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Foundations of Institutional Reality
Foundations of
Institutional Reality
ANDREI MARMOR
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–765734–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657348.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To my daughters Galia and Noga
Contents
Preface ix
1. Institutional Facts 1
2. Grounding and Reduction 23
3. Grounding Social Rules 40
4. Constitution by Rules 62
5. Artifacts and the Limits of Error 84
6. Rationalizing Practices 105
7. Power-Structuring Rules 129
Bibliography 151
Index 157
Preface
Hardly any aspect of our daily lives is not enabled, structured, or regulated
by social practices and institutions. Most people work in some institution or
organization, like a university, law firm, bank, retail store, factory, or some
other corporate entity; many of our recreational activities involve partici-
pation in social practices, such as playing games, engaging with sports, or
enjoying arts of various kinds. We routinely use money, credit, and other in-
stitutional means of exchange, and our savings are invested in some financial
institution or other. Many people participate in various forms of religious
practices, often involving membership in some religious organization. We
follow numerous conventional practices of etiquette and manners in dealing
with acquaintances and strangers. And then, in the background of all of this,
and in some sense, on top of it all, we have laws regulating our lives, deter-
mining ways in which we can relate to each other in myriad ways. Take pro-
perty, for example: laws determine what counts as mine and what does not,
what it practically means for something to be mine and not yours, how I can
use something that is not mine or condition others’ use of something I own,
and so on and so forth. And there is a lot to this “so on and so forth”: laws reg-
ulate almost every aspect of our lives, private and public.
The institutional aspects of our world thoroughly shape our lives, and
structure the environments in which we conduct most of our daily routines.
A substantial part of the world in which we live in is a world that we, humans,
collectively somehow, created ourselves. It is this collective social aspect of
reality or, at least, certain basic elements of it, that I want to explore in this
book, from a metaphysical perspective. I want to examine the foundations
of our institutional reality, ways in which we can build it up, as it were, from
relatively more simple building blocks. The construction metaphor, shared
by many philosophers who write on these issues, is not accidental, of course.
It suggests that the philosophical project envisioned is one of grounding
or reduction. The idea is that the central aspects of institutional reality—in
particular what it is for a social practice or an institution to exist—can be
accounted for by way of reducing them to more foundational elements, such
as patterns of conduct, attitudes and dispositions, functions, motivating
x Preface
reasons, and products of human agency. Therefore, part of the project here is
to identify what elements are more foundational than others, how to unpack
this building or construction metaphor, and show the explanatory payoff we
get from all this.
The objective of the book is twofold: to provide a novel account of the on-
tological foundations of institutional facts, and to show that some impor-
tant epistemic and methodological implications follow from this ontology.
The first part of the book offers a detailed reductive account of institutional
facts by way of metaphysical grounding. It shows that an ontology of insti-
tutional facts requires an ontology of social rules, and the latter depends
on a reductive account of collective attitudes that determine the content of
rules. A grounding-reductive account of collective attitudes that comports
with methodological individualism is developed in Chapter 3. The constitu-
tive grounding relation between rules and practices, analyzed in Chapter 4,
is given by a functional explanation, challenging John Searle’s influential dis-
tinction between constitutive and regulative rules; rules are constitutive of
practices when they function in certain ways.
The second part of the book aims to show that a number of important ep-
istemic and methodological conclusions follow from the ontology of institu-
tional facts. First, I demonstrate that certain types of widespread errors about
the socially constructed aspects of reality are not metaphysically possible. The
functionalist account of artifacts articulated in Chapter 5 is an essential step
in developing this argument, demonstrating its upshot and delineating its
limits. The second main methodological conclusion, explored in Chapter 6,
is that a metaphysical account of institutional reality does not have to provide
an explanation of the relevant social practices in terms that would ration-
alize the practice for the participants themselves. Thus, together, Chapters 5
and 6 purport to highlight the epistemic and methodological conclusions
that follow from the grounding argument presented in Chapters 1–4. Finally,
Chapter 7 circles back to the idea of hierarchical practices, introduced in
Chapter 1, arguing that basic social power-structuring rules function to
transform brute power into an elaborate normative framework, constituting
authoritative institutions that are central to our institutional reality.
The philosophical foundations laid out in H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of
Law and Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality inspire much of this book.
Hart’s work on the foundational role of social rules, and Searle’s more ambi-
tious project of constructing the basic elements of institutional facts from
collective attitudes, functions, and constitutive rules, I take to be important
Preface xi
philosophical insights in the right direction. My main purpose here is to

contribute some corrections and modifications to these projects, and add a
few more steps to the argument, thereby offering a more complete picture
of the metaphysical foundations of our institutional world. Helping me in
this endeavor are recent works in metaphysics about grounding, collective
intentions, and the nature of artifacts. I aim to show that we can use some
developments in metaphysics to shed new light on old ideas and, I hope, de-
velop them further.
Throughout the book I use the law as one of the main examples of a so-
cial institution (alongside natural language and art). Why give prominence
to law? First, law is undoubtedly the most complex, sophisticated, and struc-
tured social institution human cultures have created. This makes law a chal-
lenging example, but theoretically rewarding for that. Furthermore, over the
last century or so, law has attracted a great deal of philosophical attention in
the analytical tradition, much more so than other social institutions (with
the exception of language, of course, but I will dwell on language as well).
The result is that we can rely on a rich philosophical literature that aims to ex-
plain what the law is and what it would take to explain the nature of law and
its constitutive elements. Not that there is a great deal of agreement on any of
these issues; controversies abound, but at least we have a good roadmap of
the questions in play and the relevant aspects of law that are philosophically
puzzling.
Finally, the lack of metaphysical clarity in philosophy of law is itself a
reason for working with law as a central example. Almost every essay about
the nature of law attests to the fact that metaphysical issues are lurking in
the background, but most of the metaphysical concepts deployed in these
debates remain unaccounted for. Legal philosophers often mention such
concepts as social facts, social practices, social rules, and institutional facts.
Yet none of these concepts gets explained in any detail. The fact that legal phi-
losophy lacks an adequate metaphysics to back up the various positions in
dispute makes the legal example even more rewarding to work with.
Since this book is rather short, it does not warrant a long introduction.
Chapter 1 introduces some of the main questions and challenges that will be
addressed in the rest of the book, and outlines the roadmap for the subse-
quent chapters. What I would like to mention here, however, are a few points
connecting this work to some of my previous work on social conventions
and philosophy of law. When you write a new book on something that is
closely related to other books and articles you had written before, you cannot
xii Preface
simply expect your readers to be familiar with your previous work. “Copy
and paste” is not a good solution either. So this leaves you with some tough
choices to make. I have opted for reducing reliance on my previous work to
a minimum, mentioned in footnotes here and there, but not much more. In
two cases, however, this is somewhat problematic. The first has to do with
the nature of social conventions. Much of the present work, as will become
apparent from Chapter 1, builds on the metaphysics of social rules. I am not
assuming that all social rules are conventional in nature but surely many
kinds are. Yet, since I have already published a book on social conventions,
I felt that it would be unnecessarily repetitive to include the main arguments
about conventionality of rules in this work as well.1 Furthermore, my work
on conventions was not focused on metaphysical aspects of social rules; the
analysis I offered of social conventions was largely structured by concerns
of practical reasoning. Therefore, I felt that I could bracket the convention-
ality of rules in this work. I make no attempt here to distinguish conventional
from nonconventional rules, and I do not rely on my analysis of conventions
to substantiate the arguments I make here. I hope that this approach works,
and that the arguments deployed in these two works converge nicely, without
tensions or contradictions.
The second point of connection with previous work is in philosophy of
law, and relates to my association with the legal positivist school of thought.
So let me emphasize that it is not the purpose of the present work to argue
for legal positivism. My arguments imply, at various points along the way,
that some of the metaphysical commitments of standard anti-positivist views
are questionable, but these arguments are not confined to legal theory, and
the lessons about theoretical constraints on grounding-reductive accounts of
our institutional reality are meant to be much broader in scope. Defending
legal positivism is not my aim here. However, there is an aspect of legal phi-
losophy that echoes a theme I have argued for in the past—namely, the meth-
odological point that legal positivism is best seen as a metaphysical theory
about the nature of law, and a reductive one at that. But, if I may reiterate,
I use the law, and theorizing about it, only as one example in this book. My
ambition is to offer a reductive account of institutional reality much more
broadly. Whether and to what extent the account I offer here aligns with legal
positivism or not will be discussed briefly in Chapter 6, but it is rather tan-
gential to my concerns in this project.
1 Marmor, Social Conventions.

Preface xiii
It is not part of this work, however, to offer an analysis of the philosophical

foundations of the social sciences. How to go about doing science in the so-
cial realm, what would count as a scientific explanation of sociality, and sim-
ilar questions are not the kind of issues I address in this book. Some might
find the distinction somewhat artificial; after all, the foundations of the social
sciences clearly involve metaphysical issues, and perhaps even vice versa, our
views about the metaphysics in play might be influenced by methodological
views about social sciences or what we would consider a scientific explana-
tion in the social domain. I’m not denying these connections, but there is
only that much that one philosophical essay can hope to cover, even if there
are closely related issues in the vicinity.
I am indebted to a number of friends and colleagues who have read and
commented on parts of the manuscript at earlier stages, in particular to my
Cornell University colleagues Emad Atiq and Alexander Kocurek; to David
Enoch and participants in the Hebrew University Department of Philosophy
Colloquium; and to Jeremey Waldron, Liam Murphy, and participants in the
New York University Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the two reviewers of Oxford University
Press. Their meticulous, thoughtful, and penetrating comments contributed
a great deal to the content and structure of this work.
1
Institutional Facts
My purpose in this chapter is to begin to clarify some of the key theoretical

concepts at the foundations of institutional reality, in particular, the ideas of a
social fact, an institutional fact, and a social rule. But I am hoping to achieve
a bit more than that; I am hoping to show that by trying to elucidate some of
these foundational building blocks of our institutional reality, we can also
reveal some of the main questions and challenges we face in any attempt to
account for the metaphysics of social practices. This chapter does not aim
to provide detailed answers; its purpose is mostly to raise some questions
and introduce the main issues that will be addressed later in the book.
Philosophical interest in social ontology is wide and diverse. This book is
focused on a limited number of some key aspects of it, and by the end of this
chapter I am hoping to clarify what those aspects are and provide a roadmap
for the issues to be discussed in subsequent chapters.
1.1. Social Facts and Institutional Facts
The institutional aspects of reality are clearly part of the much larger and
much more diffuse social aspect of the world. In other words, institutional
facts are a subset of social facts. It might be useful, however, to start with the
larger category, with the idea of a social fact. A simple, noncircular definition
of a social fact would be one that utilizes the idea of ontological dependence.
We could say that a fact is of a social kind if and only if it is the kind of fact
that ontologically depends on the existence of a multitude of human beings
interacting with each other in certain ways. It doesn’t mean that a social fact
has to be a fact about groups of human beings, as such, or about a particular
type of interaction among them. The idea is that a fact is social if and only if it
depends, ontologically, on the existence of human interactions.
Ontological dependence is by no means a problem-free idea. Different
kinds of ontological dependence are discussed in the literature, and there is a
general sense that some of them are too coarse-grained to be useful enough
Foundations of Institutional Reality. Andrei Marmor, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657348.003.0001
2 Foundations of Institutional Reality
in metaphysical inquiry.1 But for our purposes here, the most generic and
hopefully the most intuitive notion of ontological dependence would do the
work. The basic intuition is that we have things or facts of type A ontolog-
ically depend on things or facts of type B, when A could not have existed
without B. I say “things” or “facts,” rather loosely, because for our purposes
the exact relata of ontological dependence does not matter much. It is, prob-
ably, more plausible to think of ontological dependence obtaining between
things that can exist (or not) in some sense. Nevertheless, I will assume here
that there is a certain interchangeability between things that exist and facts
about them. It might be a fact (or not) that “o is an F”; it might also be a fact
(or not) that “o exists,” or that “o exists as an F.” When we discuss the idea of
grounding, in the next chapter, I will have more to say by way of justifying the
focus on facts and about what facts are, in the relevant sense here.
Thus, the basic idea is that A depends ontologically on B if it is necessarily
the case that A could not exist without B. This is a fairly coarse-grained,
modal-existential notion of ontological dependence, which can be defined
as follows:
A ontologically depends for its existence on B =df

