The world is a messy place. We tend to make order in it by classifying things. Most animals classify the world into at least the categories food, predator and mate. But these sorts of classifications are not enough for logical information systems since they do not completely characterise the objects in the world. A botanist may classify a forest by genus and species, but there is room for error. Observations of specimens in different ways can lead to a change in its classification. The object in the world is primary. We can use logical databases for applications like this, but we have to ignore the individual objects and treat them only as instances of classes.

We need to keep in mind that our information systems contain not the world, but statements about the world. That is, Popper’s third world (McDonald, 2002). (Popper’s first world is reality, his second is internal psychological states caused by an organism interacting with the first world. The third world is what the organism says about its experience.) Both letters P and Q are in the third, as well as the first, world.

What differentiates letter P from letter Q is that letter P is an instance of an institutional fact as described by Searle (1995). An institutional fact is a statement about the world, but the world it is a statement about is a social world. It has no meaning apart from the society in which it occurs. (There are enormous differences in approach between Popper and Searle, but at a first approximation, the claim that an institutional fact is one kind of statement about the world seems reasonable.)

Searle distinguishes institutional facts from brute facts. A brute fact is a statement about something in the world outside of human society. Examples of brute facts are: ‘Thylacines are extinct’, ‘Canberra is cold in the winter’, ‘This is a 2.5 centimeter diameter gold-coloured metal disk’, ‘This is a piece of white paper with black marks on it’. All of these statements would continue to be true if our society disappeared. (Of course there would have to be some sentient being to make the statements, perhaps robots or extraterrestrials.)

All objects, including statements, are for Searle brute facts. A written statement can be black marks on white paper. A spoken statement is acoustic waves in the atmosphere at a particular place at a particular time. What makes a brute fact an institutional fact is how it is taken by the people concerned about it. In particular, an institutional fact is taken as a record of an instance of a standardised speech act performed by a social institution in a human society. A 2.5 centimeter diameter gold-coloured metal disk is taken to be a dollar coin in Australian society in 2004. A piece of white paper with black marks on it is taken as an order for particular goods by Acme Manufacturing Company at a particular time.

Searle’s formulation starts with speech acts. A speech act is an action made by a designated person on behalf of a social institution that changes the social reality managed by that institution. The quintessential speech act is giving a new baby a name. The action is entering writing in blank spaces on a form, then lodging the form at the office of the Registrar of Births in the jurisdiction in which the baby was born. The designated person is one of the parents of the baby. The form is supplied by the Registrar of Births. The form is lodged by handing it to a designated officer of the Registrar in their designated office during the designated office hours. The social reality changed is that a new person now exists with the name indicated on the form. The institutional reality managed by the Registrar of Births is the population of citizens of the country of whose government it is an arm. That the person into whom that baby develops is named its name is an institutional fact. Records of this institutional fact are stored by the agency and on birth certificate and passport documents, but also exist in people’s memories and are created whenever the name is used, especially in other official documents.

Searle’s formulation is ‘brute fact X counts as institutional fact Y in context C’. In our naming example, the brute fact is the filling in and lodging of the form. The institutional fact is that the baby has the designated name. The context is everything else: the person lodging the form is a parent, the office is the proper office, the form is given to the proper person at the proper time, and so on.

What most clearly differentiates letter P from letter Q is that letter P is an institutional fact. Sending and receipt of letter P by the appropriate people counts as the speech act of placing an order. When this occurs, the world changes, in that the receiver of letter P (the supplier) is entitled to ship the nominated quantity of the nominated product to the sender (the purchaser) and expect payment in return. The copy of letter P (brute fact) held by the supplier is a record of the institutional fact of the purchase order having been made. The context includes the supplier being in the business of selling the nominated product, the purchaser being a properly constituted customer, and so on.

The whole business is regulated by the laws of commerce in the relevant jurisdictions. In addition, it is regulated by a body of largely implicit customary practice. This body of customary practice is called background by Searle. Background is a significant aspect of any context.

Institutional facts are a subclass of what Searle calls social facts. Social facts are informal, while institutional facts are formal acts of formally constituted institutions. That my nickname is ‘Bob’ is a social fact, but that my official name is ‘Robert Michael Colomb’ is also an institutional fact. ‘A is a friend of B’ is a social fact, but ‘A is the spouse of B’ is an institutional fact as well. ‘A is influential’ is a social fact, but ‘A is prime minister’ is also an institutional fact. The institution or network of institutions that provides the context for institutional facts is a complex system of social behaviour. Different institutional environments have different informal patterns and norms of behaviour (culture) that are the background aspect of the context of the institutional facts it creates and maintains.

One key characteristic of institutional facts, at least in our present society, is that they are designed to be completely characterised by the classes to which they belong. Every name is completely characterised by the speech act of registration with a birth certificate as record of the institutional fact of having been named. Every purchase is completely characterised by the various classes by which the supplier and purchaser do business. Every student is completely characterised by the program and courses in which they have enrolled. This is the defining feature of modern bureaucracy. This is the reason people worry about ‘being just a number’.

Nearly all information systems are used to store, retrieve, and now often create institutional facts. Society agrees that nothing is relevant except that ‘brute fact X counts as institutional fact Y in context C’. There are a finite number of well-defined context types. All contexts of the same type are the same, so all institutional facts resulting from these contexts are the same. To make this work requires a highly disciplined form of behaviour, and a rigorous enforcement of the framing rules defining the contexts. This is the reason for the complex system of commercial law, standardisation of accounting rules, requirements for audit, and so on. But the standardisation also relies on the informal behaviour patterns and norms constituting the background.

That institutional facts are completely characterised by the classes constituting the operating rules for the institutions creating them corresponds exactly with the assumption underlying logical databases, that their contents are completely characterised by the classes of which they are instances. I submit that this is the reason for the overwhelming dominance of logical database technology in information systems.

In the following we are going to need some perhaps unfamiliar terminology. An ontology is a representation of the world with which a system is concerned. The rules of chess or cricket are an ontology. For an information system, the ontology consists of its data model, business rules, and a characterisation of the individuals with which the system deals. An ontology is transcendent if it contains the constituting rules for the relevant behavioural interactions, and the routine behavioural interactions cannot change their constituting rules. The rules for chess or cricket or the grammars of programming languages are transcendent. An ontology is immanent if the routine behavioural interactions can change the rules. Human natural language is an immanent ontology, since the grammar rules are patterns abstracted from practice and practice can change them, albeit slowly. The ontology of news topics in a newsfeed change as events happen in the world. The ontology given by the directory structure of a person’s personal computer is immanent, because the user of the computer is free to change the directory structure.

The schemas defining types of institutional facts define a transcendent ontology for the information systems supporting the creation of institutional facts and keeping records of them. Data models for particular systems are representations of and implementations of aspects of the ontology. The technology implementing these data models works only because of the behavioural disciplines that implement the framing rules of the various speech acts. If each letter placing an order requires separate consideration and is treated in a unique way, the order entry system of the supplier can’t work the way we expect it to. But of course the transcendent ontology is only the formal part of the system. The context of all speech acts includes the background, which is characteristic of particular institutions and differs between institutions.