Revisiting Constitutive Rules

The paper is an investigation on how behaviour relates to norms, i.e. how a certain conduct acquires meaning in institutional terms. The simplest mechanism determining this phenomenon is given by the ‘count-as’ relation, generally associated with constitutive rules, through which an agent has the legal capacity, via performing a certain action, to create, modify or destroy a certain institutional fact. In the analytic literature, however, the ‘count-as’ relation is mostly approached for its classificatory functions, mapping entities to categories whose members carry institutional properties. Besides making explicit this double function, the paper reconsiders the relation between constitutive rules and regulative rules, and introduces a proposal on the ontological status of constitution.