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This chapter addresses how laws and natural necessity figure in scientific understanding, by developing and extending Marc Lange’s and John Haugeland’s complementary accounts of the role of laws in scientific practice. Lange and Haugeland identify what laws are from their roles in research and scientific understanding, but from different directions. Lange began with laws’ constitutive, holistic counterfactual or subjunctive invariance, in contrast to accidents. This invariance accounts for the laws’ contribution to inductive strategies, counterfactual reasoning, explanation, and disciplinary orientations even in the “special” sciences, and provides a principled, univocal understanding of the manifold varieties, levels, and domains of necessity expressed by sets of laws. Haugeland took laws as constitutive rules for domains of scientific inquiry. The laws, together with scientific skills and commitments, have a normative role in scientific understanding that requires their characteristic necessity. Haugeland thereby makes intelligible the mutual accountability of data and methods with empirically defeasible theoretical frameworks. The chapter concludes that the mutually constitutive roles of conceptual patterns in the world and scientific capacities for pattern recognition show why scientific understanding is a form of material and discursive niche construction rather than linguistic representation, in order to account for the two-dimensional normativity of conceptual understanding.

This chapter examines normative systems, that is, systems of norms. One regards the rules of a game or of a language, the laws of a country or the regulations and rules of a social club as forming a system. One says that ‘this is a rule of soccer but it is not a rule of rugby’ or that ‘it is a rule of English but not of French’ or that ‘this is part of English law but there is no such law in the American legal system’. Such statements testify to a conception by which certain groups of norms are more than haphazard assemblages of norms. Normative systems are understood to have some kind of unity. The chapter looks at a few kinds of normative system and shows how their unity consists in certain patterns of logical relations among their norms. It explores constitutive rules, systems of interlocking norms, games as systems of joint validity, games as autonomous normative systems, norm-applying institutions, institutionalized systems and exclusionary reasons, and rules of recognition.

Chapter 7 first analyzes the concept of a constitutive rule in terms of essentially intentional activity patterns. Then it defines a form of constitutive agency in terms of that. Finally, it contrasts the account with John Searle’s. The rules of chess are constitutive rules. Following them brings into existence a type of activity that would not exist otherwise. The rules define an activity pattern that can be instantiated unintentionally. The rules are followed when it is instantiated intentionally. Thus constitutive rules are constitutive relative to an activity type defined as the intentional instantiation of a pattern of activity. Constitutive rules make available a form of constitutive agency in which what an agent does intentionally contributes constitutively to bringing about an essentially intentional activity type. Searle says constitutive rules have the form ‘X counts as Y in C’. But these instead define certain moments in activities governed by constitutive rules.

What is it to make an assertion? The literature contains four broad categories of answers: (1) To assert is to express an attitude. (2) To assert is to make a move defined by its constitutive rules. (3) To assert is to propose to add information to the conversational common ground. (4) To assert is to undertake a certain sort of commitment. This chapter discusses the motivations, advantages, and disadvantages of each of these views.

According to the account of practical reasons presented in Chapter 4, those reasons are ultimately grounded in the soundness of certain episodes of practical reasoning. This chapter addresses what it is for an episode of practical reasoning to be correct, which is a necessary condition for their soundness. It first shows that, at least when it is applied to reasoning, the notion of correctness need not itself be understood in terms of reasons, which would render the constructivist’s overall view circular. Then, it presents an account that characterizes correct reasoning as reasoning in compliance with the constitutive rules of that activity. It also discusses how those rules can be determined, and what the constructivist should say about their ontological status.

The speech act of assertion is introduced and its core features are described. Four accounts of assertion are presented: the attitudinal account (associated with Bach and Harnish), the common ground account (associated with Stalnaker), the commitment account (associated with Brandom), and the constitutive rule account (associated with Williamson). Virtues and drawbacks of each are discussed, with special attention paid to their ability to account for assertion’s core features. Of these accounts, the constitutive account appears to stand the best chance of explaining assertion’s core features. Key objections to the constitutive norm account are presented and discussed.

