution for granted. We need not be consciously aware of its ontology. But second, and more to the point here, in the very evolution of the institution the participants need not be consciously aware of the form of the collective intentionality by which they are imposing functions on objects. In the course of consciously buying, selling, exchanging, etc., they may simply evolve institutional facts. Furthermore, in extreme cases they may accept the imposition of function only because of some related theory, which may not even be true. They may believe that it is money only if it is “backed by gold" or that it is a marriage only if it is sanctified by God or that so and so is the king only because he is divinely authorized. Throughout the history of the United States, literally millions of Americans have thought that the Constitution was divinely inspired. As long as people continue to recognize the X as having the Y status function, the institutional fact is created and maintained. They do not in addition have to recognize that they are so recognizing, and they may hold all sorts of other false beliefs about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

④ Fourth, where the imposition of status function according to the formula becomes a matter of general policy, the formula acquires a normative status. It becomes a constitutive rule. This is shown by the fact that the general rule creates the possibility of abuses that could not exist without the rule, such as

counterfeit money (objects are designed to look as if they satisfy the X term, when they do not)
hyperinflation (too much money is issued, so that the objects satisfying the X term can no longer perform the function specified by the Y term).

The possibility of such forms of abuse is characteristic of institutional facts.

Thus, for example, the fact that attorneys have to be certified creates the possibility that those who are not certified can pretend that they are and thus pretend that they are attorneys. They are, so to speak, “counterfeit" attorneys. But even a person qualified as an attorney can abuse the position and so fail to perform the functions properly (malpractice). An other illustration is provided by the decay of the institution of knighthood during the Middle Ages. At first knights were required to be competent warriors, in charge of many men and owning a lot of horses, etc. When decay set in, many people who did not meet the criteria (X term) for becoming knights asked the king to make them knights (Y term) anyway. Though they didn’t pass the tests, they, for example, insisted that because they came from such a good family, the requirements should be waived in their case. Furthermore, many people who did rightfully acquire the status of knight became unable to carry out the functions of knighthood. They no longer had the required number of horses, or the re quired sort of armor, or they were not in the physical condition necessary to carry out the tasks of knighthood.

Where money is concerned cultures vary with their emphasis on the X or the Y aspect. United States currency is explicit on the Y aspect. It says, “This note is legal tender for all debts public anti private," but it says nothing about counterfeiting. French currency, on the other hand, contains a long statement about the X aspect, specifically about the illegality of and punishment for counterfeiting.* Italian currency makes the same X aspect point, but more succinctly.

⑤ Fifth, the relation of rule and convention, at least in this case, is reasonably clear. That objects can function as a medium of exchange is not a matter of convention but of rule. But which objects perform this function is a matter of convention. Analogously, in chess, the powers of the king are not a matter of convention but of rule. But which shape to impose those powers on is a matter of convention. Because in these cases the conditions laid down by the X term are only incidentally related to the function specified by the Y term, the selection of the X term is more or less arbitrary; and the resulting policy as to which types of things shall be used as, e.g., money or a king in chess, is a matter of convention. As we will see in later examples, often the features necessary for the applicability of the X term are essential to the performance of the Y term. Thus, for example, when it comes to being a certified surgeon, the authorization to perform surgery (Y term) has to be based on meeting certain medical criteria (X term). Nonetheless, even in these cases, there is an addition marked by the Y term that is not already present in the X term. The person in question now has the status, e.g., of certified surgeon.

It might seem that there are obvious counterexamples to the claim that the features of the X term are insufficient to guarantee the function named by the Y term. For example, when the president or a state governor declares an earthquake or a major fire to be a “disaster," surely, one might say, the brute facts about the earthquake or fire are sufficient to qualify them as disasters in virtue of their physical features. There is nothing conventional about being an earthquake or a holocaust. But if one looks closely at these cases, even they illustrate the point. The function of a declared disaster is that the local victims qualify for such things as financial aid and low-interest loans, whereas fires and earthquakes by themselves do not generate money in virtue of their brute physical features and consequences.

A similar point can be made about the criminal law. The whole point of the criminal law is regulative, not constitutive. The point is to forbid, for example, certain antecedently existing forms of behavior such as killing. But to make the regulations work, there must be sanctions, and that requires the imposition of a new status on the person who violates the law. Thus the person who kills another (X term), under certain circumstances (C term), and is found guilty of so doing is now assigned the status of “convicted murderer” (Y term, and hence, institutional fact); and with that new status come the appropriate punishments. Thus the regulative “Thou shalt not kill” generates the appropriate constitutive "Killing, under certain circumstances, counts as murder, and murder counts as a crime punishable by death or imprisonment.

