Abstract

It is a standard feature of norm-governed institutions that designated agents are empowered to create particular kinds of states of affairs by means of the performance of specified types of actions. Frequently, the states of affairs are of a normative kind, in the sense that they pertain to rights and obligations, as for instance when a Head of Department signs a purchase agreement and thereby creates an obligation on his employer to pay for goods received. We use the term institutionalised power to stand for the notion of power we here seek to explicate. Following a lead from jurisprudential discussions of legal power, we distinguish institutionalised power from permission and practical possibility. We define a conditional connective intended to capture the consequence relation implicit in statements of the form: according to the constraints operative in institution s, the performance of some act A by agent x counts as a means of creating state of affairs B. When combined with deont...

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