Paper for LMSC’09, Bordeaux, July 2009

Social groups capable of functioning in an agent-like way are capable of constructing new social things (such as social institutions) by performative acceptance. As groups can function only via their members, we can say that it in the last analysis is the members’ collective acceptance qua members of a group that creates new items into the social world and maintains previously constructed items. By acceptance here is meant acceptance as true or correctly assertable of something—acceptance thus need not be acceptance of something as good or as pragmatically useful, to mention a couple of other senses of acceptance.