Institutions, rule-following and conditional reasoning
从自然主义社会本体论出发，论证制度运作依赖于人们对未发生事态的反事实推理，并提供了一个博弈论框架来解释这一机制，对经济学、社会学等领域的制度研究有参考价值。
Abstract This paper is a contribution to the advancement of a naturalistic social ontology. Individuals participate in an institutionalized practice by following rules. In this perspective, I show that the nature, the stability, and the dynamics of any institution depend on how people reason about states of affairs that do not occur. That means that counterfactual reasoning is essential in the working of institutions. I present arguments for the importance of counterfactuals as well as a game-theoretic framework to account for them. Since the role of counterfactuals does not directly transpire in people's behavior, the whole discussion can be seen as a broad argument against behaviorism in philosophy and the social sciences.