Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
http://ant.sagepub.com
Vol 6(1): 30–39
10.1177/1463499606061732

Commentary on
Searle’s ‘Social
ontology: Some basic
principles’
Culture and institutions

Roy D’Andrade
University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

Abstract
In response to Searle’s article on social ontology, this commentary focuses on the
relation between the concept of culture and Searle’s work on institutions. Issues
concerning the super-organic property of culture and collectivities, the fusion between
ideas and social agreement found in institutions, and the relation of values to
institutions are discussed. The constructs culture, society, and personality are
deconstructed, revealing the high degree of overlap in the referents of these terms.
Finally, a definitional reformulation of these three constructs is presented, treating
each as a different kind of process.

Key Words
culture • institution • ontology • personality • society • theory • value

In the early 1950s, Talcott Parsons formulated a new definition of culture. This defi-
nition raised issues about the relation between culture and social institutions. Kluck-
hohn, much respected and beloved, did not agree with Parsons’ formulation.
Kluckhohn’s dissent, presented in a footnote to a summary statement by the authors of
Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951), concerned the boundaries
that Parsons drew around the concept of culture. Kluckhohn said:

one whose training, experiences, and prejudices are anthropological tends to feel the
present statement [on culture] does not give full weight to the extent to which roles
are culturally defined, social structure is part of the cultural map, the social system is built
upon girders supplied by explicit and implicit culture. (in Parsons and Shils, 1951: 27,
emphasis added)

30
D’ANDRADE Commentary on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’

Kluckhohn also rejected the Parsonian position separating culture from behavior. The
canonical definition presented in Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s review of over 400 defi-
nitions of culture holds that culture includes both patterns of behavior and patterns for
behavior and artifacts.

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and
transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups,
including their embodiment in artifacts. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 357)

Kluckhohn’s position was not followed by the young anthropologists emerging from
Harvard. Schneider’s position was almost pure Parsons: ‘cultural constructs, the cultural
symbols, are different from any systematic, regular, verifiable pattern of actual, observed
behavior. That is, the pattern of observed behavior is different from culture’ (1968: 5).
Schneider thought this because, following Parsons, he believed that if culture included
behavior, the concept of culture could not be used to explain behavior. Geertz, was, in
his way, even more scathing, saying that the omnibus definition of culture in
Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man was a ‘conceptual morass’ (Geertz, 1973: 4).
Parsons thought of institutions as a ‘zone of interpenetration’ between the culture
system and the social system. He held that ‘the institutional structure of society must be
regarded as a special aspect of the social system’ (Parsons, 1954: 239), but at the same
time he also said that institutions were ‘culturally patterned’ (Parsons 1973: 54–5).
However, these metaphors of maps and girders and patterns and interpenetrations are
not very helpful. What, in simple words, is the relation between culture and institutions?
Several things stand out in trying to construct the history of ideas about culture and
society since the Parsons–Kluckhohn dispute. First, with the exception of Searle’s work,
there are few well-developed definitions of institutions, even from economists and
sociologists doing the best research on institutional change. Douglass North, Nobel
laureate and pioneer in the development of the new institutional economics, defines
institutions as ‘the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, the humanly devised
constraints that shape human interaction’ (North, 1990: 3). The problem with this defi-
nition, like most definitions of institutions, is that it is much too broad. Following
North’s definition, driving on the left and putting the knife on the right become insti-
tutions. No distinction is made between norms and institutions or between constitutive
rules and regulative rules.
Theda Skocpol, whose book States and Social Revolutions (1979) did so much to place
the institution of the state at the center of understandings about historical change, does
not, so far as I can find, define institutions or organizations. But Skocpol is clear about
the dangers of conflating cultural systems with the social order. She says:

[According to Sewell], ideology is ‘constitutive of social order . . .’ Who thinks about

cultural meanings this way? Who treats culture as ‘constitutive of the social order’ –
which means fusing into one concept both social relations and meaningful discourse
. . . Anthropologists, of course. (1994: 202, italics added)

A major contribution of Searle’s book, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), is

that it provides an in-depth analysis of the construction of institutions. This analysis

31
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

makes possible a better understanding of the relations between institutions and culture,
institutions and norms, and institutions and values. It also allows us to see the relation
of culture to society in a new way.

