Your Money Is Imaginary. So Is
Your Marriage.
I have recently discovered something mildly alarming.
A surprising amount of my life does not actually exist.
My money.
My property.
My marriage.
Possibly the government.
Kate will be particularly interested in the marriage part.
The philosopher John Searle spent decades thinking about this, which strikes me as a philosopher thing to do. Most of us spend decades trying to find our glasses. Searle spent his figuring out whether twenty-dollar bills exist.
His conclusion was basically:
Yes. But also, kind of no.
And somehow this became philosophy rather than tax fraud.
Consider a $20 bill.
Physically, it is a little rectangle made from cotton and linen, covered with ink.
Hand it to a cashier and you can get lunch.
Hand it to a wolf and the wolf will probably sniff it, perhaps eat it, and definitely not give you $20 in change.
The wolf has a point.
There is absolutely nothing inside that bill that makes it worth twenty dollars.
We made that part up.
All of us.
Together.
And because everybody agreed to the same weird story, it works.
That is the part Searle found fascinating.
He said there are basically two kinds of facts.
First, there are brute facts.
A mountain is a mountain.
Gravity works.
Water freezes.
If I drop a bowling ball on my foot, it will hurt regardless of my political beliefs.
These things do not require our approval.
Gravity has never once asked me to click I AGREE.
Then there are institutional facts.
Money.
Marriage.
Property.
Presidents.
Corporations.
Universities.
National borders.
These things exist because humans collectively say they exist.
Which is honestly kinda wild.
A university, for example, can hand you a piece of paper and announce:
You are now a Bachelor of Arts.
You look exactly the same.
You have not grown another arm.
Your DNA hasn’t changed.
But congratulations, bro. You are educated now.
Searle reduced this human magic trick to a formula:
X counts as Y in context C.
Very philosophical.
But it’s actually pretty simple.
This piece of paper counts as $20 in the United States.
This person counts as president after a certified election.
This house counts as my property because a gigantic pile of documents says so.
And this woman counts as my wife because decades ago Kate and I participated in a ceremony, signed some papers and other human beings agreed:
Yep. Those two are married now.
Nothing happened physically.
No lightning.
No molecular rearrangement.
No software update.
Kate did not suddenly get a notification:
JARON HAS BEEN ADDED TO YOUR ACCOUNT.
But socially and legally, something enormous happened.
We had changed reality using words.
Which is where Searle gets really interesting.
Humans can say things that make themselves true.
A judge says:
“I sentence you to five years.”
And suddenly your afternoon plans have changed considerably.
Someone says:
“I pronounce you married.”
Boom.
Married.
A referee says:
“You’re out.”
You’re out.
You can explain for twenty minutes that, from a molecular standpoint, you remain completely unchanged.
Good luck with that.
Searle called this human ability collective intentionality.
That phrase sounds like something a California high-school senior would immediately put on mute.
So let’s call it:
We all agree this is a thing.
That’s basically the secret sauce.
If I announce that a potato in my kitchen is worth $50,000, I do not have $50,000.
I have a potato and possibly a problem.
But if millions of people, banks, governments, courts and businesses agree that a certain piece of paper has value?
Now we’re cooking.
The potato has become money.
Well, not the potato.
You get the idea.
And these imaginary-but-real things come with rules.
Searle called these deontic powers, which is another phrase absolutely begging to be ignored.
It means that once society gives you a certain status, you get certain rights and responsibilities with it.
If you own a house, you can tell strangers they can’t move into the bedroom.
But you also have to pay taxes.
If you’re president, you get enormous authority.
But apparently you can’t simply announce that Tuesday has been cancelled.
If you’re married, you gain all sorts of legal rights and obligations.
You also gain another fascinating institutional arrangement called:
“Where did you put my keys?”
This has been operating in our household for years.
The really strange thing is that these invented realities can disappear without anything physical changing.
A country can stop recognizing a currency.
Yesterday: money.
Today: souvenir.
A legislature can repeal a law.
Yesterday: illegal.
Today: totally fine.
A marriage can end when a judge signs a document.
Yesterday: married.
Today: single.
Same people.
Same atoms.
Different reality.
And that is the genuinely amazing part of Searle’s idea.
We humans live in two worlds at once.
There is the physical world:
rocks, trees, oceans, dogs, gravity and the kitchen chair I occasionally walk into.
And floating invisibly on top of it is another enormous world we invented:
money, citizenship, marriages, mortgages, universities, corporations, laws, borders, titles, governments and the mysterious concept known as your credit score.
None of these things is physically sitting somewhere in the universe.
You cannot dig up a marriage.
You cannot weigh a presidency.
You cannot put a corporation in a wheelbarrow.
Yet these invisible things determine where we live, what we own, what we can buy, whom we can marry and whether somebody will lend us enough imaginary money to purchase a house whose ownership is also imaginary.
No cap, as I believe the young people say.
Civilization may be the most successful group project in history.
Eight billion people are walking around saying:
“Okay, we’re all gonna pretend this stuff is real.”
And somehow it works.
Mostly.
So tomorrow, when somebody hands you a twenty-dollar bill, take a moment to appreciate what you’re holding.
It isn’t really twenty dollars.
