The actual corporation is not the building that is its office but is purely abstract, existing only in the legal and institutional system

Vocabulary is crucial because it is the articulation of the assignment of status functions—the vocabulary you use encodes the institutional structure you are creating and maintaining

Humans should not be arrogant about their special position in the universe—given that there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies, it is unlikely that humans are the only conscious beings in the universe

Philosophy is fun because humans still have a lot of unresolved problems to work on across all domains of inquiry

The central problem in contemporary philosophy is reconciling our self-conception as conscious, rational, free agents with what we know about the physical structure of the universe, which consists of mindless physical particles

We must assume our self-conception is more or less accurate AND that what we've learned from natural sciences is accurate, and show how the human reality is a natural consequence of basic physical reality, with the requirement that we demonstrate how once you have protons you get presidents and once you have electrons you get elections

The deep mistake in our history has been the effort to deny that we live in one world by claiming there are two worlds—a physical world described by science and a spiritual world—rather than recognizing we live in one world and showing how distinctive human features are part of that one world

Social ontology concerns the mode of existence of social phenomena such as money, property, government, marriage, universities, and income tax deductions—institutions that are created by human consciousness yet constitute objective facts

Humans are suited by Darwinian natural selection for a hunter-gatherer existence and have not had much change in the gene pool in the past 30,000 years, yet there has been an enormous difference in the mode of existence of human life in those 30,000 years

A key difference between humans and other animals like dogs is that humans have the capacity to create institutional facts—facts that presuppose human institutions—whereas other animals do not worry about such matters

An institutional fact presupposes human institutions and is distinct from brute facts—facts like hydrogen atoms having one electron or the earth being 93 million miles from the sun that don't presuppose any institutions

To get from brute facts to institutional facts, humans need three basic things: first, the remarkable capacity for collective intentionality—the ability to cooperate with other people

The second capacity needed to create institutional facts is the human ability to impose functions on objects—to take an object and give it a function through intentional assignment that is observer-relative

Money is a striking example of a status function: a five dollar bill performs its function not in virtue of its physical structure but in virtue of the collective acceptance and agreement that it has the status of being money

Constitutive rules are rules that constitute the very behavior they regulate, unlike regulative rules which regulate previously existing or independently existing forms of behavior

Civilization is built through repeated application of constitutive rules in a system where they iterate upward indefinitely—X counts as Y, and Y counts as Z, and so on—creating increasingly complex institutional structures

In California, when you get married the institutional status creates numerous status functions and rights including spousal benefits and pregnancy leaves even for male spouses, demonstrating how a single institutional status interlocks with many other institutional structures

Status functions interlock with other status functions so that individual institutions function only by locking into many other institutions—money in a bank account interlocks with employers, universities, income tax systems, and credit card companies

Sometimes you don't need a rule to create an institutional fact—a bunch of kids can just decide that somebody is going to be captain of the softball team without needing a constitution to appeal to

Sometimes you can create an institutional fact out of thin air without any physical X term—most money has no physical existence; money in a bank account is purely representational, existing only as magnetic traces on computer disks in the bank's systems