Conceptualizing institutions

Corrado Roversi

pp. 201-215

in: Alessandro Salice, Luca Tummolini (eds), Social facts, Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 13 (1), 2014.

Abstract

Being part of the life of institutions requires a considerable amount of conceptual knowledge. In institutional settings, we must learn the relevant concepts to act meaningfully, and these concepts are internal in a peculiar way, namely, they are strictly relative to the rules of a given institution because they are constituted by those rules. However, institutions do not come out of nothing: They are inscribed in a social setting and this setting determines, at least in a broad sense, what is the nature of the institution. Our social life therefore creates more or less defined contexts for meaningful institutional activities, and these contexts in their own turn involve concepts. In this paper, I address this question by distinguishing between three kinds of concepts relevant for an institution and trying to identify the different relations that these concepts have with constitutive rules. I then proceed to explain how this distinction can improve our understanding of practical reasoning in institutional context.