THE ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONS

For Searle, institutions are created by the assignment of a status function based on a
constitutive rule of the form X counts as Y in context C; thus a dollar bill counts as (is)
money, and taking someone’s wallet counts as (is) theft. A truly huge number of such
status functions are collectively agreed upon in any society. The fact that such constitu-
tive rules are collectively agreed upon then serves as the basis of assigning various deontic
powers (rights, duties, obligations, responsibilities – called here norms) to X because X
counts as Y and Y has these powers.
Institutions can be corporate, like Microsoft, or non-corporate, like chess and property.
They may be temporally based, like the 4th of July, or territorially based, like the state.
They may be assigned to people, like roles, or to physical objects, like money and property,
or to events, like an election. They may be general to the entire society, like a constitu-
tional right, or specific to a small group like the secret handshake of the Masons. They
may be formal or informal. They may be rigid in definition and assigning powers, or
quite vague. And they may simply create Y out of thin air, the way a business corpora-
tion is created out of pure nothing by the right kind of legal act. The incredibly wide
spread of things that can be institutions is due to the fact that humans can symbolize
almost anything.
Searle’s article in this journal issue and his book treat these points in detail. The overall
picture is clear and internally consistent, and so far as I know, unquestioned as an original
and accurate account of the construction of institutions. Searle is especially effective in
pointing out the great power of institutions, the importance of language in the construc-
tion of institutions, the systematic relations between institutions, and the objective
facticity of institutions. And Searle’s account is universal; according to ethnographic
accounts all societies have institutions such as roles and feast days and property and
marriage.
Prototypically, the term institution refers to those institutions that create, formally or
informally, an organized collectivity, like the post office, the Congress, or the family.
However, according to ordinary usage, marriage and Thanksgiving and dowry and
property are also institutions. Thus one can distinguish between corporate institutions
– like the post office or the family – in contrast to non-corporate institutions like
property and money. The important similarity is the fact that both are constructed
through the same symbolic format and both involve the assignment of special powers
to X as Y. But it is important to note corporate institutions have certain distinct causal
powers. Corporate institutions can act as agents; they can have rights and duties like
people, can be sued, become bankrupt and so on. There is no way to sue a dollar bill,
although it has the power to serve as a medium of exchange and be money.

COLLECTIVES
To return to the issue of the relation between culture and institutions and the social
system, given Searle’s formulation, are institutions culture? Of course, if we return to the
conceptual morass of the omnibus definition of culture, there is no issue because almost

32
D’ANDRADE Commentary on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’

everything is culture from crocks and pots to dining at the Savoy. (In fact, later on it
will be argued that this is not such a bad idea.) But in any case a basic question remains:
How are institutions related to shared systems of ideas and meanings, whatever they are
called?
The first thing to note is that the idea that X counts as Y in context C is not just a
shared idea. First of all, as Searle points out, this kind of sharing is not the simple
aggregate sum of what individuals believe. The formula has to be collectively shared; it
must be something we share. This we is important. Institutions cannot be understood
as just the operation of individual minds, since for money to be money and marriage to
be marriage there has to be collective agreement about what these things are. The cogni-
tion that is part of the creation of institutions is not the result of a group of people just
thinking the same thing, as if they had all somehow individually and singularly decided
to think about funny looking pieces of paper as money. Not only is this unlikely, it
wouldn’t do the crucial thing that institutions do. That is, some number of people each
individually thinking something doesn’t bind anyone to anything. Institutions, by their
nature, bind us to do what is jointly agreed upon. If some piece of paper counts as
money, then you must accept it as money. And if you say you don’t believe it is money,
I will take you to the bank and prove that it is money. You can’t believe it isn’t money
unless you are crazy, because as a reasonable person you understand that money is
precisely what we collectively agree is money. As Searle says, money is ontologically
subjective but epistemologically objective. Even if you were from Alpha Centuri, you
would quickly learn what money is if you visited New York City.
Margaret Gilbert, a philosopher from the same analytic tradition as Searle, argues that
collectivities are created by people having a sense of common identity expressed by the
full-blooded use of we (1979). Gilbert contrasts the full-blooded sense of we with what
she calls the tendentious sense of we, exemplified by the hospital nurse who inquires of
a patient ‘How did we sleep last night?’ Gilbert differs from Searle in stressing that
collectives must involve a joint commitment or potential readiness to do something. By
the joint commitment that comes with being part of a collective, the members of a
collective are bound to the courses of action undertaken by the collective and are
obligated to follow them. For example, following an example of Gilbert’s, if a university
department, following its rules for making such decisions, decides not to hire some
candidate, the department chair may not then offer the rejected candidate the job. She
is obligated not to. However, the chair might appropriately say something like ‘We
decided not to hire you, but I wish we had’, distinguishing the part of her mind which
is singular from the part that is collective.
Recently, new findings have emerged which suggest that understanding alone cannot
be the whole story of collective cognition. As Tomasello et al. say:

