ABSTRACT
Institutions—governments, families, languages, legal systems, corporations—are among the elements of the social world that have the most profound impact on our lives. Some of them, like governments, wield substantial power over us, and we are naturally interested in developing theories about the appropriate scope of that power. Others, like families or languages, are so intertwined with our conception of ourselves, that investigating how they become so embedded in our lives promises important insights into ourselves as social agents. The chapters in this part describe several ways in which the philosophical theory of social institutions intersects with the theory of collective intentionality.