Necessarily, A exists only if B exists.2
Among the many possible complications here is a temporal issue: ontolog-

ical dependence can be understood sequentially or continuously. We can talk
about ontological dependence in cases where a particular thing could not
have existed without some other thing that had existed before, such as the
dependence of my existence on the prior existence of my biological parents,
and we can talk about continuing existence, such as the continuing existence
of a set depending on its members or the existence of water depending on
H2O molecules. For purposes of defining what a social fact is—that is, for
saying whether facts about A are social facts or not—ontological dependence
needs to be understood in the continuous-dependence sense. Facts of a social
kind generally depend on the continuous existence of human interactions,
not on some prior state in which there were humans who interacted with
each other. This does not mean that the sequential or causal sense of onto-
logical dependence is not relevant to various aspects of social reality. Some
1 See, for example, Koslicki, “Varieties of Ontological Dependence.”

2 I borrow this formulation from Tahko and Lowe, “Ontological Dependence.”
Institutional Facts 3
causal links might be necessary features of certain aspects of our sociality.

But for the characterization of what social facts are, generally speaking, we
need the continuous sense of dependence. A fact is of a social kind if and only
if it depends on some interactions between humans. In other words, I am as-
suming that if x years from now there are no longer humans on our planet,
at that time there will be no social facts on our planet, only a history of them.
Generally speaking, ontological dependence, in this coarse-grained, ge-
neric sense, is a modal concept. It points to a necessary connection between
the existence of one kind of thing and another. The basic intuition of (contin-
uous) modal-existential dependence is that for facts of type A to exist, some
other type of facts, B, must exist as well. Now applying this to social facts,
the basic intuition I try to cash out here is that a fact is social if and only if it
depends, as the kind of fact it is, on the existence of human beings interacting
in certain ways. Which is to say two things: First, that a world in which there
are no human beings (or, if you will, creatures sufficiently similar to us) is a
world in which there are no social facts. Second, a world in which there are
only Robinson Crusoes, each one totally isolated on an island with no inter-
action with any other, is a world in which there are no social facts. Social facts
are the kind of facts that ontologically depend on the existence of human
interactions.
Now one might worry that this definition is both overinclusive and
underinclusive. It might be thought to be overinclusive in that the defini-
tion would make, for example, many facts about morality social facts. It also
renders most facts about language social facts. True, but I don’t see it as a
problem. Surely our ability to communicate in a natural language is one of
the most fundamental aspects of our sociality. And there is hardly any reason
to doubt that many facts about moral aspects of our lives are social facts, that
is, at least by way of ontological dependence.3 Bear in mind that ontological
dependence does not entail reducibility or supervenience or anything of the
sort. So yes, the definition of what counts as a social fact is very broad, but
we will soon narrow down our interest to a subset of social facts, and that’s
where details and scope may matter.
The definition of social facts by way of ontological dependence on human
interactions is obviously underinclusive by excluding nonhuman animals
3 A certain type of robust realism about morality (e.g., Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously) holds the
view that there are certain moral truths that do not depend on human interactions or even on the ex-
istence of humans. I do not need to take sides on this particular debate. I am certainly not committed
to the view that all facts about morality are social facts.
from the domain of discussion. And some might think that this is narrow-
minded; after all, we know that some animal species exhibit fairly sophisti-
cated social lives. So if we talk about ontological dependence on interactions
between humans, we exclude the sociality of animals. But this should be seen
as a matter of theoretical convenience at this point, and nothing more. If at
any point it turns out that something we say about the metaphysics of the
social domain is threatened by the exclusive focus on humans, we can revisit
the assumption. I don’t think that there will be a need for that, at least not in
the context of this book.4
The generic, modal-existential version of ontological dependence is too
coarse-grained to tell us much about the nature of things. For one thing, on-
tological dependence is a modal concept, and, as such, is not explanatory. It
just tells us that there is a necessary connection between the existence of one
thing and another, but it tells us nothing about why something is the way
it necessarily is.5 (More on this in the next chapter.) Thus, to say that facts
of type A ontologically depend on the existence of facts of type B is rarely
the kind of information that conveys a great deal of philosophical insight.
Second, at least in the social context, not many cases are factually controver-
sial. It is certainly not controversial that things like law, for example, depend
ontologically on the existence of humans, on the kind of interests and needs
human beings have, on the ability of humans to communicate in a natural
language, on our predisposition to have moral sensibilities, and on all sorts of
things like that. And the same can be said of other social practices.
I think that we will get closer to our target if we draw a distinction between
social facts and institutional facts as a subset of the former. All institutional
facts would be social facts, on this view, but not all social facts are also institu-
tional. By the term institutional facts, I will label facts about social aspects of
reality that depend on the existence of rules.6 What kind of dependence is in
4 I have great sympathy for the view that the social sciences would probably benefit a great deal
from taking into account the social lives, and even forms of collective agency, in the nonhuman an-
imal world. (see Epstein, The Ant Trap). But this book is not about the philosophical foundations of
the social sciences. My interest is confined to the institutional aspects of human cultures. As I will
mention in Chapter 3, the idea of collective agency is much wider in scope than the building blocks of
institutional reality that I employ in this book, and potentially not confined to human agency.
5 In some of his earlier work on dependence, Fine tied the idea of ontological dependence to essen-
tialism (“Ontological Dependence”). He suggested that A depends on B just in case B is a constituent

of A’s essence. His more recent work on metaphysical grounding makes it doubtful that he still holds
the earlier views (“The Question of Realism” and “Guide to Ground”). It seems that much of what
Fine wrote earlier about dependence gets folded into the more recent work on grounding, distinct
from ontological dependence, that is. Grounding will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
6 This conception of “institutional facts” is inspired by and roughly in line with Searle, The
Construction of Social Reality, 27. Searle, however, called institutional facts those social facts that
play is something that we will need to discuss in detail later on, after we have a
detailed account of metaphysical grounding and its corresponding modes of
reduction (Chapter 2). Why focus on facts that depend on rules? The reason
is straightforward: our main interest here is the metaphysical foundations of
social practices and institutions. Practices are structured by rules. I use the
word “structured” advisedly to avoid the assumption, which would be pre-
mature at this point, that practices are necessarily constituted by rules or that
the rules constituting practices are necessarily of a particular, viz., constitu-
tive, kind. For now, I hope that at least at an initial, intuitive level, we can see
that there is no hope for any metaphysical explanation of facts about social
practices, such as law, language, arts, money, games and sports, corporations,
schools, universities, and countless other social practices, without an ac-
count of what rules are, and what it is for a rule to exist. Institutional facts are
facts about practices that are, at least partly, structured or regulated by rules.
This simple insight was at the core of Hart’s contribution to analytical juris-
prudence. We need “the idea of a rule,” Hart said, “without which we cannot
hope to elucidate even the most elementary forms of law.”7 And that of course
applies to any social practice, whether legal or not.
Obviously, all institutional facts are also social facts; they depend, ontolog-
ically, on human interactions. But not all social facts are institutional. There
are many types of social interactions that are not structured by rules and
their existence, as social facts, does not depend, ontologically or otherwise,
on the existence of rules. Examples would be things like taking a walk to-
gether, cooking a meal together, having sex, having a fight, going on a trip to-
gether, or for drinks in the pub. As Gilbert, Bratman, and others have shown,
doing certain things together (which Bratman called “shared agency”)
requires certain types of commitments and intentions that need to mesh, as it
were, sometimes intricately so.8 But there are no rules structuring such forms
of shared agency.9 Even on a larger scale, however, certain types of social
depend on constitutive rules. Since I will come to call into question his distinction between regulative
and constitutive rules—in particular, the idea that only constitutive rules have the function of ena-
bling social practices (Chapter 4)—the difference between our uses of “institutional facts” is some-
what tangential and indirect. The essential point, that institutional facts depend on the existence of
social rules, is the same.
7 Hart, The Concept of Law, 78.

8 Gilbert, On Social Facts; Bratman, Shared Agency.
9 In some of these cases of shared agency, when the shared activity occurs with some regularity, so-
cial conventions may evolve that structure certain aspects of it. But, even so, the conventions are not
rules that make the activity possible, as such. Nonconventional sex is still sex, and a nonconventional
cocktail party may still be a cocktail party. See also Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 88.
interaction do not depend on rules. People often exercise brute power over
other people, sometimes millions of other people, subjugating or subordi-
nating them in various ways. Obviously, rule over others often takes complex
social interactions, but those kinds of interactions do not have to form part
of rule-structured practices (though often they do, of course).10 Thus not all
social facts are institutional facts. When rules structure a certain type of ac-
tivity, then we can talk about a social practice, and facts about practices I will
label institutional facts, to designate their rule dependence. For the most part
in this book, I will be interested in the metaphysics of institutional facts.
Admittedly, the distinction between institutional and noninstitutional so-
cial facts is not always very sharp.11 Consider the example of social solidarity.
Solidarity between a group of people is a complex set of attitudes people
share, and presumably, a certain set of dispositions they have to help or oth-
erwise prioritize members of their group and exhibit some special concern
for them. So, on the face of it, facts about social solidarity do not look like
institutional facts; they are not structured by rules. But group membership
itself is often a matter of institutional facts; social rules often determine who
belongs to this or that group. So there might be an institutional, that is, rule-
governed element to facts about social solidarity, even if solidarity itself is
not essentially rule structured. I am not suggesting that rules are everywhere
in our social lives. But they sometimes lurk in the background, and some
aspects of social facts that do not seem institutional might have some institu-
tional aspects, even if only at the margins.
The idea of a social practice is extremely broad and covers many different
types. Generally, we can say that we have a social practice when we have cer-
tain types of human activities, that is, action types, structured by rules or
conventions, occurring with a certain regularity over time (in a given popu-
lation). That is, social practices have a certain stability; they are maintained
over some period of time, though they can change of course, sometimes dra-
matically so. Some social practices are relatively simple, such as the practice
of our greeting conventions or table manners; others are more complex, such
as playing games like chess or football; and some are much more complex,
10 There is some controversy or, rather I should say, inconsistency, in the literature about the ques-
tion of whether wars are institutional in the sense we discuss here. Searle seems to think that they are
(The Construction of Social Reality, 89). I’m not so sure. My inclination is to suggest that only super-
ficial and marginal aspects of wars are rule structured. In any case, surely many cases of large-scale
violence, such as ethnic cleansings or civil wars, are not structured by rules. They are social facts, of
course, but not institutional.
11 Searle agrees with this (The Construction of Social Reality, 88).
such as using natural language, practicing a religion, or maintaining a legal

system. Furthermore, in most cases the population that engages in the prac-
tice over time is not constant; membership in the practicing population is
often in flux, changing over time. The size of the population that maintains
a social practice varies enormously. Sometimes, as in the case of natural
language or law, the population is very large. In other cases, practices and
institutions can be rather small in scale, as some peculiar game played only in
one small geographic region, or a club that centers around a local hero.
Given how diverse and numerous social practices are, many possible
distinctions between different types of practices can be drawn, but I don’t
think there is a need for it here. One distinction worth mentioning, how-
ever, is between practices we can call flat, and those that are hierarchical.
Many social practices we are familiar with are highly structured in that they
have what Hart called secondary rules—namely, rules determining ways of
creating new rules, modifying existing ones, monitoring compliance with
the rules, and determining ways of reacting to noncompliance.12 The law is
certainly highly structured and hierarchical in this way, but countless other
practices share this hierarchical complexity, such as sports leagues, clubs,
universities, and corporations. I call them hierarchical to designate the fact
that they have secondary rules—rules structuring the creation of new rules
and reactions to violations of the rules. In Chapter 7, we will see why this hi-
erarchical structure of rules is bound to emerge in some cases and not others,
and its connection to normative powers. In other words, we will see why so-
cial hierarchy depends on a hierarchical structure of rules. However, some
social practices are not hierarchical, and have no secondary rules. The use
of natural language is a prominent example. Many fundamental aspects of
language use are rule governed, but there are no rules about creating new
rules of a language, and no rules determining reactions to noncompliance.
Despite the considerable complexity of linguistic rules, language is flat, not
12 Hart, The Concept of Law, 79. See Marmor, Social Conventions, 50–52. Admittedly, the idea of
secondary rules is a bit vague. According to Hart, who introduced this distinction, primary rules
are rules of conduct; they apply directly to modes of conduct or behavior, like do this or don’t do
that. Secondary rules take rules as their object; they are rules about rules, such as rules about ways of
changing rules or enacting new ones. But this leaves some of the familiar institutional rules a bit up in
the air. Practices often have rules determining specific punitive reactions to breaking the rules; they
are not exactly primary rules—at least because their scope of application is always relative to some
rule—but then not quite rules about rules either; they don’t take rules as their object of regulation.
In any case, I will stipulate here that rules that function to monitor compliance with other rules and
determine ways of reacting to noncompliance are secondary rules. As we will see in Chapter 7, most
of the secondary rules are power-structuring rules.
hierarchical. And of course, other familiar practices share this lack of sec-
ondary rules, such as practices of etiquette or manners, genres of arts, and all
sorts of customary or conventional practices.
Generally, however, the idea is that we have a social practice when we have
a fairly distinct pattern of human activity, structured by rules, occurring with
some regularity, and persisting over time in a given population. The main lesson
here, and the one I want to focus on for the rest of the chapter, concerns the
foundational aspect of rules. Any metaphysical explanation of institutional facts
and social practices requires a metaphysics of rules. As Hart put it very simply,
we need to ask: “What are rules? What does it mean to say that a rule exists?”13
Despite presenting this question at the center of his work, the truth is that Hart
hasn’t quite managed to give us an answer. Hart provided an interesting and, in
many ways, a fruitful explanation of what it takes to have a social rule in place,
but his account of social rules depends on the idea of a rule, an idea that remains
metaphysically unexplained in The Concept of Law. I need to elaborate on this
problem in Hart’s theory because it reveals one of the main challenges facing
any metaphysical account of institutional facts.
Before we get to Hart’s theory of social rules, however, we need to explain
what kind of rules are in play here. The notion of a rule is extremely broad.
Some types of rules are not quite relevant to our concerns. Common to all
rules is that they have some prescriptive content, a domain of application
determining the relevant subjects of the rule and its circumstances of appli-
cation, and an application range that occurs with some generality or regu-
larity. But all this is very broad and vague. So let me draw a rough distinction
between two general types of rules: some rules are natural, in that they are
not socially constructed. In some sense we discover them in the nature of
things or, perhaps better said, extrapolate the rule from the way things are.
Take, for example, rules of inference in logic, norms of instrumental ration-
ality, rules about warranted inference from factual evidence, and all sorts of
practical rules of thumb like how to get from A to B or how to achieve X by
doing Y. There is a sense in which we figure out the existence of the rule from
the way things are. Perhaps not necessarily so; natural rules do not have to
be necessary, and they can be both a priori and a posteriori (whether nec-
essary or not). They are natural only in the sense that they are not socially
13 Hart, The Concept of Law, 8.

constructed.14 It’s a good rule of thumb, for example, to be very careful when
cutting things with a sharp knife, or to walk slowly on slippery pavements,
otherwise you might injure yourself. Such rules are not necessary—clearly
they are a posteriori, and yet, also clearly enough, not socially constructed.
It’s in the nature of things, as it were, that walking too fast on slippery roads
might result in an accident, so if you care about your health, avoid it. Similarly
(in a very limited sense of course), it’s in the nature of things that there are
certain rules of inference preserving truth from premises to conclusions. So
I call these kinds of rules natural just to signify the idea that they are not so-
cially constructed. Natural rules will remain outside the scope of our discus-
sion. The kind of rules that will be discussed here, and in the rest of the book,
are of the nonnatural kind, that is, rules that are socially constructed in one
way or another. Thus, henceforth, when I use the word “rule” I mean the non-
natural kind only.
Nonnatural rules, as Hart and many others recognized, come in two main
forms: rules are either enacted by someone in a position of power or au-
thority, or they are social rules, not resulting from anyone’s deliberate enact-
ment. Clearly the latter are more foundational. Once we have an account of
what social rules are, we can go on to explain what authorities are and how
they can introduce new rules or modify existing ones.15 In fact, this will be
the topic of Chapter 7: we will see how foundational power-structuring rules
are, and how they enable the emergence of hierarchical social practices. In
short, I take it that Hart was clearly correct in regarding the idea of a social
rule as foundational. He was also correct in emphasizing that rules ought
to be clearly distinguished from mere regularities of behavior.16 There are
many things people do with considerable regularity, such as eating dinner,
sleeping at night, or having sex, but not as a matter of following a rule. Rules,
as opposed to regularities of behavior, have a separate ontological aspect that
needs to be explained. To say that something is done with some regularity is
only to report on the recurrence of an action type, and types of action tend
to recur mostly because the relevant reason for action happens to occur with
some regularity. But to say that something is done by way of following a rule
is to invoke something that exists over and beyond the mere regularity of
14 Examples are going to be controversial. Some rules are necessary a priori, but whether they are
necessarily analytic is controversial (Kripke, Naming and Necessity). More problematically, it might
be argued that analyticity is essentially semantic and therefore social in the ontological sense.
15 On the constitutive function of social norms in structuring practical authorities, see Marmor,
“An Institutional Conception of Authority.”

16 Hart, The Concept of Law, 54–59.
conduct. And Hart’s main intuition here, surely correct in some sense, was
that when we follow a social rule we regard the rule itself as a reason for ac-
tion. The rule has to be a fact that can count in favor of doing something,
which is to suggest that there is some sense in which rules exist.17
This is precisely the point where the first main challenge of our foray into
the metaphysics of institutional reality emerges: the challenge of explaining
the ontology of social rules. What is it for a social rule to exist? So the general
assumption here is that institutional facts are facts about social practices;
what makes a certain type of continuous human activity form part of a social
practice is the fact that the activity is structured by rules. Therefore, a meta-
physical account of social practices, an account of what institutional facts are,
must start with the idea of a rule. Without an ontology of social rules we will
not be able to account for institutional facts. In this respect, I think that Hart
had the better starting point compared with John Searle. Searle’s account of
institutional facts, as we will see later (mostly in Chapter 4), took the idea of
rules seriously, but without any attempt to account for the ontology of rules.
Searle was mostly interested in structural or syntactical aspects of rules, and
their constitutive functions, without telling us much about what it is for so-
cial rules to exist.18 The functional aspect of rules is crucially important, and
will be discussed at length in Chapters 4 and 6. But the starting point needs to
be ontological. I will follow Hart in this respect, and start with the question of
what it is for a social rule to exist. We will not have the answer in this chapter.
First I need to show why Hart’s own answer to this question is crucially in-
complete, and what it would take to complete it. The completion will come
in Chapter 3, following some general metaphysical groundwork presented in
Chapter 2.
Before we proceed, a note on usage. Here, and for the rest of our discussion,
I follow Hart in talking about reasons for action in the causal-motivating
sense. Whether a rule, or anything else is, normatively speaking, a reason
for action or not is beyond the concerns of the metaphysics of sociality, quite
generally. We have to be careful not to turn a metaphysical account of rules
17 Kantians may think that whenever we act for reasons for action in the right way we follow a rule.
I don’t have a quarrel with that, but notice that the discussion here is confined to nonnatural rules,
which is not what Kantians have in mind.
18 Apart from the vague idea that rules must exhibit a certain form of social agreement or accept-
ance. Acceptance, as we will see later, is too vague and too coarse-grained to ground an ontology
of rules. And the idea of agreement, as Lewis (Convention) convincingly demonstrated, is certainly
not going to do the job. We need rules precisely in those cases where agreements are too difficult to
obtain.
into a normative one. Thus, from now on, talk about reasons for action is talk
about motivating reasons, not normative ones.19
1.2. The Practice Theory of Rules
Hart’s explanation of what social rules are, which came to be called The
Practice Theory of Rules, can be summarized in the following way:
A social rule, say R, exists in a population S, Hart maintained, if and only if

the following conditions obtain (henceforth: Conditions-H):
1. Most members of S regularly conform in their behavior to the content
of R, and
2. Most members of S accept R as a rule, which means that
a. for most members of S the existence of R constitutes a reason for
action in accordance with R, and
b. members of S tend to employ R and refer to it as grounds for
exerting pressure on other members to conform to R, and as
grounds for criticizing deviations from conformity to R.20
As we can see here, according to Hart the existence of a social rule consists
of a pattern of conduct and a set of shared attitudes and dispositions: we have
a social rule when there is a component of conduct or behavior—viz., the
regular conformity with the rule or the regularity of conduct in accord-
ance with it—and a complex component of “acceptance” of the rule, which
consists of (1) a belief shared by the population that the existence of the rule
provides them with a reason for action and (2) a shared attitude of a posi-
tive endorsement of the rule that is manifest in the disposition to invoke the
rule as grounds for exerting pressure on others to comply as well, or crit-
icizing them when they don’t. Clearly, this is a reductive account of social
rules. It purports to explain what social rules are in terms of overt behavior
19 The only connection between motivating and normative reasons we can acknowledge here,
without getting into unnecessary trouble, is to be willing to assume that when a fact is a motivating
reason for an agent, the agent would regard the fact as a normative reason. If I take X to be a reason for
my φ-ing, I would assume that X actually counts in favor of φ-ing. More colloquially, perhaps, we can
assume that when people act for a reason, they would assume that it’s a good reason. But this assump-
tion is not needed for the argument and nothing depends on it in the discussion to follow. Besides, it
may not be as innocuous an assumption as it may seem.
20 Hart’s explanation of the nature of social rules is scattered around several places in The Concept
of Law. Most of the essential points are at 82–86.

