Institutions without actions

X counts as Y in C, X is the brute fact and Y the institutional one; then, collective intentionality allows us to span from X to Y by imposing a status function. This is the story–the short one–Searle told us in The Construction of Social Reality in 1995. In order to make sense of the notion of collective intentionality, Searle borrowed his 1990 analysis of collective intentions. Searle’s analysis of collective actions employs irreducible (to individual intentions) collective intentions: we-mode CI (using Tuomela’s vocabulary). As a result, Searle ended up in using we-mode CI not only to account for collective actions, like pushing a car together, but also in order to analyse the logical structure of the collective imposition of status function, which is a quite different act. Therefore, over the years, there have been many criticisms targeting the CI requirement put forward by Searle in his The Construction of Social Reality.
In his latest book, Searle tweaks the wording: in Making the Social World (Searle 2010), precisely in the third chapter, entitled “Collective Intentionality and the Assignment of Function”, Searle introduces the concept of collective recognition and opens to institutions built in I-mode (pp. 57-58). The chapter is eighteen pages long and only the last two are actually devoted to the explanation of the assignment of function, whereas the others provide a recapitulation of the theories of collective intentions available on the philosophical market, along with a reminder of the reasons according to which Searle’s own approach is better. In those two pages Searle sketches a whole new theory of the social world: the accounts of collective intentions (preferably Searle’s …