Briefly, the main finding is that some nonhuman primates understand more about
intentional action and perceptions than was previously believed (and this is also true,
to some degree, of children with autism). But they do not thereby engage socially
and culturally with others in the ways that human children do. Therefore, under-
standing the intentional actions and perceptions of others is not by itself sufficient
to produce human-like social and cultural activities. Something additional is
required. Our hypothesis for this ‘something additional’ is shared intentionality. We

33
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

propose that human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for
participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordi-
nated action plans (joint intentions). Interactions of this type require not only an
understanding of the goals, intentions, and perceptions of other persons, but also, in
addition, a motivation to share these things in interaction with others – and perhaps
special forms of dialogic cognitive representation for doing so. The motivations and
skills for participating in this kind of ‘we’ intentionality are woven into the earliest
stages of human ontogeny and underlie young children’s developing ability to partici-
pate in the collectivity that is human cognition. (Tomasello et al., forthcoming)

My society, a huge collective, agrees that certain things count as property. As a member
of the collective, I share, whether I want to or not, that commitment. We have agreed
that property is property. Even if there is a part of me – some individual, Bartleby-like
part – that does not agree that things are really property, that does not diminish the
power of the fact that we have agreed to treat certain things as property. Furthermore,
my national collective has collectively decided that I am a member of the collective – I
was born in this country, and therefore count as a citizen – and since I am a member I
am bound by the laws of this nation no matter what I think about these laws. If
individual A, as an institutional fact, is defined as a member of collective Q, and this
collective is committed to P, then, as a member of Q, A is committed to P, no matter
what A may feel about it. The evidence is that this is a universal human rule, one that
admits of few exceptions. We are a social species.
In summary, institutions are formed by collective intentions, not singular cognitions,
shared or unshared. Collective obligations typically trump singular wishes. This implies
that there is a superordinate reality that has enormous causal power over individuals, as
Durkheim argued. Ontological prejudices against the existence of the conscience collec-
tive notwithstanding, who will argue that the world is not this way?

FUSIONS
While there is not likely to be much assent to the idea that collectivities are a super-
ordinate level of reality, perhaps at least the argument that the constitutive rules of
institutions are not the same as ordinary cultural meanings can be accepted, and that
the difference is that some kind of collective coercion is involved. Contra Skocpol,
institutions are a fusion of the social (the collective) and the ideational (the cultural
proposition that X counts as Y in context C). These fusions, however ordinary in our daily
life, are hard to think about because they create as single entities things we believe are
ontologically distinct. Ideas are one kind of thing while collective agreement is another
kind of thing. It is hard to get one’s mind around the fact that there can be an entity –
a real thing – that is both. But again, there it is – an institution is a thing formed by the
fusion of a cultural idea that X counts as Y in context C with a collective commitment
to this idea. An agreed upon idea is not just an idea. It is something both agreed upon
and an idea. Neither has causal priority. Paradoxically, one cannot think an institution
away because it is more than a thought, yet an institution cannot exist unless people
think it is real.
For example, although the nation can be talked about as if it were basically just an
idea – an imagined community, as Benedict Anderson says (1991) – a nation is more

34
D’ANDRADE Commentary on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’

than something imagined. Nations, unlike ideas, are institutionally created collectivities
that can declare war on each other, kill each other’s citizenry, expand boundaries, and
on and on. The nation has an enormous range of causal powers. Perhaps some people
like to believe that the modern nation is basically something imagined because if it were
then it could be thought away. It is interesting that most cultural anthropologists, in
their current Hegalian mode, like to talk about culture as if it were nothing but pure
idea and simply exclude the term institution from their talk (see, for example, discussions
about culture in Borofsky et al., 2001). And usually when cultural anthropologists say
anything about institutions, they talk about them as if they were an epiphenomenon of
ideas, ignoring the fact that the causal powers of institutions are strikingly different than
the causal powers of ideas.
Institutions tend to be relatively permanent, but they do change, sometimes by top-
down authority, sometimes by complex bottom-up interactions. Typically the incre-
ments are small. The USA has a federal system and a presidency, Great Britain has a
centralized government and a parliamentary system, and neither is likely to change much
in the proximate future whatever their advantages or disadvantages might be. While
economic conditions, population pressure, new ideas, and many other factors influence
the creation and modification and elimination of institutions, the degree of complexity
of interactions typically involved in institutional change makes institutional change
different in quality and quantity than the change of ideas simple.
An important fact about institutions is that they are constructed by a linked pair of
fusions. The first is the fusion of the constitutive rule with collective commitment. The
second is the fusion of an idea about how things should be with a collective commit-
ment that they will be this way. This second kind of fusion is called here a norm. Norms
are the collective shoulds of life, which Searle calls deontic powers. Norms are more than
just ideas. Like institutions, norms are collectively agreed upon; one can be sanctioned
for breaking a norm. Thus an institution contains two basic ideas: the first that X counts
as Y, the second that certain norms apply to situations involving Y. For each of these
ideas there has to be a separate collective agreement and commitment.