in a given population, accompanied by certain attitudes and dispositions ac-

tually entertained by (most) members of that group. Notice that this is also
an aggregative account because it purports to explain a social phenomenon
in terms of facts about individual members of the relevant population. This
feature of social explanation is called methodological individualism. The idea
is that we can explain social phenomena without positing any entities be-
yond individual people and their causal interactions.21 If most members of
a given population behave in a certain way, and share some attitudes and
dispositions with respect to that behavior, then we have “the idea of a rule.”
The problem is that we don’t quite get “the idea of a rule” here. Hart’s re-
ductive account of rules seems to be strikingly circular: we have a (social)
rule, Hart suggests, when, inter alia, people regard the existence of the rule as
a reason for action, as something that counts in favor of doing (or avoiding)
that which the rule prescribes. But this really seems like a vicious circle: we
have a rule when we regard the rule as a reason for action. That may be true,
but it says nothing about what rules are. Now you might think that Hart
shouldn’t be too worried about this apparent circularity. What matters is not
what exactly it is that people believe to exist (the rule), but the fact that they
believe that it does, and have a typical set of attitudes and dispositions about
it. But this won’t do. To begin with, we would still need some content for
“the idea of a rule,” that thing that people believe to exist and to give them
reasons for action. Nothing in Hart’s theory would allow us to see the differ-
ence between following rules, or following the commands of God, or the will
of the ancestors, or, more importantly, following reasons generally regarded
as good reasons.22 We can replace “R” in Conditions-H with “God’s will,” or
“natural law,” or perhaps even just something like “the right thing to do in C,”
and we get the same results. So “the idea of a rule” we do not get here.
You may still think that for Hart’s purposes it doesn’t matter. Even if we
have not quite articulated what rules are, at least we have an answer to the
question of what it is for a rule to exist—namely, a combination of some reg-
ularity of conduct and a particular set of attitudes and dispositions accom-
panying that regularity shared by the relevant population. But important
questions remain unanswered here. First, how can we separate the question
of what constitutes the content of a rule from its conditions of existence? In
21 This will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

22 This point against the practice theory of rules was made a long time ago by Warnock, The Object
of Morality, 45–47. Warnock pointed out that Hart’s account cannot really distinguish between fol-
lowing a rule and following a generally or widely accepted reason for action.
other words, Hart may well be quite right to suggest that we have a social rule
when members of a given population by and large regard the existence of the
rule as something that gives them a reason for action, a reason to exert pres-
sure on others to comply, etc. This would clearly distinguish rule-governed
behavior from mere regularities of behavior. But in order to get closer to a
metaphysics of rules, we still need an account of what it is that forms the rele-
vant content of the shared beliefs—what is this thing that people believe to be
a rule? Second, we also need to know how the relevant attitudes can be shared
by a group; surely it cannot be just a matter of a happy coincidence. As we
will see in Chapter 3, the challenge here is not trivial. If the existence of a rule
requires certain attitudes to be shared by a population, often a rather large
and diffuse group of individuals, we need an account of what this “sharing”
is. Lots of people may happen to have the same attitude about something, but
in a way that is too disconnected or too accidental to ground an idea of a rule.
An attempt to give an account of this aspect of rules will form one of the main
challenges to be discussed in Chapter 3.
Finally, we need an account of the nature of the metaphysical depend-
ence between the shared attitudes and the existence of the rule. To illus-
trate, consider the negation of existence. Thus, suppose you replace “R” in
Conditions-H with “God’s will.” You will get something that tells you what
it is for a population to be guided by what they take to be God’s will or God’s
commands. Now consider the assertion “God does not exist.” Whether the
assertion is true or not, we understand what it means and, crucially, one
can deny the existence of God without denying that Conditions-H obtain
in S. But now suppose we assert something similar about a rule, say R*: I tell
you that despite the fact that Conditions-H obtain about R* in population S,
there is no R* in S—R* does not exist. Now it is no longer so clear what it is
that I’m saying. Can people believe that there is a rule, R*, and that R* gives
them reasons for action, even if there is no R*? What would it mean for R*
not to exist if people believe that it does and behave accordingly? Without
knowing what kind of thing R* could be, and how much of its existence is
actually constituted by shared attitudes, we cannot hope to answer this ne-
gation problem.
In other words, the practice theory of rules, formulated by Conditions-H,
doesn’t quite tell us what the idea of a rule is, nor what it takes for one to exist.
There are at least two elements missing from the picture: the type-token dis-
tinction, without which rules cannot be used; and more importantly, the idea
of collective intentionality. We cannot hope to explain what a social rule is,
and what it is for a social rule to exist, without explaining the possibility of a
group of people collectively intending that P.23
Let me use a very simple linguistic rule to explain the intuitions behind
these two points. Consider a rule of the form: X stands for/signifies Y (in
context C):
R1: The word “red” [as a sound configuration] stands for red [the color] (in
English).
There are at least two salient features present here. First, we would not be
able to use such rules if we did not have the ability to think in terms of tokens
being instances of types. Both the sound configuration of the word “red” and
the color red are types, not tokens. When I say “red” (with my Israeli accent)
and you say “red,” we utter slightly different sounds. But as long as they are
tokens of the same type, we understand each other. And of course redness is a
type, not a token. The word stands for the type of color, not this or that partic-
ular red. And here I venture to generalize: our ability to use rules in our social
lives hugely depends on our ability to associate particular tokens with types.
Without this ability we would not be able to have rules. I am not suggesting
that all rules must be formulated by way of relation between types. Rules can
apply to a particular thing, such as a rule saying, “Don’t touch X,” where X is
a particular object. But even here, the prescription relies on a type of action,
touching, and there is a range of actions that may be “touching” in the rele-
vant sense. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that it is impossible to have a
nonnatural rule formulated in a way that does not contain types. Consider,
for example, a rule requiring a number of particular people (set =a, b, c, d)
to perform a particular act (token) every January 1. Maybe there are no types
here, only tokens (though we may still need some type concept to account for
the recurrence of a date every year). Still, the vast majority of social rules are
not like that—which is really all we need here.
I don’t think that there is much by way of philosophical analysis we can
add to our ability to associate tokens with the types they are tokens of. I will
assume that it is essentially biological. We are constituted in ways that enable
us this mental capacity. These mental capacities probably vary with different
types; it is more than likely that what enables us to see different shades of red
23 This seems to be acknowledged in more recent literature. See Searle, The Construction of Social
Reality, 22–26; Gilbert, On Social Facts; and Epstein, The Ant Trap.
as shades of redness is very different from ways in which we can categorize

particular actions as action types, etc. All I wanted to flag here is that our
ability to use rules crucially depends on these mental capacities we share.
There is, however, a separate and difficult question in the vicinity, about the
ways in which we carve up the world, linguistically and conceptually, into
types or categories. Structuralism maintains that there is truth and falsehood
about such matters since the world itself, not just our representation of it, has
a real structure. Our categorization is true if it “carves up reality at its joints,”
and false if it doesn’t.24 Many philosophers tend to resist realism about
structures, maintaining that there is no mind-independent reality about
types and categories—reality has no real joints to discover. Types, categories,
similarities, and things like that may be more or less useful, or they may re-
flect something that enables us to represent different aspects of the world, but
structures are, essentially, in our minds, not in the world. Though my own
intuition is that this debate is bound to play out differently in different areas,
I will remain agnostic about metaphysical structuralism. I am flagging this
issue only to set it aside.25 What matters for the metaphysics of rules is the
mental capacity humans share to identify tokens with types, without which
social rules, by and large, or most of them if you will, would not be possible.
Let me turn to the collective-intention element, which is the one that’s re-
ally important here. Consider again the rule that “X signifies Y in C.” What
does the relation “signifies” (or “stands for” or “represents”) consist in, given
that there might be no particular reason to signify Y by X? There might be a
very good reason to have Y signified by something, we may need the signifi-
cation for a reason, but there are no reasons to signify it the way we happen to.
So when we say that X signifies Y, we must be talking about some intention—
it is an intention we have to signify Y by X. But then it must be the intention
of a collective; the rule does not express the intention of a particular person.
We intend X to designate Y, We intend X to count as Y, and so on. Who is
“We”? Presumably, those whose rule it is. Sometimes the group is fairly small,
and sometimes it consists of the relevant population of language users.
It may be worth keeping in mind at this point that social rules necessarily
have a population-relative temporal dimension. Remember that when we
talk about rules here we confine our attention to what I called nonnatural
24Sider, Writing the Book of the World.

25Though perhaps a limited aspect of this debate will come up in the discussion of artifacts in
Chapter 5.
rules. Natural rules, like, say, norms of instrumental rationality or prac-

tical rules about how to achieve X by doing Y, are not socially constructed.
We extrapolate the rules from the way things are, in some sense. Therefore,
natural rules can be universal; their existence is not necessarily tied to par-
ticular populations at a given time. Nonnatural rules, rules that are socially
constructed, as it were, are rules of a given population at a given time. When
we say, “It is a social rule that R,” the questions of whose rule is it?, and when?,
are always relevant and should have an answer. R could be a social rule here
(say, in New York City) but not there (say, in Rome), or it could be a rule of
soccer fans but not opera fans, or it could have been a social rule here some
time ago but no longer is. Social rules are tied, as it were, to some population
whose rule it is at a given time. Of course we can come to know about rules at
other places and in different times. The point here is not epistemic, it’s meta-
physical. The continuous existence of a social rule depends on the existence
of the population, at a given time and place, whose rule it is. This is partly
what is meant by the idea that rules are socially constructed (when they are,
of course).
Let me return to the example of the rule determining the semantic repre-
sentation function of “red.” Assume, at least for the sake of the argument, that
semantic properties are properties of words and sentences, not utterances or
speech acts. I know that this is controversial, but I’m interested in exempli-
fying how rules work, not making a point about semantics. So let me work
with this picture of meaning whereby the meaning of a word is a represen-
tation type, assigning X to represent, designate, or stand for Y.26 The crucial
point to realize is that semantic rules assigning, as they do, a signifying rela-
tion between sounds and types of things they signify—or of concepts, if you
think that what I call types here have to be concepts—cannot be understood
without the idea of collective intentions. The meaning of a word crucially
depends on the intention to represent Y type of things by X (a distinct sound
configuration). And, generally speaking, the intention is that of a collective
of language users. When I intend to use a word the way that it is normally
used in English, my intention is to follow the collective intention of English
speakers, the intention of the relevant language users, as a group. In using the
word “red,” in an ordinary conversation, I would typically intend to use the
sound configuration as other English speakers intend to use it. For all I know,
26 As Salmon aptly put it, words are expression types, not tokens, and we can see semantics, gen-
erally, as a “systematic assignment of representation” (“Two Conceptions of Semantics,” 323). That is

