Acceptance Is Not Enough, but Texts Alone Achieve Nothing: A Critique of Two Conceptions on Institutional Ontology

In this paper I first examined the mainstream conception of institutional ontology developed in social ontology: the so-called collective-acceptance view. I argued that this view, if framed as a conception about an institution’s constitutive rules, has several defects on conceptual grounds as well as on phenomenological ones. Specifically, the view cannot explain how institutions can exist to some extent independently of a community’s practices and beliefs, or how institutions can have an objective existence, considering that they very often define the limits of the relevant institutional communities, thus enjoying a degree of independence from those communities. As an alternative to the mainstream view (collective acceptance), we considered another social-ontological view of institutional ontology, a view that seeks to explain the objectivity of institutions by appealing to texts. But I have argued that this alternative view (a form of textualism) cannot explain how texts need to be recognized if they are give rise to institutional reality, or what kind of interaction between texts and humans we should suppose to hold in the institutional domain. Hence, the two views here examined suffer from complementary defects. The first fails to explain the degree of objectivity that institutions in fact have in the social context. The second fails to explain in any specific way how the objectivity of institutions can be squared with the fact that institutions require recognition in order to work. The question, therefore, is whether an alternative view can be offered which can solve these problems in a coherent and simple way.