Abstract

I term ‘institutional monism’ the ontological thesis according to which the distinction between institutions and practices is only a matter of degree and not of kind. This paper criticizes institutional monism and puts forward a dualist theory, which takes institutions and practices as two distinct ontological kinds. For that, I introduce a distinction between the attitude and the content of a mental state. I show there can be normativity at the level of the attitude as well as at the level of the content. In the former case we have a norm, in the latter a rule. This allows me to draw an ontological distinction between practices, understood as systems of norms, and institutions, understood as systems of rules.