In many cases the X term is chosen precisely because it is supposed to have the features necessary to perform the function specified by the Y term. Thus, for example, each of the expressions “attorney," “physician," "president," and “cathedral" names a status with a function imposed on entities—graduates of law school or medical school, winners of certain sorts of elections, and large buildings capable of accommodating big church services and acting as the seat of a bishopric—precisely because they are supposed to be able to perform the Y functions implied by the status labels “attorney,” "physician," “president," or “cathedral." But even in these cases, something is added by the Y term. The features specified by the X term are not themselves enough to guarantee the additional status and function specified by the Y term. The difference between attorneys and screwdrivers, for example, is that the screwdriver just has the sheer physical structure to enable it to perform its function, but for the law school graduate to be an attorney, an additional authorization or certification is required to confer the status of attorney. Collective agreement about the possession of the status is constitutive of having the status, and having the status is essential to the performance of the function assigned to that status.

An interesting class of cases are those where the entity in question has both a causal agentive function and correlated status-function. Consider, for example, the actual fence on portions of the border between Mexico and the United States. It is supposed to function causally as a physical barrier to crossing the border. But it is also supposed to mark a national boundary, something one is not supposed to cross unless authorized. Even in this case the status-function is in addition to the physical function, even though they both have the same ultimate objective. 

The point is that the Y term must assign some new status that the entities named by the X term do not already have, and this new status must be such that human agreement, acceptance, and other forms of collective intentionality are necessary and sufficient to create it. Now, you might think, that is not much of an apparatus to work with, but in fact, as we will see in detail, the mechanism is a powerful engine in the generation of social reality.

⑥ Sixth, finally there is a special relation between the imposition of these status-functions and language. The labels that are a part of the Y expression, such as the label “money," are now partly constitutive of the fact created. Odd as it may sound, in the creation of money, the linguistically expressed concepts, such as “money," are now parts of the very facts we have created. I will explore this feature in the next chapter.

 

4. Why Self-Referent iality Does not Result in Circularity

In my list of six apparent features of social reality that needed explanation, the first was a puzzle about how we can define "money," if part of the definition is "being thought of, or regarded as, or believed to be money. I asked: does this not lead to a circularity or infinite regress in any attempt to define the word, or even to give an explanation of the concept of money? But the resolution of the paradox is quite simple. The word “money" marks one node in a whole network of practices, the practices of owning, buying, selling, earning, paying for services, paying off debts, etc. As long as the object is regarded as having that role in the practices, we do not actually need the word “money" in the definition of money, so there is no circularity or infinite regress. The word "money” functions as a placeholder for the linguistic articulation of all these practices. To believe that something is money, one does not actually need the word “money." It is sufficient that one believes that the entities in question are media of exchange, repositories of value, payment for debts, salaries for services rendered, etc. And what goes for money goes for other institutional notions such as marriage, property, and speech acts such as promising, stating, ordering, etc. In short, the fact that a set of attitudes is partly constitutive of the truth conditions of a certain concept, and the fact that those attitudes would normally be summarized by using that very concept (e.g., thinking that something is money, thinking that those people are married), does not have the consequence that the word expressing that concept cannot be defined without circularity or infinite regress.

Although we do not need the concept “money" to define “money," and thus we avoid an immediate circularity, to explain the concept we do need other institutional concepts such as “buying," “selling," and “owing," and thus we avoided the vicious circularity only by expanding the circle by including other institutional concepts. We are not trying to reduce the concept “money” to noninstitulional concepts.

I mentioned that there is a distinction between the self-referentiaiity of the concept as applied to types and as applied to tokens. Where money is concerned a particular token could be money even if no one thought it was money, but where cocktail parties are concerned if no one thinks of a particular event that it is a cocktail party, it is not a cocktail party. I think the reason we treat cocktail parties differently from money in this regard has to do with codification. In general, if the institution in question is codified in an “official” form, such as in the laws concerning money, then the self-referentiality in question is a feature of the type. If it is informal, uncodified, then the self-referentiality applies to each token. Codification specifies the features a token must have in order to be an instance of the type. Hence a token may have those features even if no one thinks about it, but the type is still defined in this self-referential way.

The self-referentiality we have been discussing is an immediate consequence of the nature of agentive functions. It is not peculiar to institutional facts. So, for example, in order that something be a chair, it has to function as a chair, and hence, it has to be thought of or used as a chair. Chairs are not abstract or symbolic in the way that money and property are, but the point is the same in both cases. Where agentive functional concepts are concerned, part of satisfying a description is being thought to satisfy that description. This does not lead to circularity or infinite regress for the reason just stated: We can cash out the description in terms of the set of practices in which the phenomenon is embedded. Chairs are for sitting in, money is to buy things with, tools are for manipulating objects in various ways, etc.*

 

5. The Use of Performative Utterances in ihe Creation of Institutional Facts

The second apparent feature we need to explain concerns the role of performative utterances in the creation of many, though not all, institutional facts. The explanation is provided by the structure of constitutive rules. In general, where the X term is a speech act, the constitutive rule will enable the speech act to be performed as a performative declaration creating the state of affairs described by the Y term. Because saying certain things counts as entering into a contract or adjourning a meeting, you can perform those acts by saying you are performing them. If you are the chairman, then saying in appropriate circumstances “The meeting is adjourned” will make it the case that the meeting is adjourned. Saying, in appropriate circumstances, “I appoint you chairman" will make it the case that you are chairman. The same words said by the wrong person or in the wrong circumstances will have no such effect. Because the constitutive rule enables the function to be imposed on a speech act, then just performing that speech act in appropriate circumstances can constitute the imposition of that function, and thus will constitute a new institutional fact.

It is said that in Moslem countries a man can divorce his wife by simply saying “I divorce you" three limes while throwing three white pebbles. This is clearly a performative use of the verb “divorce," which does not exist in other countries. Those who think that meaning is use would have to conclude that the word “divorce" has a different meaning for Moslems than it does for others. But that is not the case. What has happened is that a new status-function has been imposed on an existing sentence form. The sentence form “I divorce you" does not change its meaning when a new status-function is added; rather, it is now simply used in the creation of a new institutional fact, namely, the particular divorce, in virtue of a new constitutive rule according to which the husband's saying “I divorce you" three times with the appropriate throwing gestures counts as divorcing his wife. Thus the performative utterance creates a new institutional fact, the divorce.

Even the statement on the twenty dollar bill, though it contains no performative verbs, is a declaration. It says, “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” But that utterance is not an empirical claim. It will not do, for example, to ask the Treasury, “How do you know it is legal tender?" or “What’s the evidence?" When the Treasury says it is legal tender, they are declaring it to be legal tender, not announcing an empirical fact that it already is legal tender.

The possibility of creating institutional facts by declaration does not hold for every institutional fact. You cannot, for example, make a touchdown just by saying you are making it.

To summarize this point: performatives play a special role in the creation of institutional facts, because the status-function marked by the Y term in the formula “X counts as Y" can often, though not always, be imposed simply by declaring it to be imposed. This is especially true where the X term is itself a speech act.

 

6. The Logical Priority of Brute Facts over Institutional Facts

The third apparent feature we need to explain concerns the priority of brute facts over institutional facts. As with feature two, this is explained by the structure of constitutive rules. The structure of institutional facts is the structure of hierarchies of the form “X counts as Y in context C." That hierarchy has to bottom out in phenomena whose existence is not a matter of human agreement. This is just another way of saying that where there is a status-function imposed on something, there has to be something it is im posed on. If it is imposed on another status-function, eventually one has to reach a rock bottom of something that is not itself any form of status-function. So, for example, as I said earlier, all sorts of things can be money, but there has to be some physical realization, some brute fact—even if it is only a bit of paper or a blip on a computer disk—on which we can impose our institutional form of status function. Thus there are no institutional facts without brute facts.

This discussion anticipates a discussion of realism I will present in Chapters 7 and 8. It could not be the case, as some antirealists have maintained, that all facts are institutional facts, that there are no brute facts, because the analysis of the structure of institutional facts reveals that they are logically dependent on brute facts. To suppose that all facts are institutional would produce an infinite regress or circularity in the account of institutional facts. In order that some facts be institutional, there must he some other facts that are brute. This is a consequence of the logical structure of institutional facts.

 

7. Systematic Relations and the Primacy of the Act over the Object

Our fourth question was, Why are there always certain sorts of systematic relations among institutional facts? And the fifth was, Why do institutional acts seem prior to institutional objects?

The most obvious reason why there are systematic relationships among the various sorts of social facts of the type that I tried to describe is that the facts in question are designed for precisely that purpose. Governments are designed to impact on our lives in all sorts of ways; money is designed to provide a unit of value in all kinds of transactions. Even games, which are explicitly designed to be insulated from the rest of our lives, nonetheless employ an apparatus—of rights, obligations, responsibilities, etc.—that, as I remarked earlier, is intelligible only given all sorts of other social facts.

The explanation for the apparent primacy of social acts over social objects is that the “objects" are really designed to serve agentive functions, and have little interest for us otherwise. What we think of as social objects, such as governments, money, and universities, are in fact just placeholders for patterns of activities. I hope it is clear that the whole operation of agentive functions and collective intentionality is a matter of ongoing activities and the creation of the possibility of more ongoing activities.

Unconsciously, we have throughout this discussion been acknowledging this point by our talk of institutional facts rather than institutional objects. Such material objects as are involved in institutional reality, e.g., bits of paper, are objects like any others, but the imposition of status-functions on these objects creates a level of description of the object where it is an institutional object, e.g., a twenty dollar bill. The object is no different; rather, a new status with an accompanying function has been assigned to an old object (or a new object has been created solely for the purpose of serving the new status-function), but that function is manifested only in actual transactions; hence, our interest is not in the object but in the processes and events where the functions are manifested.

The priority of process over product also explains why, as several social theorists have pointed out, institutions are not worn out by continued use, but each use of the institution is in a sense a renewal of that institution. Cars and shirts wear out as we use them but constant use renews and strengthens institutions such as marriage, property, and universities. The account I have given explains this fact: since the function is imposed on a phenomenon that does not perform that function solely in virtue of its physical construction, but in terms of the continued collective intentionality of the users, each use of the institution is a renewed expression of the commitment of the users to the institution. Individual dollar bills wear out. But the institution of paper currency is reinforced by its continual use.

The sixth and final feature we need to explain concerns the role of language in institutional reality, and to that topic I devote the next chapter.