A procedural social rule model of organized institutions

Abstract

This chapter presents a model of the rule-guided infrastructure of human organized institutions. Building on the shared policy model of social rules, it characterizes an institutional web of social procedural rules. It does this by appeal to a sufficiently rich web of social procedural rules that interlock and to a significant extent require consistency of outputs. It then explains when outputs from rules in that web are institutional outputs. This involves appeal to an output-consistency condition, a functional role condition, and a limit on certain kinds of cognitive divergence. This provides a model of two forms of institutional valuing. And it supports a separation of institutional action-focused output and corresponding shared intention. These ideas are compared to ideas from John Searle about collective acceptance, institutional roles, status functions, and counting as.