Abstract
The paper is an investigation on how behaviour relates to norms, i.e. how a certain conduct acquires meaning in institutional terms. The simplest mechanism determining this phenomenon is given by the ‘count-as’ relation, generally associated with constitutive rules, through which an agent has the legal capacity, via performing a certain action, to create, modify or destroy a certain institutional fact. In the analytic literature, however, the ‘count-as’ relation is mostly approached for its classificatory functions, mapping entities to categories whose members carry institutional properties. Besides making explicit this double function, the paper reconsiders the relation between constitutive rules and regulative rules, and introduces a proposal on the ontological status of constitution.
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Notes
- 1.
We may read the perspective of the legal scholar in this claim. In an actual social setting, this is often not the case: players may play even without knowing any rule, just mirroring what others are doing (mimesis) or, more rationally, fabricating their own models of the rules in place.
- 2.
In Searle’s words, the prohibition of stealing is “a constitutive rule of the institution of private property”, [1, p. 168].
- 3.
The material implication allows to convert a logic conditional into a composition of disjunction and negation: \((a \rightarrow b) \leftrightarrow (\lnot a \vee b)\). It makes explicit the ‘constraint’ nature of the operator of implication, rather than (epistemic) ‘production’ aspects.
- 4.
“The rules for checkmate or touchdown must ‘define’ checkmate in chess or touchdown in American Football [...]”, [1, p. 34].
- 5.
Informally, given two concepts X and Y, ‘X subsumes Y’, or ‘Y is subsumed by X’, means that X (e.g. animal) is an abstraction of Y (e.g. whale).
- 6.
- 7.
Bulygin [12] suggests the following: “a player must make a given number of moves in a given period of time on pain of losing the game”, where losing can be seen as a sort of punishment, considering the pragmatics around games.
- 8.
To reiterate, the ‘must’ that is used in certain normative statements does not refer to a (conditional) duty, but to an institutional power. Consider for instance “in order to perform a real estate transaction, buyers and sellers must sign a written contract”. In this sort of cases, ‘must’ is derived from practical necessity (“to be obliged to”), more than normative aspects (“to have the obligation to”): e.g. if buyer and seller want to perform a sale, they don’t have any other way but signing a contract.
- 9.
On the other hand, when a relation can be represented between the outcomes, the procedural model requires the introduction of adequate revision mechanism for operational closure, and therefore, it becomes less efficient from a representational perspective.
- 10.
Disposition is a long-debated notion in philosophy, especially in metaphysics. Lewis provides in [28] a famous critique to the classic account based on logic conditionals, and a reformulation in causation terms, which is compatible with the present proposal.
- 11.
In a similar spirit, Sartor extends in [29] action-power with generic-power, that can be associated to natural events as well (e.g. death, timeouts, etc.).
- 12.
The canonic form of constitutive rules (1) implies that when we are not in C, X may not count as Y. This shows that it is impossible that constitution corresponds to identity, as X would be equal to Y in certain cases, and not equal to Y in others.
- 13.
If supervenience holds, it is impossible that there are two paintings that are the same from a physical point of view (e.g. for their distribution of colours), but they are different in respect of how beautiful they are (to respond to relativist critics, we should add for the same observer and in the same mental state).
- 14.
This idea was briefly presented in [33] as well, but it remains underspecified.
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Sileno, G., Boer, A., van Engers, T. (2018). Revisiting Constitutive Rules. In: Pagallo, U., Palmirani, M., Casanovas, P., Sartor, G., Villata, S. (eds) AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems. AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL 2015 2016 2016 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10791. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00178-0_3
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