The question of whether meaning is inherently normative has become a central topic in philosophy and linguistics. It also has crucial implications for anthropology and for understanding the evolution of language. This chapter defends the normativity of meaning against some recent challenges. Anti-normativists contend that while there are “semantic principles”—aka explanations of meaning—specifying conditions for the correct application of expressions, these are either not genuinely normative or they are not in fact constitutive of meaning. This dilemma can be defused if one clarifies the notions of norm, rule, and convention, distinguishes different dimensions of semantic normativity, and pays attention to different types of mistakes that can afflict linguistic behaviour. One needs to keep apart: norms of truth and of meaning, regulative and constitutive rules, rules and the reasons for following or disregarding them, pro tanto and all things considered obligations. On that basis the chapter argues that correctness is a normative notion and that constitutive rules in general and explanations of meaning in particular play various normative roles in linguistic practices. Furthermore, while speakers may conform to and occasionally violate semantic principle for defeasible prudential reasons, this is perfectly compatible with the principles having a normative status. The final section discusses the question of whether human communication requires communally shared rules or conventions and the age-old problem of circularity: how could such conventions be essential to language, given that the latter appears prerequisite for establishing and communicating conventions in the first place?

This chapter summarizes in broad terms the work of the book, which focuses on how the multiple agents account of collective action can be extended to institutional and mob action. It reviews the problems raised by singular group agents. It reviews the account of logical form developed for grammatically singular group action sentences. It reviews the account of constitutive rules and constitutive agency. It reviews the analysis of status functions, collective acceptance, and conventions. It reviews the account of membership in singular group agents. It reviews the account of proxy agency. It reviews the application to corporations and nation states. It concludes with a big picture view of the territory and brief description of directions for future research.

Chapter 6 lays groundwork for explaining what a constitutive rule is and how they underwrite certain important forms of constitutive agency by giving an analysis of the concept of a certain category of essentially intentional action type, and locating it in a taxonomy of essentially intentional action types. It begins with an overview of essentially intentional action types. Next it analyzes one sort of essentially intentional action type as involving two components, a requirement that a certain activity pattern be instantiated and a requirement that it be instantiated intentionally, focusing on tic-tac-toe as an example. It distinguishes these sorts of essentially intentional action types from those defined by an intentionally pursued goal. It discusses briefly essentially intentional primitive action types, and then takes up a puzzle about intending to perform essentially intentional action types. It concludes with a taxonomy of essentially intentional action types by way of summary.

This chapter discusses a competing consensus about the relation between social facts and facts about individual people. This view, which is closely associated with John Searle, has been called the “Standard Model of Social Ontology.” The idea is that the social world is a kind of projection of our thoughts, or attitudes, onto the world. The community as a whole makes the social world by thinking of it in a particular way. Printed paper bills are money, for instance, because they are thought of as money. The chapter describes Searle’s theory of institutional facts, constitutive rules, and the assignment of status through collective acceptance. It also describes Hume’s theory of social convention, another example of this model. The chapter describes the tension between the “Standard Model” and the consensus view on ontological individualism.

This chapter presents the author’s grounding−anchoring model of social ontology. It explains how the two competing traditions about the nature of the social world can be unified. Building on Searle’s rough notion of “constitutive rules,” the chapter points out that they are best understood as giving the grounding conditions for a kind of social fact. It then introduces and explains the notion of a frame, which is a structure containing a universe of possible worlds, with the grounding conditions for social facts fixed in a particular way. Using frames, the chapter refines constitutive rules into “frame principles.” The chapter then introduces anchoring. Anchors are facts that “put in place” a frame principle. That is, they set up the grounding conditions for a kind of social fact. Finally, the chapter distinguishes two distinct inquiries: an inquiry into the grounds of social facts, and an inquiry into how frame principles are anchored.

This chapter defends the intent-to-deceive conception of lying against the challenge posed by bald-faced lies. It argues that bald-faced lies aren’t lies, because they’re not assertions. The chapter begins by arguing that lies must be assertions. Next, it sketches a view of assertion according to which a constitutive rule of asserting is being responsive to evidence in a particular way. Then, focusing on two well-known examples of bald-faced lies, it argues that those speakers don’t assert anything; rather, they do something more like what an actor does. The argument thus removes an important objection to the intent-to-deceive tradition. It also offers a different way of thinking about lying. Defenders of bald-faced lies sometimes describe them as attempts to ‘go on record’. This chapter defends an alternate view according to which lying involves taking a kind of (epistemic) responsibility for the content of one’s utterance.

