Six Heresies on Constitutive Rules

The concept of “constitutive rule” is inextricably linked with the philosophy of John R. Searle and with the field of study that we now call “social ontology”, a domain that owes much to Searle’s work. The debate on constitutive rules that resulted from those ideas has been up to this day lively and full of results. It is less known, however, that starting from the ‘70s, and only partially linked with Searle’s work, a discussion on constitutive rules emerged in Italian legal philosophy that reached a level of complexity and depth hardly matched in the rest of the world. I would like this paper to act as a bridge between these two important discussions: the socio- ontological one and the one drawn from Italian legal philosophy. In particular, I will criticize some of the main tenets of the Italian legal- philosophical discussion on constitutive rules by arguing six theses that, within that community of scholars, can be perceived as “heretic”. But, in explaining why these theses are heretic when judged from an Italian perspective, I will consider the socio-ontological perspective, thus trying to draw a picture of the differences and overlaps between those two perspectives about constitutive rules.