Abstract
The opposition between nature and culture has always been paradigmatic in the philosophy of society, and in this sense it is certainly striking that, in contemporary theories of collective acceptance in social ontology—theories which actually entail the presence of individual mental content in the form of (at least dispositional) beliefs—the shaping role of culture has not found significant recognition. However, it cannot but be trivially true that cultural presuppositions play a role in the maintenance and development of beliefs on rules and other kinds of abstract artifacts. But once we recognize that the reality of social institutions is at least culturally-dependent, the question emerges whether there is still room for nature as a possible determinant of social reality. Many authors maintain that there is and argue that there are objective natural features shared by human beings which are necessary conditions to explain the emergence of institutional structures within society. This is a culture-independent relation between nature and social institutions. In this paper, however, I will try to argue that there is another, very peculiar, way in which nature can work as a possible determinant of social reality, a way which is instead culture-dependent. In particular, I will give three examples of this kind of culture-dependent relations—examples about states, corporations, and contracts—and I will introduce a new concept to account for it, that of “institutional mimesis.” I will then provide an explanation of how institutional mimesis can have an impact on the content of collective acceptance by appealing to two influential theories in contemporary cognitive psychology (those regarding conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending). Finally, I will explain the ontological significance of institutional mimesis using Ian Hacking’s concept of historical ontology.
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Notes
In Making the Social World, of 2010, Searle has explicitly distinguished between institutional facts without institutions—and so without constitutive rules (or “standing declarations,” in his new terminology)—and institutional facts that require constitutive rules (see Searle 2010, 93ff.). In this paper, I will confine myself to discussing this latter kind.
It must be noted here that, in Searle’s view, though collective acceptance is a form of collective intentionality, it is much weaker than the kind of collective intentionality which entails active cooperation: see in this regard Searle (2010, 56ff).
Here I set Philip Pettit’s theory aside, because this theory does not assume that the relevant mental states actually occur in the minds of individuals and rather ascribes collective mental states by assuming collective agents with definite features (see for example Pettit 2001).
Another criticism of collective acceptance theories can be found in Roversi 2012.
The idea of meta-institutional concepts as distinguished from that of institutional concepts constituted through rules can be traced to Miller (1981). Basically, in Miller’s view, meta-institutional concepts are not constituted by sets of constitutive rules, but rather form the conceptual background against which those rules constitute institutional concepts. As Miller notes, for example, the essential rule of a promise in Searle’s view (“Uttering a promise counts as undertaking an obligation”) does not constitute the concept of obligation but rather that of promise, and it does so in terms of the meta-institutional, already meaningful concept of obligation. This idea will shortly reveal itself to be very relevant: In fact my assumption is that, just like promises, law also has its own set of meta-institutional concepts, among which duty, rights, power, validity.
Again, I am not considering here Searle’s “Type 1” institutions, namely, “the creation of an institutional fact without an institution” (Searle 2010, 94). Moreover, by including element Z among constitutive rules, I am incorporating Frank A. Hindriks’s critique concerning practical import in Searle’s theory, thus basically accepting Hindriks’s “XYZ conception of constitutive rules” (see, for example, Hindriks 2005, 129–132). Hence, I assume that Searle’s and Hindriks’s theories are consistent.
I am thankful to two anonymous referees of this journal for raising these objections, which have been very helpful in clarifying the scope of the argument developed in this paper.
It could similarly be argued, for example, that what ultimately lies at the root of all wars is an innate human disposition toward conflict, all the while conceding that if we are to explain the contingent causes and features of any specific war, we will need to look to historical studies.
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Roversi, C. How Social Institutions Can Imitate Nature. Topoi 35, 327–338 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9300-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9300-0