the picture I’m assuming here, but again, only for the sake of demonstration.
other users of English utter “red” when they intend to refer to the color red.
Barring unusual circumstances, my linguistic intention is to align with the
collective one. All this seems to be very much on the surface. Think about
instances when you need to correct someone who is using a word incorrectly.
You might say, “This is not what we mean by X” or “It’s not how we use X in
this context.” We, of course, refers to users of this natural language or of a par-
ticular idiolect, as a group.
None of this entails that individuals cannot deviate from the collective
intention on particular conversational occasions. After all, speakers don’t
always use words and expressions according to their standard or common
meanings. Deviations on particular occasions of speech are quite frequent,
and usually rendered unproblematic by contextual and other pragmatic
features enabling hearers to grasp the content intended to be communi-
cated by the speaker. In other words, when I say that collective intentions
determine semantic representations, I do not mean to imply that speakers
cannot deviate from the collective semantic intentions in particular cases.
But these deviations are generally parasitic on the standard meaning of
words, meanings that are determined by the collective intentions of language
users.27
Before we proceed, let me insert a clarification here: the argument about
collective intentions in the semantic context does not depend on anything
like Wittgenstein’s alleged refutation of the possibility of private language.28
More generally, I do not intend to imply that rules, necessarily, have to be
public, reflecting some collective intention. Perhaps I can create my own
version of Andrei solitaire, with rules I invent, and play the game privately;
there’s nothing in what I assumed here to count against the idea that my
Andrei-solitaire rules are rules, even if nobody else knows about them. My
only assumption here is that social rules, which are evidently public and on-
tologically dependent on human interactions, cannot be constituted by way
of some happy coincidence of lots of private rules. So I take the disagreement
about the possibility of private language to be irrelevant to our concerns. As
far as I know, nobody argues that the possibility of private language would
show that natural language is not, in some sense, a collective endeavor. The
27 See, for example, Salmon, “Two Conceptions of Semantics”; Soames, “Drawing the Line be-
tween Meaning and Implicature.”

28 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §243. Wittgenstein’s private language argument is not
free of problems, of course; even sympathetic readers find some puzzles and unresolved questions
about the argument. See, for example, Baker, “The private Language Argument.”
word “red” means what it does by virtue of the fact that a collective or group
of language users intends it to signify the color red. This remains true even
if it is possible for an individual to invent their own color concepts and use
them on their own.29
Semantics of a natural language might seem like a special case. When rules
constitute a system of representation, they obviously rely on a type-token dis-
tinction and obviously manifest some collective intention. But not all rules
are of this kind, and not all rules constitute new modes of representation or
some new activity type. Countless rules simply aim to guide conduct—rules
may express a demand, or some kind of a requirement to act in this or that
way or to forebear from doing this or that. Are such conduct-regulating rules
also expressions of a collective intention?30 That depends on what kind of
rule it is. Remember, we distinguished between enacted rules and social
rules. Rules of the former type, enacted by someone in a position of authority
or power, can express the intention of the enactor, and nothing more. They
don’t have to express any form of collective intention. Social rules, however,
of the kind that purport to regulate conduct included, would be very diffi-
cult to understand without the idea of collective intention (or, perhaps, some
other collective attitude). Let me explain why that is the case.
Since social rules of conduct are often formulated by “ought” statements
(or can easily be reformulated as such), one might be tempted to think that
we can analyze such rules as generalized formulations of reasons for action.
Take a rule of the form:
R2: “All X’s who are F ought to φ in context C.”
Let us assume that R2 expresses the idea that if an X is F in context C, X has a

reason (of a certain type or structure) to φ. But leaving it at that would make
the idea of invoking a rule as one of pointing to a reason, which would make
it very difficult to explain the difference between things we do for a reason,
with some regularity perhaps, and things we do by way of following a rule.
29 Kripke’s famous argument about rule skepticisms (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language),
cannot be discussed here. This so-called Kripkenstein argument has generated an industry of litera-
ture over the years, for and against skepticisms about rule following, and there is no hope of resolving
that issue in this work. I am just going to assume that even if Kripke is right and there is a deep philo-
sophical puzzle about rule following, quite generally, the philosophical puzzle leaves praxis as we find
it—namely, we do follow rules in our everyday lives, on countless occasions with respect to a great
variety of rules.
30 The distinction between regulative and constitutive rules will be discussed in Chapter 4.
In other words, Hart was quite right to emphasize that we cannot begin to
explain the idea of following rules without accounting for the fact that the
very existence of the rule is taken by the relevant population to be a reason for
action. If a rule is a reason for action then the rule itself has to be a fact that is
deemed to count in favor of doing this or that.
To see the point more clearly, we can contrast social rules with rules of con-
duct that are, indeed, nothing more than generalized formulations of reasons
for action that apply. Here’s a rule that is sadly familiar from the earlier stages
of the COVID-19 pandemic: “When talking or otherwise interacting with a
person who is not a member of your immediate household, keep at least six
feet apart.” Alas, there was a good reason for this rule, which is to prevent
infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, as it can spread from one
person to another within a few feet, but usually not more than six. So we were
all told to observe this rule, and most people tried to follow it. Now of course,
this is not an example of a social rule; the rule has been recommended by
medical experts and state authorities (if the coronavirus hangs on for long, it
may become a social rule, but let’s hope we will not get to that).
I hope this example helps us see Hart’s point about the independence of
rules from the reasons that apply irrespective of the rule. Once we know that
the coronavirus can spread by droplets reaching up to six feet, keeping six feet
apart is what we should do, regardless of the rule. One who complied with the
rule because it is a rule would be acting from the wrong kind of reason. If it
turned out, for example, that science got it wrong and the virus can infect
at greater distance, say up to eight feet, we should keep eight feet apart; the
six-foot rule will simply no longer apply. Or vice versa, if it turns out that the
virus cannot infect beyond three feet, then there is no reason to stick to much
more than that, and no sense of breaking a rule by doing so. Social rules play
some role in our practical reason and in our social lives, more generally, only
when their import is distinct from the reasons that apply to us anyway. When
we have a genuine social rule in play, there has to be a sense in which people
can break the rule even if their failure to comply is justified, all things consid-
ered. Perhaps you have good reasons to fail to greet your aunt when seeing
her at a cocktail party, but even if your conduct is justified, all things consid-
ered, you would have broken a rule of etiquette, the greeting convention in
this case. However, if you have good reasons not to worry about contagion
with the coronavirus in a given encounter, there is no rule breaking involved
in failing to keep the requisite distance. The relevant reasons just don’t apply
anymore.
All this comes to show that Hart was quite right to assume that we need an
ontology of rules that is not entirely a function of the reasons for action that
apply in the circumstances. Rules must capture something that is metaphysi-
cally distinct from the reasons for action they purport to point out or formu-
late, if you will. And this clearly indicates that rules are very closely tied to the
idea of a collective intention. To say that there is a rule in S to require X’s who
are F to φ in C is to point to something that is collectively intended in S. I am
not suggesting here that social rules just are collective intentions. What
kind of metaphysical dependence obtains between collective intentions and
rules will be analyzed in Chapter 3. But I am suggesting that there is bound
to be some metaphysical dependence between social rules and collective
intentions. Without the idea that a collective of people, as a collective, can
share an intention that certain things ought to be done (or that certain things
represent or stand for something else), we cannot account for the fact that
a rule exists. To say that “a rule exists in S” must refer to something that can
exist (or not), and something that might exist in S but not necessarily in Si.
Remember that social rules have a population-relative temporal aspect that
must be accounted for; social rules are rules of a particular collective.
1.3. The Roadmap
Let me recap briefly and explain how the book proceeds. The conclusion
that emerges so far is that we cannot provide a metaphysical account of in-
stitutional facts without an ontology of rules, and we cannot provide an ac-
count of the latter without an account of the relevant collective attitudes that
determine the content of rules. Before we get to the analysis I will offer, in
Chapter 3, we need to begin this journey with providing the metaphysical
framework that will inform the analysis offered in the rest of the book.
In Chapter 2, I will try to explain why social ontology, of the kind we are in-
terested in here, is rightly drawn to an Aristotelian framework of grounding
and reduction. This book aims to show, among other things, that some of
the recent literature on metaphysical grounding can help us to a better un-
derstanding of institutional facts and ways in which we can account for the
building blocks of institutional reality. For readers who are familiar with the
literature on grounding, most of Chapter 2 may not provide new insights,
but I will argue for a novel distinction between two types of reductive
explanations that will be utilized in later chapters. Since Chapter 2 engages
with some controversial aspects of metaphysical grounding and its relation

to reduction, it may be a bit more technical than the rest of the book, but
I hope not too much so.
In Chapter 3, we return to the question of what makes social rules exist, as
such, utilizing some of the key concepts explained in Chapter 2. Following
the idea, argued here, that there is no hope for explaining what social rules
are without an account of collective intentions, Chapter 3 offers such an ac-
count, and one that is compatible with methodological individualism. Thus
the metaphysical grounding of collective intentions forms a major part of
this chapter, accompanied by a reconstruction of Hart’s practice theory to
provide a more complete account of the ontology of social rules.
Chapter 4 turns to an attempt to unpack the constitutive relation between
rules and practices. In this chapter I build on Searle’s account of constitutive
relations in terms of practical functions, explaining in some detail the idea
of function, and ways in which the functions ground the constitutive rela-
tion between rules and practices. My explanation deviates from Searle in two
respects. First, I raise some doubts about Searle’s famous distinction between
regulative and constitutive rules, arguing that the functional explanation,
coupled with a proper construal of the practice theory of rules, is sufficient
to account for the grounding relation between rules and practices. Second,
I argue that this grounding relation is incomplete or partial. It takes more
than rules to ground practices; a minimal level of agreement in judgments
among participants about the point of the practice and their reasons for en-
gaging in it is also practically necessary.
Chapter 4 completes the basic argument of this book about the ontology
of institutional facts. In the next two chapters I show that a number of epi-
stemic and methodological conclusions follow from the ontological account.
Chapter 5 turns to a fairly detailed analysis of the nature of artifacts, and
for two main reasons. First, because there is considerable overlap between
artifacts, in particular, intangible and massive artifacts, and institutional
facts. Indeed, it is part of the argument here that social rules, and practices
structured by rules, are artifacts. The second reason to dwell on the nature
of artifacts in the context of our discussion, is to show that there are some
group-wide, comprehensive errors about certain aspects of artifacts that are
not metaphysically possible. A population that creates and uses an artifact
has some epistemic privileges about what the artifact is. This epistemic priv-
ilege will be shown to align nicely with the idea, shown in Chapters 3 and 4,
that the content of social rules just is the collective intention shared by the
relevant population. In other words, a closer look at the nature of artifacts and
their relation to institutional facts allows us to complete an argument about
the epistemic implications that follow from the social ontology presented in
these chapters. It allows us to see that socially constructed aspects of reality
are such that they prevent the possibility of certain types of comprehensive,
group-wide errors about the nature of the things socially constructed, as op-
posed to other types of comprehensive errors that are possible and some-
times quite common.
This last point raises another issue, however, which forms the topic of
Chapter 6: Does a metaphysical-grounding account of social practices have
to provide the kind of analysis that could be endorsed by those whose prac-
tice it? I am going to answer this question in the negative. I will defend the
view that a metaphysical account of institutional facts and social practices,
as opposed to a hermeneutical approach, is not constrained by the need to
provide an account of a practice in terms that would rationalize the practice
for those who engage in it. A discussion of some of the central controversies
about the nature of law will form the main example I use in this chapter, but
I hope to show that its lesson generalizes to all cases.
The book concludes with a discussion of one particular type of institu-
tional facts—namely, normative powers, and ways in which they are socially
constructed. One remarkable aspect of our social reality is that human soci-
eties managed to transform a great deal of brute power exercised by people
over others into an elaborate normative framework. Normative powers are
institutional facts of tremendous importance, and Chapter 7 examines in
some detail how and why such powers emerge, and how they constitute and
structure hierarchical social practices and institutions. This chapter aims to
show that basic power-structuring social rules are essential building blocks
of a significant part of our social reality. Social hierarchy is necessarily struc-
tured by basic power conferring social rules.
2
Grounding and Reduction
What metaphysics should aim to accomplish is a controversial business. It is