This chapter develops an account of the structure of the body of information that is the common ground, and of the role of that structure in explaining some of the ways that the common ground changes in response to manifest events that take place in the course of a discourse. It defends the thesis that the notion of common ground is intelligible independently of the rules of any conventional linguistic practice with constitutive rules, though it also considers the role of shared information about a conventional linguistic practice. A central concern of the chapter is with the nature and role of the notion of presupposition accommodation.

Assertion is a phenomenological category—that is, assertions are experienced as such by speaker-hearers. Speech-act phenomenology is distinguished from semantic perception. We not only experience speech acts, we experience the words and sentences we utter as distinct objects with properties different from those of the speech acts. Using this distinction, evidence against agential-state assertion norms, such as a sincere-belief norm, a knowledge norm, or a warrant norm, etc., is given. Anonymous assertions or shapes resembling inscriptions produced by accident are experienced as assertions and as possessing meaning even when they are recognized to be products of sheer accidents and in reality without utterers. Spokespersons for companies, actors in advertisements for products, cartoon characters (that don’t exist), and flakes who can’t be trusted are all experienced nevertheless as asserting, and what they assert as assertions. The common-ground expectation view is supported. Compatibly with this, Moorean remarks are often naturally utterable.

Procedural rules that are designed to facilitate the adjudication process are neither coercive nor restrictive. Rather, they are optional tools that enable individuals to achieve their goals. Respect for autonomy does not require the legal system to afford litigants a right to proceed in person under all circumstances. As long as the system as a whole offers them adequate opportunities to present their cases and enforce their substantive rights, it is respecting their autonomy. The procedural activity does not have a normative value which in itself justifies litigants in insisting on exercising their procedural rights in person rather than through counsel. For litigants who cannot afford a lawyer, a right to self-representation is more a symptom of a failed regime of liberal individualism than an expression of a high degree of respect for autonomy. What liberal societies owe their citizens is an effective, affordable system of justice, not an unfettered right to self-representation, which leaves untutored and unrepresented lay disputants to suffer almost inevitable consequences.

Conjunctivism is the view that anchors are just another kind of grounds, and therefore, that the grounding conditions for social facts are conjunctive: they include both grounds and anchors. A conjunctivist takes money to involve two kinds of grounds. It is partly grounded by the conditions we collectively accept as the grounds for something being money. And it is partly grounded by the collective acceptance of a constitutive rule. Both, according to the conjunctivist, are grounds. In contrast, the grounding−anchoring model makes a sharp distinction between grounds and anchors. This chapter explains and defends the distinction, arguing that anchors are not just another kind of ground. It shows why the strongest evidence in favor of conjunctivism fails, that conjunctivism leads to a regress, and that conjunctivism gets the grounding conditions wrong for social facts. Ontological individualism should not be understood as a thesis about anchoring at all.

This introductory chapter begins by suggesting how philosophical anti-exceptionalism—the view that good philosophical inquiry is continuous with good inquiry considered more broadly—can be fruitfully paired with philosophical traditionalism—the view that typical philosophical inquiry is a priori inquiry into essential natures. Indeed, it is claimed that a priori inquiry into essential natures can be largely accounted for by recognizing the existence of pure rational thinking. Pure rational thinking involves successfully following the constitutive rules of thought—rules that are constitutive because following them grounds the capacity for having propositional attitudes. Pure rational thinking, if it exists, is not extravagant; neither, then, is any philosophical inquiry that pure rational thinking explains. The chapter ends by pointing out that acknowledging pure rational thinking is at odds with assigning a central epistemological role to intuitions.

In this chapter, Daya Krishna reflects on freedom in relation to reason, ethics, and aesthetics. More specifically, he examines the constitutive role that the presupposition of freedom plays in our self-consciousness as rational, aesthetically sensitive moral agents. Krishna calls into question the presumption that freedom is a first person-singular property. He argues that Immanuel Kant's idea of a constitutive rule—the kind of rule that makes reason possible, the kind of rule that structures moral life, the kind of rule that makes aesthetic judgment as opposed to the expression of sentiment—is the idea of a transcendental condition for a sort of practice. According to Krishna, the best model for such a practice in which rules are constitutive are games and other collective activities, in which constitutive rules free us to participate. He concludes that the exercise of freedom affects not only others but, in a radical and essential sense, freedom itself.