Filip Buekens

The Incentivized Action View of Institutional Facts as an Alternative to the Searlean View: A Response to Butchard and D’Amico

In our earlier work, we argued, contra Searle, that institutional facts can be understood in terms of non-institutional facts about actions and incentives. Butchard and D’Amico claim that we have misinterpreted Searle, that our main argument against him (“the circularity objection”) has no merit and that our positive view cannot account for institutional facts created via joint action. We deny all three charges.

Psychoanalytic Facts as Unintended Institutional Facts

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis.

How to Do Things Without Words: A Theory of Declarations:

Declarations like “this meeting is adjourned” make certain facts the case by representing them as being the case. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the mechanism whereby the utterance of a declaration can bring about a new state of affairs. In this paper, we use the incentivization account of institutional facts to address this issue. We argue that declarations can serve to bring about new states of affairs as their utterance have game theoretical import, typically in virtue of the utterer signaling a commitment to act in an incentive-changing way.

Institutions and the Artworld – A Critical Note

Abstract Contemporary theories of institutions as clusters of stable solutions to recurrent coordination problems can illuminate and explain some unresolved difficulties and problems adhering to institutional definitions of art initiated by George Dickie and Arthur Danto. Their account of what confers upon objects their institutional character does not fit well with current work on institutions and social ontology. The claim that “the artworld” confers the status of “art” onto objects remains utterly mysterious. The “artworld” is a generic notion that designates a sphere of human activity that involves practices that create goals that have led to the emergence of formal and informal institutions. But those institutions, rather than magically “creating” objects subjected to esthetic appreciation, merely solve familiar and ubiquitous coordination problems created by artistic activity in ways other institutions in other areas (science, religion, education…) solve similar and/or analogous coordination problems.

Searlean Reflections on Sacred Mountains

Error theories hold that claims about sacred objects are uniformly false when (and because) their existence is supposed to depend on the occurrence of highly implausible supernatural events involved in their creation or causal history. It is therefore an illusion to believe that the concept of being sacred corresponds to a real property. Social constructionists maintain that sacred entities are constructs of concepts, discourses, or practices, just like gods, angels, witches, and devils. Claims about sacred objects are therefore uniformly true. I present an institutional account of sacred objects as covert institutional entities, and distinguish between true beliefs that help create the institutional facts and false beliefs about their origin.