Abstract
Nowadays, it is widely recognized that constitutive rules play a key role in social ontology. They are considered the primary source of meaning for every rule-based activity. But what can ensure the persistence of such activities? The most common proposed solution is to rely on social acceptance, and even though this is certainly part of the story, it is nonetheless not sufficient to explain what happens in breakdown situations. We need to embed into the system something that would preserve it from destruction. Our claim is that for this purpose, an arbitral function is needed. Intuitively, an arbitral function is a mechanism which is—at least partially—extra-contextual, and it is introduced to solve possible or actual impasses. This function may equally well be played by an intentional agent (like a referee in a football game) or by an extra-contextual rule (as the 50-move rule in chess). Our contribution aims to introduce the novel concept of arbitral function and show that it is widespread in institutional reality and it is essential in every institution. Finally, if constitutive rules determine that a certain activity counts as a valid element of an institution, then arbitral functions ensure that this activity persists by preventing impasses.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Probably such a match would not be considered valid according to the criteria of most national federations, but it is still a football match under many respects, differently from a match where the players use their hands.
- 2.
In the past, some variants of the game used to assign the victory to the player who had caused the stalemate, some the other way round (see Murray 1913).
- 3.
Logically, this is expressed by the formula R if P and Q, where we cannot have P and Q true and R false at the same time.
- 4.
It is interesting to notice that not all instances of discursive dilemma can be solved with the conclusion-based procedure, as it is in the present case, which does not allow to then decide on the premises (having decided to increase the taxes does not suggest anything on what to do then with the various expenses). This means that the criterion to choose between premise-based and conclusion-based procedures is strictly dependent on the particular dilemma for which the agents are voting.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
We cannot avoid to notice that the goal of Lewis’ research is language and thus meaning, but in his case it moves from a regulative dimension. This leads us to think that there is a point where regulative and constitutive dimensions could meet, even though the route to the singling out of that point seems still to have to be explored in social ontology; in this regard, see Marmor (2007).
References
Aumann, Robert. 1974. Subjectivity and correlation in randomized strategies. Journal of Mathematical Economics 1: 67–96.
Boella, Guido, and Leendert van der Torre. 2004. Organizations as socially constructed agents in the agent oriented paradigm. In Proceedings of ESAW 2004, 1–13, Berlin: Springer.
Bottazzi, Emanuele, and Roberta Ferrario. 2009. Preliminaries to a DOLCE ontology of organizations. International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management 4: 225–238.
Bottazzi, Emanuele, Carola Catenacci, Aldo Gangemi, and Jos Lehmann. 2006. From collective intentionality to intentional collectives: An ontological perspective. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research 7: 192–208.
Bottazzi, Emanuele, Roberta Ferrario, Claudio Masolo, and Robert Trypuz. 2007. Designing organizations: Towards a model. In Normative multi-agent systems, Dagstuhl seminar proceedings, ed. Guido Boella, Leon van der Torre, and Harko Verhagen, 237–244. Dagstuhl: IBFI.
Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Dignum, Virginia. 2004. A model for organizational interaction: Based on agents, founded in logic. PhD thesis, Universiteit Utrecht.
Fox, Mark S., Mihai Barbuceanu, Michael Gruninger, and Jinxin Lin. 1998. An organisation ontology for enterprise modelling. In Simulating organizations: Computational models of institutions and groups, ed. K. Carley and L. Gasser, 131–152. Menlo Park: AAAI/MIT Press.
French, Peter A. 1979. The corporation as a moral person. American Philosophical Quarterly 16: 207–215.
French, Peter A. 1984. Collective and corporate responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press.
Giret, Adriana, and Vicente Botti. 2004. Towards an abstract recursive agent. Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering 11: 165–177.
Giunchiglia, Fausto, and Chiara Ghidini. 2001. Local models semantics, or contextual reasoning = locality + compatibility. Artificial Intelligence 127: 221–259.
Hart, Herbert. 1994. The concept of law. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ladd, John. 1970. Morality and the ideal of rationality in formal organizations. The Monist 54: 488–516.
Lewis, David. 1969. Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
List, Christian, and Philip Pettit. 2002. Aggregating sets of judgements: An impossibility result. Economics and Philosophy 18: 89–110.
List, Christian, and Philip Pettit. 2004. Aggregating sets of judgements: Two results compared. Syntheses 140: 207–235.
List, Christian, and Philip Pettit. 2005. On the many as one. Philosophy and Public Affairs 33: 377–390.
Marmor, Andrei. 2006. How law is like chess. Legal Theory 12: 347–371.
Marmor, Andrei. 2007. Deep conventions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74(3): 586–609.
Masolo, Claudio, Laure Vieu, Emanuele Bottazzi, Carola Catenacci, Roberta Ferrario, Aldo Gangemi and Nicola Guarino. 2004. Social roles and their descriptions. In International conference on the principles of knowledge representation and reasoning, ed. Didier Dubois, Christopher Welty and Mary-Anne Williams, 267–277. Whistler: AAAI Press.
Masolo, Claudio, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Laure Vieu, Emanuele Bottazzi, and Roberta Ferrario. 2005. Relational roles and qua-individuals. In AAAI fall symposium on roles, an interdisciplinary perspective, ed. Guido Boella, James Odell, Leendert van der Torre, and Harko Verhagen, 103–112. Hyatt Crystal City: AAAI Press.
McCarthy, John. 1993. Notes on formalizing contexts. In IJCAI 13, 555–560, Chambery.
Miller, Seumas. 2011. Social institutions. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/social-institutions/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2012.
Murray, Harold. 1913. A history of chess. London: Oxford University Press.
Pacheco, Olga, and José Carmo. 2003. A role based model for the normative specification of organized collective agency and agents interaction. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 6: 145–184.
Perry, John. 1986. From worlds to situations. Journal of Philosophical Logic 15: 305–329.
Pettit, Philip. 2001a. A theory of freedom: From the psychology to the politics of agency. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pettit, Philip. 2001b. Deliberative democracy and the discursive dilemma. Philosophical Issues 11: 268–299.
Pettit, Philip. 2008. Made with words. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pigozzi, Gabriella. 2006. Belief merging and the discursive dilemma: An argument-based account to paradoxes of judgment aggregation. Synthese 152: 285–298.
Recanati, Francois. 2001. On what is said. Synthese 128: 75–91.
Scott, Richard. 2001. Institutions and organizations, ed. Nikolaos Psarros, Katinka. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Searle, John R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press.
Smith, Barry. 2007. The foundations of social coordination. In Facets of sociality, ed. Nikolaos Psarros, and Katinka Shulte-Ostermann. Frankfurt-Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag.
Smith, Barry, and Leo Zaibert. 2007. The varieties of normativity: An essay on social ontology. In Intentional acts and institutional facts: Essays on John Searle’s social ontology, ed. Savas L. Tsohatzidis. Dordrecht: Springer.
Tuomela, Raimo. 1995. The importance of us: A philosophical study of basic social notions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Tuomela, Raimo. 2002. The philosophy of social practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van der Torre, Leendert, Joris Hulstijn, Mehdi Dastani and Jan Broersen. 2004. Specifying multiagent organizations. In Deontic logic, 7th international workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, DEON 2004, ed. Alessio Lomuscio and Donald Nute, 243–257. Madeira: LNCS Springer.
Wight, Colin. 2006. Agents, structures, and international relations: Politics as ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bottazzi, E., Ferrario, R. (2013). Arbitral Functions and Constitutive Rules. In: Schmitz, M., Kobow, B., Schmid, H. (eds) The Background of Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5599-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5600-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)