becoming commonplace these days to distinguish between two main views
about the task of a metaphysical inquiry; both views have long and respect-
able pedigrees. According to one view, associated with Quine among others,
metaphysics should address the question of what there is in the world, fo-
cusing on what kind of things exist. Do numbers, properties, universals,
meanings exist? Are these the kind of things that form part of the fabric of
the universe, as it were, or merely our ways of thinking about what there is?
According to the second view, sometimes labeled Aristotelian, an important
task of metaphysics is (also?) to tell us what kind of things are more founda-
tional than others.1 The physical particles and forces that my desk is made of
are more foundational than the desk; human beings, with their mental capac-
ities and dispositions, etc., are more foundational than social institutions,
like universities or corporations. So the assumption here is that there is some
hierarchical structure in the world, whereby certain things that exist are con-
stituted or constructed by other things that exist, and thus, at least in some
sense, certain things are more foundational than others.
The kind of metaphysical inquiry we seek in the social context is almost in-
evitably drawn to the Aristotelian framework. Quite obviously, institutional
facts do not form part of the basic fabric of the universe—to the extent that
they are facts about things that exist in the world, their existence is not foun-
dational. Laws, institutions like universities or banks, sports, the arts, com-
mercial means of exchange and finance, to mention a few obvious examples,
are what they are in virtue of other things that exist, things or facts that are
more foundational. Consider, for example, one of the central questions that
has preoccupied philosophy of law for over a century, the question of what
legality consists in: What makes things legal, when they are? Does legality
depend on morality, and if so, in what ways? To the extent that there are met-
aphysical issues involved here, those would hardly be questions about what
1 The contrast between these views is nicely explained by Schaffer, “On What Grounds What.”
Foundations of Institutional Reality. Andrei Marmor, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657348.003.0002
really exists. I’m not aware of any position in legal philosophy aiming to show
that legality is a real mind-independent property, part of the fabric of the
universe, as it were—or, to the contrary, a position that would suggest that
there are no laws, that they do not exist. It is rather uncontroversial that there
is a clear sense in which laws exist, and a fairly clear sense in which they don’t.
As we saw in Chapter 1, all institutional facts are social facts, and as such,
ontologically dependent on interactions between human beings. It would be
just too crazy to suggest that the existence of law does not depend on human
interactions. But it is equally uncontroversial that there are ways in which
we can talk about the existence of laws. It is a law in New York State that the
maximum speed limit on interstate highways is 60 mph. It was not the law
prior to early 1900s. And it is not the law in Germany.2 Thus, assume that
(1) is true:
(1) The law in Si at t prescribes Lx (where Lx stands for some prescriptive

propositional content).
Then the following is also true:
(2) There is a law in Si at t that Lx.
Now suppose the Quinean metaphysician insists that the existential oper-
ator in (2) cannot possibly be the robust ontological existence we assume
about atoms and gravity and things like that. Of course that is the case; every-
thing that is legal depends on other things. The law’s ontological dependence
on all sorts of facts about human beings; our material, mental, and social
conditions; and countless factors like that, cannot be doubted. Which is to
say that it is not questions about existence that have preoccupied philosophy
of law. The relevant metaphysical question about legal aspects of the world
is one about foundations, not about existence. Laws clearly exist in some
sense and clearly do not exist in some other sense. The questions here are
about hierarchies of existence, about what is more foundational than some-
thing else. In other words, and I take law to be only an example here, the
metaphysics of sociality is inevitably drawn to an Aristotelian framework.
What we seek to explain is the building blocks of social practices, to find the
2 I am not suggesting that every proposition about the content of laws would be either true or false.
But most of them are.

Grounding and Reduction 25
foundations of the kind of things that in some sense clearly exist, and in an-
other, not less clear sense, do not exist in a foundational way.
What is it for one thing to be more foundational than another? This may
mean several things, actually, but a good start would be to assume that if an
A aspect of X is more foundational than its B aspect, then there is a sense in
which we should be able to utilize the A aspect in order to explain the exist-
ence or essential features of the B aspect. Ideally, we should be able to say that
X is B in virtue of X being A. And this is the idea of grounds. A grounds B just
in case that something is B in virtue of being A.3
There is a lot of grounding talk in contemporary metaphysics, but it doesn’t
mean that there is a great deal of consensus on what exactly grounding is,
and what it applies to. I will start with some characterizations of grounding
that are widely accepted, and will later dive into a few more controversial
aspects of it.
So we have already tied the notion of grounding to that of explanation.
The grounding relation is meant to be explanatory, like causation but unlike
modal concepts such as necessity or supervenience. To say that B is neces-
sarily A does not, by itself, explain B. Same for supervenience: if facts of type
B supervene on facts of type A, it means that we cannot have any difference in
B facts without some difference in the A facts. What supervenience guaran-
tees is a kind of necessary correlation between two distinct types of facts. But
supervenience, by itself, has no explanatory power. If it obtains, it calls for
explanation, and leaves us wondering why the correlation is necessary and
what would explain it. Grounding, however, like causation, has some explan-
atory power. To say that A grounds B does seem to provide an explanation,
similar to the way in which causation explains something. So there is this way
of thinking about grounding as something that explains the relation between
things. But grounding, perhaps like causation, though this is controversial
of course, is also a relation between things in the world that obtain or exist,
something that would be there even if we were not around.
3 Not every Aristotelian view of metaphysics necessarily goes in the direction of grounding,
e.g., Sider, Writing the Book of the World. The idea of grounding permeated contemporary meta-
physics only in the last twenty years or so. Many have contributed to this endeavor, including Fine,
“The Question of Realism” and “Guide to Ground”; Rosen, “Metaphysical Dependence”; Schaffer,
“On What Grounds What”; Audi, “Grounding” and “A Clarification and Defense of the Notion of
Grounding”; Bennett, “Construction Area (No Hard Hat Required)” and Making Things Up. Of
course, grounding does not come without its critics. See, for example, Hofweber, “Ambitious, Yet
Modest, Metaphysics”; and Daly, “Scepticism about Grounding.”
Admittedly, this dual role assigned to grounding may seem troublesome

from the start. Explanation, generally speaking, is often relative to our the-
oretical interests and questions raised by our theorizing about this or that.
What is in need of explanation often depends on prior explanations, and
theoretical frameworks often determine what would count as an adequate
explanation within that framework.4 But if grounding is also a worldly meta-
physical relation, then it is not tied to our interests and our ways of seeing the
world. Can one and the same relation be both? Probably yes, as many would
think about causation, for example.5 And this leads some philosophers to
suggest that grounding is a kind of metaphysical causation. When there
is no causal connection between two items, but one nevertheless exists in
virtue of the other, we have a grounding relation. Perhaps, but we should be
careful with this idea of grounding as “metaphysical causation.” There are
some similarities between causation and grounding, for sure, but saying that
grounding is metaphysical causation is no more than a metaphor, and one
that is not easy to unpack.
So when we say that A grounds B, we say that B is what it is in virtue of
it being A. (Or, X is B in virtue of X being A.) Grounding is a metaphysical
relation between things or facts, explanatory, presupposing a hierarchical
structure of the world in which A is more foundational than B. Therefore, it
is widely assumed, and I take it rightly so, that a grounding relation between
A and B must be asymmetrical, irreflexive, and transitive.
Asymmetry: If A grounds B, B cannot ground A.

Irreflexivity: A cannot ground itself.
Transitivity: If A grounds B and B grounds C, then A grounds C.
At this point one might have hoped that we could give some simple and un-
controversial examples of grounding. Alas, simple examples, maybe, but
not uncontroversial. The use of grounding is wide and varied, but in almost
all cases controversial. We can say, for example, that dispositional proper-
ties of objects are grounded in their categorical features. A glass is fragile
in virtue of the molecules that make it up and perhaps laws of physics and
4 I am not endorsing here a wholesale pragmatic view of explanation, certainly not in science. But
it is difficult to deny that, generally speaking, explanations are not tied to our interests and modes of
theorizing about the world.
5 If you hold a Humean conception of causation, would that drive you to a kind of Humean con-
ception of grounding? Not necessarily, I presume, but I leave this, and related issues, unresolved here.
chemistry. Some would say that moral properties are grounded in nonmoral
facts. Legal positivism, as we will see in greater detail below, is best under-
stood as a claim about grounds: positivists claim, and anti-positivists deny,
that legal facts are fully grounded in institutional facts. Some might want to
say that colors are grounded in the reflection of light waves from physical
surfaces and the biochemistry of our eyes and brain. Grounding possibilities
are almost endless. But almost all of them are philosophically controversial.
However, it is precisely this nontrivial aspect of grounding that makes it po-
tentially fruitful. When we can distinguish clearly enough between different
types or categories of facts, and ask a question about the potential grounding
of one type by another, we are given a powerful tool to focus our inquiry
in a way that is nicely structured. For example, if there is a suggestion that
facts of type A ground facts of type B, but then it turns out that, under some
conditions, B would ground A (violating asymmetry), we would know that
something went wrong. Similarly, if transitivity fails, we would know that ei-
ther the grounding relations we assumed are incorrect or, at the very least,
incomplete.
A few more clarifications before we get to some controversies. First, we
need the distinction between complete and partial grounds, which also bears
on the question of transitivity. So the idea is this: A would be a complete
ground of B when the fact that A obtains is sufficient to account for the fact
that B obtains. A partially grounds B when B obtains in virtue of A, but not
only A. So here’s a schematic version:
Grounding: The fact that A grounds the fact that B.

