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Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala's critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean version of collective acceptance theory can be defended against Guala's critique and question the sufficiency of Guala's account of the ontology of the social world.

▪ Abstract  The Rochester school of political science, led by William H Riker, pioneered the new method of positive political theory. Positive political theory, or rational choice theory, represents the attempt to build formal models of collective decision-making processes, often relying on the assumption of self-interested rational action. This method has been used to study such political processes as elections, legislative behavior, public goods, and treaty formation and diplomatic strategy in international relations. In this article, we provide a retrospective account of the Rochester school, which discusses Riker's theoretical synthesis and his institution building in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We discuss some of the most important Rochester school contributions related to spatial models of voting, agenda setting, structure-induced equilibria, heresthetics, game theory, and political theory. We also briefly situate positive political theory within the larger context of political science and economics.

In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to the center of transatlantic thought. The Decisionist Imagination explores how "decisionism" emerged from its origins in prewar political theory to become an object of intense social scientific inquiry in the new intellectual and institutional landscapes of the postwar era. By bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume illuminates how theories of decision shaped numerous techno-scientific aspects of modern governance-helping to explain, in short, how we arrived at where we are today