VALUES
Values that are embedded in institutions are said to be institutionalized. Some examples
may be helpful. Consider the institution of grades. Certain letters – A, B, C and so on –
count as the symbolic entity called a grade. Grades have procedural powers; one must
have passing grades in certain courses in order to graduate; very high grades can give one
honors; bad grades can lead to suspension and so on. Values are embedded in the insti-
tution of grades in the sense that the normative standards that are used to assign grades
involve the application of certain values. Grades are based on value criteria concerning
knowledge, learning, and performance. These values are institutionalized in grades, as
well as in other educational institutions such as appointments, promotions, graduations,
honors and so forth.
To give another example, the parent role is part of the institution of the family. This
symbolic status is assigned on the basis of biological and social facts, and once assigned,
brings with it a whole complex of formal and informal rights and duties, creating a host
of normative obligations. The norms of parenting vary from family to family, but almost
always include taking care of the physical and psychological health of the children,

35
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

providing financial support, being loving, disciplining, and so forth. Evaluation of how
well the parent performs the role institutionalizes these norms as value criteria for
parental roles. Parents who do not spend enough time with their children are thought
to be doing the wrong thing; wrong because the values expressed by the norm have been
violated. To not spend enough time with one’s children is taken to mean that one does
not really care, and caring about one’s children is a strong value. And once values become
normative criteria, they can then legitimate these norms. For example, why should we
have grades? To assess and reward the competence of the student, something that is
valued. Thus the value we place on competence legitimates the giving of grades if these
values have been personally internalized.
Once a set of values has been embedded in an institution, then performing the activi-
ties regulated by that institution brings the value criteria directly into the life of the
participant. One may not like the values institutionalized in military life, but once in
the military these values form criteria one must accommodate to. One salutes and does
as one is ordered, and these norms embed values of hierarchy and authority into everyday
routines. People often participate in institutions with institutionalized values that they
themselves have not internalized. There are students who do not like school because the
values of gaining knowledge and learning are not their values. There are employees who
do not like the world of business because they disvalue competition and the pursuit of
profit. It is theoretically possible for whole institutional complexes to exist, embedded
with value criteria nobody believes in but everyone must act in accordance with.
This independence of institutionalized values from internalized values makes for
complexities. Values live in three different places. They live in the culture – culture in
the sense of symbolic representations that are part of the ideational heritage of a society.
For example, almost every movie has strong value messages. Values also live in the
psyche, where they are more or less deeply internalized. And they live in social insti-
tutions, where they form the evaluative criteria based on the norms created by that
institution, further legitimizing these norms. Some degree of integration is normally
found among the values found in the ethical ideas of a society, in its personalities, and
in its institutions. It is this core of integrated values that makes a society good and right
for its people.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND

PERSONALITY
One of the things a Searlean analysis leads to is the deconstruction of the notions of
culture and society and personality, in which these global constructs are broken into
more specific constructs, such as institutions, motives, values, and norms. Once taken
apart this way, it is apparent that these elements overlap considerably. Consider the
following schema:

personality (psyche) motives ideas values

culture ideas values norms? institutions?
society/social structure values? norms institutions practices

The layout shown here makes clear the high degree to which psyche, culture and
society are composed of overlapping elements. Looking at this high degree of overlap,