A consists of items (x, y, z).
Complete grounds: The fact that (x, y, z) grounds the fact that B.
Partial grounds: The fact that [(x, y, z) and φ] grounds the fact that B.
In both cases, facts (x, y, z) stand in a grounding relation to B. But in the

second case (x, y, z) is not sufficient to ground B—it also takes another fact,
φ, to provide the complete grounds of B. Notice that, in the case of partial
grounds, transitivity might fail (but not asymmetry and irreflexivity). If
A partially grounds B, and B partially grounds C, it may not be the case that
A grounds C.6 So there is a crucial difference between complete and partial
6 Schaffer argues that partial grounds may fail transitivity and offers a contrastive view to account
for such cases (“Grounding, Transitivity, and Contrastivity”). I’m not aware of anyone who argues,
however, that complete grounding relations might fail transitivity.
grounds and sometimes it matters which one we talk about. When it does,
I will make it explicit whether I’m assuming partial or complete grounds.
What kind of things in the world does grounding relate to? The answer is
somewhat controversial. Most philosophers take grounding to be a relation
between things or facts, but there is no general consensus on this or on what
exactly we consider to be facts.7 First, we need to separate two issues here.
For most friends of grounding, the relation itself is a metaphysical business,
not representational or conceptual. However, when we focus on the question
of the kind of items grounding takes as its relata, things become a bit more
tricky. It is generally thought that grounding is a relation between things in
the world, or worldly facts, not between concepts or meanings or ways of
representing the world. Following Audi and others, I will assume here that
worldly facts are facts about things that exist and their properties, including
their relational properties to other things. Audi, however, takes this worldly
conception of facts to be opposed to a “a conceptual view of facts, according
to which facts will differ if they pick out an object or property via different
concepts.”8 I surmise that the thought here is that if we want to maintain the
grounding relation itself to be a kind of robust metaphysical relation, then
the items grounding applies to have to be worldly facts, facts that would not
vary according to different ways of representing them. And this makes a lot
of sense, up to a point.
The difficulty with the worldly conception, thus defined, is that it leaves us
wondering how grounding relations can obtain between facts that are clearly
mind dependent, and in ways that would be extremely difficult to identify, as
the kind of facts they are, without relying on concepts and modes of repre-
sentation. In the context of social ontology, this would be particularly prob-
lematic. There is, I would suggest, a grounding relation between corporate
entities and laws; there is a grounding relation between laws and institutional
facts; there is a grounding relation between institutional facts and social
rules. None of these facts can be identified or individuated without relying on
some modes of representation. Different concepts of what is a corporate en-
tity would pick out different entities and different facts about those entities.
Or, to take an example more familiar in the grounding literature, the fact that
7 Fine, for example, often talks about grounding relations between propositions (“The Question
of Realism”). He explains, quite convincingly, I think, that truthmakers are not good candidates for
the relata of grounding. A view that would constrain grounding to obtain only between truthmakers
would be unduly restrictive (Fine, “Guide to Ground,” 43–46).
8 Audi, “Grounding,” 103.
Chicago is a city is grounded in a whole series of other facts, maybe all the
way down to the most fundamental particles and forces of physics. So we can
think of the fundamental grounding facts in terms of the worldly concep-
tion. But I don’t see how the fact that is being grounded here—that Chicago
is a city—can be grasped or individuated without relying on concepts.
Are we talking about the city of Chicago only terms of buildings, streets,
people, people’s possessions, interactions between people? And if we rely on
concepts, like the vague and multifarious concept of a city, we must make
room for the possibility that the individuation of facts might differ according
to different concepts we use or different modes of representation.
I am not suggesting that we need to abandon the worldly conception of
facts as the appropriate relata of grounding. I think that Audi’s intuition is
correct, but it wrongly focuses on the question of individuation. I think that
it is hopeless to aspire for an individuation of facts that is entirely worldly,
as Audi defines it. However, even if the individuation of facts or things in
the world often depend on concepts or modes of representation, it does not
mean that the relevant fact is a conceptual matter. Different conceptions of
what a city is would pick out different items in its extension, but the items
are not conceptual—they are not facts about concepts, just facts about things
that exist and relations between them, even if some of those things are mind
dependent. In other words, I will also assume here, along with Audi and
others, that grounding relations pertain to worldly facts, but I will assume a
more permissive attitude to the individuation or categorization of facts that
might be subject to a grounding account.9
The final clarification is potentially much more controversial. Most friends
of metaphysical grounding explicitly avoid any suggestion that would im-
plicate that a grounded fact doesn’t really exist. In other words, the fact that
A is more foundational than B is not meant to imply that B does not exist,
as such. For example, if you hold the view that dispositional properties are
grounded in categorical properties, you are not thereby suggesting that there
are no dispositional properties. Similarly, if you suggest that legal facts are
fully grounded in certain types of institutional facts, you are not denying that
9 This, I think, is precisely how Schaffer would characterize worldly facts grounding takes as its
relata (“On What Grounds What”). Therefore, the question of whether grounding is a relation be-
tween propositions or not would depend on the appropriate ontological conception of what prop-
ositions are. If and to the extent that propositions can be said to exist, there would be no objection to
including propositions in the items grounding applies to; if propositions are just ways of representing
that which exits, then I will assume that we should talk about grounding of the things represented,
not the representations.
laws exist. The problem is that this idea pulls in opposite directions—in one
sense it is intuitively compelling, but in another sense quite the opposite.
The kind of Aristotelian metaphysics that grounding is tied to heavily
relies on the intuition that the world admits of a hierarchical structure; some
things are more foundational than others. Given the fact that there must be
some constitutive relations between things, that some things can build or
constitute others, the idea of hierarchy seems unavoidable. And, as I said,
intuitively compelling. Surely certain things are just more foundational
than others. Physical aspects of the world are more foundational than so-
cial aspects of it—at least we can agree on that. But equally plausible is that
physics is more foundational than chemistry and the latter more founda-
tional than biology. These ideas seem natural and very much in line with a
scientific world view. But then the difficult question is why would this view
not lead to some kind of doubt about the reality of the grounded facts?10
If B is completely grounded in A, why would we not want to say that B is
somehow less real than A? Do we get the existence of B as “an ontological
free lunch,” as sometimes suggested?11 Or is it the case that the Aristotelian
metaphysician wants to have the cake and eat it? There are several avenues
open here, and different philosophers opt for different views.12 On one view,
Schaffer’s for example, existence comes cheap.13 Everything exists, even God
for the atheist. The question is always: Exists as what? In what way and on
what grounds does it exist? For the atheist, God exists as an idea, something
that is fully grounded in peoples’ attitudes. And that seems right. But then
the problem for Schaffer is that that even if everything exists it does not mean
10 One old theme that came up in relation to reduction, and would seem to resurface now with re-
spect to grounding, is the question of whether it has, and necessarily so, an anti-realist import (Fine,
“The Question of Realism”). Michael Dummett for instance, has long wavered on this issue. In some
moods he took it as obvious that if you can provide a full reduction of a given type of facts A to facts of
type B, then, ipso facto, you hold an anti-realist position about A. You would hold the view that facts
of type A, as a type, do not really exist; they are actually facts of type B. But then the opposite seems
equally plausible: if you are a realist about facts of type B, then by reducing A to B, you are ipso facto
a realist about A. After all, you hold the view that A exists or obtains in virtue of being B and so, if
and to the extent that B is real, A is real (e.g., Dummett, The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy, 448).
Either way, I will put the question of realism aside here; an account of the realism versus anti-realism
debate is beyond the scope of the present work.
11 The expression comes from Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, 12.
12 For some critics of ground, this idea that reality may come in degrees is precisely what makes
grounding obscure and esoteric. See, for example, Hofweber, “Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics,”
268; but cf. McDaniel, The Fragmentation of Being. Another issue that perplexes both friends and
foes of ground concerns the question of whether there are ungrounded facts, and if not, how to
avoid an infinite regress. As Sider nicely demonstrates, there are some really tricky issues involved
here (“Ground Grounded”). See also, e.g., Bennett, Making Things Up, ch. 5. These issues will be set
aside here.
13 Schaffer, “On What Grounds What,” 356–362.
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The Stern Chase
A stern chase is a long chase
And the wind dies every hour,
And the veil that covers the ocean’s face
Is Death and Wealth and Power.
Ten leagues behind, we cursed the wind

That would not blow by day,
Three nights we tried to trail her blind
And thrice she crept away;
O the fog blew thin and the breeze drew in
And the leagues lay green and gone,
By our keel that quivered we vowed to win
Ere the birth of the dismal dawn.
The wind’s awake, the rollers break,

Split by the scurrying prow,
We gulp our haste for the booty’s sake
And reef the tops’ls now;
For haste is dear, but the goal is near
And she hath not seen nor heard;
Our lights are lost, but our steel is here,
Our ears are sick for the word.
Our eyes are bright for the chance of night,

We strain across the gap
That yawns ’twixt us and the tossing light
That rocks in the rollers’ lap.
The span half-sped, we loose the head
In the teeth of the ocean’s frown,—
When the waves recoiled from the things we said,
For the stubborn fog dropped down!
The fog that shifts, the fog that drifts
Sank lazily onto the sea,
And we snatched one glimpse thro’ the final rifts
And steered from memory....
Like a wraith of snows her sheets arose,—
“’d-a-port!” her lookout cried;
And our steel leapt forth for its meal of blows,
As our chains caressed her side!
A stern chase is a long chase

And the wind dies every hour,
And the veil that covers the ocean’s face
Is Death and Wealth and Power.
The Minstrel of the Fleet
It was the minstrel of the fleet
That lured the notes from the willing strings,
He holds the heart of you there at his feet
By the call of heart when the minstrel sings.
Years unsped and the world was young

And the haws were green in an English glen;
We kissed by night and the songs we sung
My love and I ne’er sang again.
I kissed my love on her red red lips,

And my love she wept as her heart would break;
And I left my love for the Love-o’-Ships
And my love believed for our True-Love’s sake.
I sailed the heart of the year away,

And I sailed the seal of another twain,
And I loved my love for every day
When shone the Sun or rained the rain.
Years were three and I harked me back

To the hawthorn glen in the golden morn,
I heard the beagle upon my track
And I cursed the soul where the sin was born.
Your love is gone (in scorn they said),

She would not wait for a buccaneer;—
My love was true for my love was dead,
Her grave is green as my soul is sere.
Years be-sped and the world is old

And the dew is fresh on the English green,
And my love’s at rest in the English mould
Here in my heart that ye now have seen.
Hard eyes are soft for the song is sweet,

Hard hearts are soft for the song he sings,
It was the minstrel of the fleet
That woke dead Youth from the wailing strings.
The Ballad of the Forty-
Ye a r
One, men saw for an honest man
And one they saw for a buccaneer,
But no man knew when the hunt began,
Lost in the haze of the Forty-Year.
Friends were they ere the Forty-Year,

Boys together and merry twain;
Youth was on them and Youth was dear
Till Love came by to molest his reign.
One was gay, and he stole the maid,

In the dark of the moon he bore her far,
And the grave one followed them down the glade
And tracked them close by star and star.
He caught them by the yellow sea-shore,

To light the rivals the dawn did rise,
And the grave man’s love the gay one bore,
And love for her captor lighted her eyes.
They fought with knives and the captor bled

So he called on her who was loved of each,
And she sheathed the blow that would stretch him dead,
And slain she lay on the pallid beach.
The victor gazed for deep and long,

Kneeling beside them, his love and friend;
And the vanquished swore to right the wrong
Ten hells for one, at the other end.
And the victor saw the lovelight glow
Deep in her eyes, a wondrous flame,
And the word her dying lips crooned low
Was heard of him for his rival’s name.
The victor looked on her dead, dear face

