Minds as social institutions Cristiano Castelfranchi # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and spe- cialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptances and in terms of motives and plans. We have to revise the behavioristic view of “scripts” and “roles”; when we play a role we wear a “mind.” No collective action would be possible without shared and/or ascribed mental contents. This is also very crucial for a central form of automatic mind-reading (mind ascription). Second, I will argue that often what really matters is the ascribed/prescribed, worn, mind not the real, private one. We have to play (like in the symbolic play) “as if” we had those mental contents. This social convention and mutual assumption makes the interaction work. The ascribed beliefs and goals are not necessarily explicitly there; they might be just implicit as inactive (we act just by routine and automatically) or implicit as potential. The coordination and social action works thanks to these “as if” (ascribed and pretended) minds, thanks to those conventional constructs. Our social minds for social interac- tions are coordination artifacts and social institutions. Keywords Social frames . Theory of mind . Social institutions . Coordination . Extended mind Phenom Cogn Sci DOI 10.1007/s11097-013-9324-0 This work has been developed within the European Network for Social Intelligence (SINTELNET); a preliminary version has been presented at the Second Workshop of the European Network on Social Ontology (ENSO), Rome, Italy, September 21–23, 2011 “For sure I lie! The problem is that you believe me!” Shakespeare C. Castelfranchi (*) ISTC- CNR, via San Martino della Battaglia 44, 00185 Rome, Italy e-mail: cristiano.castelfranchi@istc.cnr.it URL: http://www.istc.cnr.it/group/goal C. Castelfranchi LUISS University, Viale Romania, 32, 00197 Rome, Italy