36
D’ANDRADE Commentary on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’

one wonders how they could ever have been defined as distinct. One of the central con-
fusions in the social sciences has been the tendency to think that what makes culture
and society and psyche different is their content. While content is normally what makes
things different, the attempt to define society, or culture, or personality in terms of
content results in problems and perplexities because, as outlined here, these terms
contain so many overlapping elements.
One solution to the overlap problem is to restrict each concept to non-overlapping
items. Following this strategy, personality would be restricted to motives, culture to ideas,
and society to practices. But then what is one to do with ideas that are culturally shared
yet central to people’s personalities? Or with institutions like games, rituals, and forms
of marriage that, by almost anyone’s definition, are both part of culture and part of
society? And what can one do with values, which are important elements of all three
concepts?
Analytically, what is distinct about psyche (psyche is what psychology is a science of )
and culture and society is not a matter of content but rather the way in which elements
are organized. For example, what is different about the organization that connects
elements of culture and organization that connects elements of the psyche is that culture
refers to the flow of mental contents across persons and over time, while psyche refers to
the causal organization of elements within the person. Cognitive models tend to gener-
alize easily across persons because cognitive learning is quick and can effectively be
formulated and communicated in natural language. But for values to function as felt
evaluations, not just thoughts about what is good, and for norms to function as felt
shoulds, there must be some degree of internalization (Spiro, 1987). Internalization
typically requires socialization, which is why values do not generalize as easily and
extensively as cognitive models. More Americans know about the lack of civil liberties
in China than care about them. Motives and sentiments are even less often part of a
cultural heritage because they are even harder to teach to everyone.
Just as culture is a characteristic of elements that move across place and person and
time, so psyche can be thought of as the way ideas, motives, feelings and values are
organized within a single person. Personality is the organization of ideas, motives,
feelings, and values within the human being. Society, on the other hand, involves the
organization of practices that produce the basic human necessities and frivolities – food,
shelter, companionship, self-protection, reproduction, education, entertainment and so
on. Functionalism is still a bad word in the social sciences, but the fact is that most of
the practices generated by institutions do something, people know what they do, and
people attend to making sure these practices do what they should. Society exists because
practices do what they do – the bread gets to the table, the business produces its
products, the schools teach, the churches minister to their congregations and so on.
These practices are organized in human societies by institutions, norms, and values.
Thus, in the conceptual framework presented here, culture, psyche, and society are not
words for different kinds of things, they are words for different organizing processes.
They are needed for this purpose. But they have become a source of confusion because
they are used as if they were names for different kinds of stuff.
As an aside, one nice thing about defining culture as process is that one can have both
the omnibus definition in which culture contains artifacts, institutions, symbols, ideas,
and dining at the Savoy, and also have culture as a causal force or causal power. For

37
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

example, the activity of typing, which I am now doing, plus the computer I am using
and the English language I am writing in are all causally linked to the past and to other
people through a long chain of historical causal processes. They did not just appear out
of nowhere. I am typing because (among other reasons) typing is part of my culture, I
am using a computer because (among other reasons) computers are part of my culture,
and I am writing in English because (among other reasons) English is part of my culture.
Culture in the sense of a historical causal process has enormous power; it has brought
us most of what we do and have.
As a life work, Searle has taken central but poorly conceptualized ordinary human
phenomena – speech acts, institutions, intentions, and consciousness – and brought to
them the analytic skills of the philosopher in defining, analyzing, deconstructing and
reconstructing these phenomena. Such skills are in short supply in the social sciences,
where conceptual confusions abound and invade our theories. The Construction of Social
Reality is an outstanding contribution to philosophic analysis in the social sciences, provid-
ing a foundation from which a clearer description of social and cultural life can be built.

References
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Borofsky, R., F. Barth, R. Shweder, L. Rodseth and N. Stolzenberg (2001) ‘WHEN:
A Conversation about Culture’, Current Anthropology 103: 432–46.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gilbert, Margaret (1979) On Social Facts. London: Routledge.
Kluckhohn, Clyde (1949) Mirror for Man. New York: McGraw Hill.
Kroeber, A.L. and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and
Definitions (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and
Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 47 no. 1). Cambridge, MA: The [Peabody]
Museum.
North, Douglass (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parsons, Talcott (1954) ‘The Problem of Controlled Institutions’, in Talcott Parsons
Essays in Sociological Theory (rev. edn), pp. 30–57. New York: The Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott (1973) ‘Clyde Kluckhohn and the Integration of Social Science’, in
W.W. Taylor, J.L. Fisher and E.Z. Vogt (eds) Culture and Life: Essays in Memory of
Clyde Kluckhohn, pp. 54–5. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils (1951) Towards a General Theory of Action.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schneider, David (1968) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Searle, John R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.
Skocpol, Theda (1979) States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Skocpol, Theda (1994) Social Revolutions in the Modern World. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Spiro, Melford (1987) ‘Collective Representations and Mental Representations in
Religious Symbol Systems’, in Melford Spiro Culture and Human Nature:

38
D’ANDRADE Commentary on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’

Theoretical Papers of Melford E. Spiro (edited by Benjamin Kilborne and L.L.

Langness), pp. 161–84. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Joseph Call, Tanya Behne and Henrike Moll
(forthcoming) ‘Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural
Cognition’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

ROY G. D’ANDRADE is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. His major research
area is in psychological anthropology, especially the relation between cognition, culture, motivation, and
values. He has completed a book manuscript on values, and is currently working on a book on general theory
in the social sciences. Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, 354 Mansfield Road,
Unit 2176, Storrs, CT 06269–2176, USA. [email: rdandrade@ucsd.edu]

39