It’s a tiny piece of cloth that several hundred million strangers have agreed to hallucinate about in exactly the same way.
And if that sounds ridiculous, remember:
I am also married because somebody once said I was.
Kate continues to recognize the arrangement. So far. But if you like arcane calculations, check out this:
1. Regulative vs. Constitutive Rules (the foundation)
Before Searle gets to his famous formula, he draws a distinction between two types of rules:
- Regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity. “Drive on the right side of the road” regulates driving, but driving exists whether or not that rule exists.
- Constitutive rules create the very possibility of the activity. The rules of chess don’t regulate some pre-existing activity called “chess” — they are what chess is. Without the rules, there’s no game to regulate; you’re just moving wood around a board.
This distinction matters because institutional facts (money, marriage, government) are created by constitutive rules, not regulative ones. That sets up the need for a formula describing how a constitutive rule works.
2. The Core Formula: X Counts as Y in C
This is Searle’s basic template for a constitutive rule:
X counts as Y in context C
- X = a brute, physical thing or event (paper, a person, a sequence of moves, an utterance)
- Y = a new status imposed on X — Searle calls this a status function
- C = the specific context or background system needed for the assignment to hold
Example: A particular kind of move in chess (X) counts as “castling” (Y) under the rules of chess (C). Or: Getting a majority of Electoral College votes (X) counts as being elected president (Y) under the U.S. Constitution (C).
The key logical feature: X doesn’t cause Y or resemble Y. The relationship is purely stipulative — X counts as Y only because the rule says so, not because of any natural connection between them.
3. Status Functions and Function Imposition
Searle then generalizes this. He notes that humans impose functions on things constantly — a rock can function as a paperweight, a tree stump as a chair. Most functions are just based on physical properties (a rock is heavy enough to hold down papers).
But status functions are special: the object performs the function only because it has collectively assigned status, not because of its physical features. A dollar bill doesn’t buy things because of its paper properties — it buys things because of its status as currency. So Searle narrows the general formula:
X counts as Y in C, where Y is a status function
This is the piece that explains why institutional facts require collective belief to keep existing — take away the status, and the physical object can no longer perform that function, even though it hasn’t changed at all.
4. The Status Function Declaration (how the formula gets applied)
Here’s where it gets more precise. Searle asks: what kind of speech act actually creates an X-counts-as-Y relationship? His answer: a Declaration — a special category of speech act where saying something makes it true, purely by virtue of being said and accepted (unlike a normal statement, which is true or false independent of being said).
He formalizes this as roughly:
We make it the case by Declaration that the Y status function exists in context C.
For example: “We [the electoral college / the legislature / the community] hereby declare that this act of Congress makes X count as legal currency.” Weddings, coronations, elections, incorporations, contracts — all function through this same declarative logic, even when no one explicitly says the word “declare.” The minister saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife” is a textbook Status Function Declaration.
Searle notes something odd about Declarations: they have both a word-to-world direction of fit (describing reality) and a world-to-word direction of fit (changing reality) simultaneously — the utterance is true because it makes itself true. That double direction of fit is unique to declarations and is the engine that actually manufactures institutional facts.
5. The Deontic Power Formula
Once a status function exists, Searle argues it automatically carries deontic powers — rights, duties, obligations, permissions, authorizations. He expresses this as a further layer added onto the status function:
S has power (S does A), or S has power (S does not have to do A)
Where S is some agent given a status. Example: The President (S) has the power to veto legislation (does A). Or: A licensed driver (S) has the power to legally drive (does A), and correspondingly, others have an obligation not to interfere with S doing A.
This is the part of the formula that explains why institutional facts aren’t just labels — they reorganize what people are permitted, obligated, or empowered to do. It’s also, Searle argues, why institutions can coordinate massive societies without anyone needing to use physical force constantly: the deontic powers do the coordinating work.
6. Collective Intentionality as the Background Operator
Finally, all of these formulas depend on an operator that isn’t written into the X-counts-as-Y formula itself but is presupposed by it: collective intentionality, symbolized loosely as “We intend that…” rather than “I intend that…”
Searle insists the formula only works if the “counts as” relation is collectively accepted — a single person declaring a rock to be currency accomplishes nothing. So underneath the whole system sits an unstated premise:
We collectively accept/recognize that (X counts as Y in C)
This collective acceptance is what philosophers sometimes call the “glue” — it’s not part of the formal X-Y-C structure, but without it, the formula is just words with no social force.
Putting the Formulas in Sequence
- Constitutive rule sets up the general form of rule-governed creation (contrasted with regulative rules).
- X counts as Y in C is the basic template for how a physical thing gets a new status.
- Status function narrows Y to cases where the new role depends entirely on collective assignment, not physical properties.
- Status Function Declaration describes the speech act that actually performs the assignment.
- Deontic powers (S has power to do A) describes what the new status does — the rights/duties it creates.
- Collective intentionality (“We intend/accept…”) is the underlying condition that makes all of the above stick.
Each formula solves a different piece of the puzzle: rule-type, structure, mechanism of creation, resulting powers, and the psychological glue holding it all together. Together they form Searle’s account of how language literally manufactures the institutional scaffolding of human civilization.
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