Moving from the mental to the behavioral in the metaphysics of social institutions

One particularly influential strand of the contemporary philosophical literature on the metaphysics of social institutions has been the collective acceptance approach, most prominently advocated by John Searle and Raimo Tuomela. The continuing influence of the collective acceptance approach has resulted in alternative accounts that either preserve a role for collective acceptance, or replace it with some other kind of mental state. I argue that this emphasis on the mental in the metaphysics of social institutions is a mistake. First, I raise problems for the collective acceptance approach itself, then for pluralist approaches that preserve a role for collective acceptance, and finally for approaches that replace collective acceptance with individual mental states such as beliefs and intentions. Lest my arguments undermining these approaches to the metaphysics of social institutions seem to also undermine our ability to give such a metaphysics at all, I end by sketching an alternative approach: focusing only on observable behavior, with no role for mental states.