And hied him off at the dawn of day;—
But the vanquished kissed her lips for grace,
And side by her side he swooned away.
——————
The victor hied him where brave men be
And turned his trick at the wheel of trade;
Many the merchant he steered to sea,—
Free wi’ his liquor and free wi’ a maid.
He sailed the seas from Pole to Pole,

An honest captain, as all men knew,
But he drowned in sin his hidden soul
To cheat his Master out of His due.
But the vanquished set him upon his trail

And tracked him over the world and gone,
And year by year he fared to fail,
Yet tracked and hoped by dawn and dawn.
The vanquished got him a pirate keel

And wreaked his hate on the merchant-kin
Of the one who fled from his sleepless steel,—
And shuddered the earth at his open sin.
He whipt the seas in a blind black ship

That wrought its woes ’twixt tide and tide,—
For the Forty-Year he touched no lip
Save only that of his dying bride.
The deep is cruel, and danger naught,

And life is lightly of tempest held;
The Forty-Year their manhood bought,
By the axe of Time was their vigor felled.
And syne the tracker’s heart is woe,

And the Forty-Year but mocks his ire,—
Yet zone by zone his lean sails go
Till the gilded east meets the western fire.
And the Forty-Year befogged his brain

Fettered his hand and clogged his feet,
And he saw the Past as a wraith of rain ...
And they met by noon on the open street.
Now knew they both what man was there,

And cared they not what Hand had led,
And the tracker lifted his eyes in prayer,
And the tracked man found his voice and said:
“Now here is my breast and here the knife,

But hear my word, my last in life,
And there above is Heaven’s dome,
And then ye may hurry the hot blade home.
“Now the Forty-Year is sped and past

And glad am I to behold your face,
To flee no more from fear at last,
To hug the dagger that ends the race.
“For I have died a thousandfold,

Stabbed have I been by a million blades,
’Tis worse than death to see the gold
That crowns the heads of living maids,
“To see and know that mine I slew,

So that nevermore might she greet the day,—
In all my life hath no man been true,
For the scourge I bear drives Truth away.
“Friends have I sought by like or lure,
And begged their hands in fellowship,
And felt their stabs, than steel more sure,
The scorn that curls the sneering lip;
“So never a friend have I known to love,

And never a love have I known to keep,
Now grip this life I am weary of,
And stab me down to a dreamless sleep!”
The tracker thought of the crimson path

For the Forty-Year his feet had trod,
And he saw the wreck that was left of wrath,
Purged by the flame of the Wrath of God.
“Take up your life and go your way,

No judge am I to fill your bier,
Wait ye the call of Judgment Day!”
This is the tale of the Forty-Year.
Marooned
In all the earth
There is no thing except the sand, and me.
An endless bleaching yellowness lies here
Subject to silence and the silent Sun.
The sand has no beginning, neither end;
Around the isle have I sought end for it
And have found none, and when the wind is high
Even my footprints have been blown away
That marked one circuit ere I made the next.
Sometimes I curse the sea, but all the time
I know that she is guiltless, and I know
That she is kinder than the soulless sand,
For in the end she shall be good to me,
Embrace me tired within her mother-arms
And so shall give me peace. Yet still I curse
Her, for her luring brought me unto this:
Had she not called me those long summer nights
With soft seductive cadence and sweet words
I should not now be waiting here for death.
Life is a ceaseless hunt for turtle’s eggs.

(O humorous employment!) Day on day
I rise up in the crimson morn and see
The red irrevocable Sun rise too
Out of the eastern wave. All day I watch
Him slowly travel his unyielding path,
Hating him all the while, yet hating more
The sullen gloom of twilight that his fall
Forces the world to wear.... All through the day
I search the stolid sand for what may be
Of life that lies where turtles lay before;
For if today I have enough, tomorrow
Demands relentless meed, and thus I live,
Loathing the living, yet afraid to die.
How often have I tried to end it all!

So often have I failed. I, who was known
Wide as a living terror of red death,
Whom countless victims of my sword have cursed
Dying,—I am afraid to kill myself.
I have lain down and bade goodbye to earth,
Glared at the jeering sea and mocking sand,
Taken my dagger by its jade-green hilt,
Looked on the edge that was to drink my blood,
Loosened the shirt upon my breast, and there
Fumbled with grey unfeeling finger-tips
To find the proper rib, have placed the point
Sharp on the spot, have closed my eyes and laid
My left arm down beside me, clutched the dagger,—
And felt the end with thrice ten thousand pangs.
Yet always at the first fierce prick of death

Trembling I snatch the blue unwilling blade
Off from my breast and fling it far away
Hoping that I may lose it, and not know
Such torture more.... And after wide-eyed night,
I have crept back at the first streak of dawn
And sought about the drifted, smitten sand
To find the blade that is my only friend,
And kissed it when I found it.... Suicides
Men brand as cowards; they are more brave than I.
For death would be so quiet. I should hear
Not even the surges beat upon the reef.
I am so far from all the living world
I know the natural vultures come not here;
So would my body lie unpicked and still
Until the Sun had bleached it all away.
Time has unfolded to me many things ...
I am more wise than when I came: I know
That it is folly to upbraid the Sun
For he can take no harm of it; ’tis folly
To rush each morning to the barren cliff
O’erlooking all the ocean, and to scan
The bare horizon for a sail,—because
There is no sail on this side of the earth.
’Tis mad to hope—and surely Hope is dead?
I have killed hope so many aching days,
By myriad hopeless nights has she been slain,
Till I have learned that she is really dead....
And yet, and yet,—she has a terrible ghost!
I have learned too that it is very mad
To rail at Fate, or at the sea or sand,
To curse the coming in or going out
Of days like, each to each. It is in vain
That I do keep my dagger sharp and bright
For I shall never sheathe it in his breast.
I dread the stubborn days’ relentless round,

The dazzling sunlight on the waves that dance
To mock my soul that shall not dance again;
The days are twice as long as may be borne,
Yet must be borne. Sometimes I even laugh
To see how small a thing a man’s life is.
The nights are loneliest. The buoyant stars
May rove across the heavens. I must lie
Flat on my back and watch them; I alone
Must live in one small corner of the world.
There is a tavern in a place I knew,
Kept by a shrew, a veritable hag,—
I cannot even wander in her door,—
How sweet to me her railing now would sound.
I fear the nights ... for then comes Memory.
I am more brave when I forget to think.
... O Love, your eyes shine for me in the night.
I taste the perfume of your last caress,
The last, long, throbbing kissing of your mouth.
Your “I love thee” is magic in my ear
To mingle with the surf upon the shore.
I have lived the life of every man in mine.

I have been sullen as a convict is,
I have been sad as any maid in love,
I have outgibed the mad loud mirth of fools,
I have been happy as a little child,
Have grown religious, touched philosophy,
Have in a breath blasphemed and laughed and wept.
Yet all moods pass. The sea is just the same,
And I am grown old looking on its face.
I know that every wave that laps the strand
Is like to every other wave that comes,
As many follow this one, as the last.
I say my prayers to him, because I know

Somehow that wheresoever he may be
He is awake and hears me. It is sweet
To call around his head the flames of hell,—
It is my only pleasure. And he hears
Across the gulf of time, and in his turn
Curses my hate that will not let him sleep.
The Sun is falling low. Upon the earth

There is no thing except the sand, and me.
Explicet
Dying, you tell me, dying?
The day drifts fast to night;
The craft by the headland lying
Lean to the headland light;
I hear the stout sea-cables sighing,—
And I die tonight....
The ghost of a breeze is blowing,

Failing and falling faint,
There’s none where I am going—
’Fore God, I’m bound there ain’t;
None knew more surely than I’m knowing
I’m no sculptured saint.
I’d hoped to meet him fighting,

Be dead before I fell,—
Death should be more exciting
Than this dull dipsey swell;
I’d always thought to end it fighting,—
But maybe it’s just as well.
Away with that dead grinning

Mimicking crucifix!
I’ll see out my own sinning,
Last cards shall take last tricks;
No whining end to my beginning,
My creed and His won’t mix.
Dying.... I know it: dying.

The sun is sunk from sight;
The stars alone are trying
To send me down some light;
The dead day-wind in the dark is sighing....
It is night....
Here ends the Buccaneer Book; written by Alden Noble, Press-mark
designed by Harry Townsend, and the whole imprinted at the Green
Mountain Press, Brattleboro, Vermont, in December, Nineteen
Hundred and Eight, the Edition being limited to One Hundred and
Fifty Copies
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Foundations of Institutional Reality

An American Presidency: Institutional Foundations of

Institutional Grammar: Foundations and Applications for

Chemistry of Functional Materials Surfaces and

Philosophical Foundations of Precedent (Philosophical

The Dark Double: US Media, Russia, And The Politics Of

Foundations of Decision Analysis Ronald A. Howard

Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality Thomas

Physics, Structure, and Reality Jill North

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

philosophical insights in the right direction. My main purpose here is to

1 Marmor, Social Conventions.

It is not part of this work, however, to offer an analysis of the philosophical

My purpose in this chapter is to begin to clarify some of the key theoretical

1.1. Social Facts and Institutional Facts

A ontologically depends for its existence on B =​df

Among the many possible complications here is a temporal issue: ontolog-

1 See, for example, Koslicki, “Varieties of Ontological Dependence.”

causal links might be necessary features of certain aspects of our sociality.

tialism (“Ontological Dependence”). He suggested that A depends on B just in case B is a constituent

7 Hart, The Concept of Law, 78.

such as using natural language, practicing a religion, or maintaining a legal

13 Hart, The Concept of Law, 8.

“An Institutional Conception of Authority.”

1.2. The Practice Theory of Rules

A social rule, say R, exists in a population S, Hart maintained, if and only if

of Law. Most of the essential points are at 82–​86.

in a given population, accompanied by certain attitudes and dispositions ac-

21 This will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

as shades of redness is very different from ways in which we can categorize

24Sider, Writing the Book of the World.

rules. Natural rules, like, say, norms of instrumental rationality or prac-

erally, as a “systematic assignment of representation” (“Two Conceptions of Semantics,” 323). That is

tween Meaning and Implicature.”

R2: “All X’s who are F ought to φ in context C.”

Let us assume that R2 expresses the idea that if an X is F in context C, X has a

1.3. The Roadmap

with some controversial aspects of metaphysical grounding and its relation

What metaphysics should aim to accomplish is a controversial business. It is

(1) The law in Si at t prescribes Lx (where Lx stands for some prescriptive

Then the following is also true:

(2) There is a law in Si at t that Lx.

But most of them are.

Admittedly, this dual role assigned to grounding may seem troublesome

Asymmetry: If A grounds B, B cannot ground A.

Grounding: The fact that A grounds the fact that B.

In both cases, facts (x, y, z) stand in a grounding relation to B. But in the

Ten leagues behind, we cursed the wind

The wind’s awake, the rollers break,

Our eyes are bright for the chance of night,

A stern chase is a long chase

Years unsped and the world was young

I kissed my love on her red red lips,

I sailed the heart of the year away,

Years were three and I harked me back

Your love is gone (in scorn they said),

Years be-sped and the world is old

Hard eyes are soft for the song is sweet,

Friends were they ere the Forty-Year,

A ontologically depends for its existence on B =df

of Law. Most of the essential points are at 82–86.