Précis of The Construction of Social Reality

This book is primarily about the ontology of social and institutional facts. How can facts in the world such as the fact that I am a citizen of the United States, or that this is a twenty dollar bill, be objective facts if they are in some sense facts only by human agreement? The ontology of institutional reality can be explained using exactly three concepts: collective intentionality, the assignment of function and constitutive rules of the form, "X counts as Y in context C." Functions are observerrelative, they exist only relative to observers, or agents and are not intrinsic to the entities in question. Collective intentionality is a primitive notion in the sense that it does not reduce to individual intentionality. This is consistent with methodological individualism because collective intentionality exists entirely in the heads of individual agents. Constitutive rules of the form "X counts as Y in context C," not only regulate but constitute social institutions. The key to understanding institutional reality is to see it as a class of functions imposed on entities where the functions cannot be performed solely in virtue of the physical constitution of the entities, but require the collective acceptance of the imposed status and function. These collective impositions of what I call "status functions," are of the form "X counts as Y in context C." In working out the exact logical structure of human institutional reality, we need to account for at least the following six features: