Institutions, Distributed Cognition and Agency:Rule-following as Performative Action

Recently, Aoki proposed the concept of substantive institutions which relates outcomes ofstrategic interaction with public representations of equilibrium states of games. I argue thatthe Aoki model can be grounded in theories of distributed cognition and performativity,which I put into the context of Searle’s philosophical account of institutions. Substantive institutionsbuild on regularized causal interactions between internal neuronal mechanisms andexternal facts, which are shared in a population of agents. Following Searle’s proposal to conceiverule following as a neuronally anchored behavioral disposition, I show that his correspondingnotion of collective intentionality can be grounded in recent neuroscience theoriesabout imitation as the primordial process in human learning. I relate this with Searle’s conceptof status function and the neuronal theory of metaphors, resulting in a precise definition ofrule-following as performative action. I present two empirical examples, the institution ofmoney and status hierarchies in markets.