Institution as interpreted text

“The symbolizing aspect of language is essential to the constitution of institutional reality in a way that is not essential to brute reality, because the move whereby we agree to count an X term as having the function Y [e.g., we count X position on the chessboard as a checkmate (Y)] is already a symbolizing move. “(Searle, 1998, pp. 133-134)

“[A]ction itself, action as meaningful, may become an object of science, without losing its character of meaningfulness, through a kind of objectification similar to the fixation which occurs in writing” (Ricoeur, 1981b, p. 203).