Institutional Naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki's Contribution to Institutional Economics

26 Pages Posted: 5 Feb 2016

See all articles by Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies

Date Written: February 4, 2016

Abstract

I discuss Aoki’s fundamental model of institutions in its most recent version, building on a comment that Aoki contributed to a paper by Hindriks and Guala in 2015. These authors advance a ‘rules in equilibrium’ approach to institutions that claims to reduce a Searlian social ontology of institutions to mere linguistic conventions and theoretical terms. Against this view I posit ‘institutional naturalism’ and reinstate the analytical need for recognizing the ontological autonomy of institutions, reflected in their causal powers. I show how this follows from a proper reconstruction of the Aoki model, building on advanced cognitive sciences which are also deployed by Aoki. In this view, notions such as collective intentionality reflect the material embodiments of distributed cognition and distributed agency. This approach has been dubbed ‘Neo-Hegelian’ by Aoki in his comment.

Keywords: institutions, Aoki, Searle, distributed cognition, performativity, social ontology, identity and agency, money

JEL Classification: B31, B41, B52, D02

Suggested Citation

Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten, Institutional Naturalism: Reflections on Masahiko Aoki's Contribution to Institutional Economics (February 4, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2727716 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2727716

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Contact Author)

Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies ( email )

Nordhäuserstr. 74
Erfurt, 90228
Germany

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
68
Abstract Views
709
Rank
603,475
PlumX Metrics