Semantic Institutional Design investigates the conditions under which institutions can be constituted, expressed, and executed through structured meaning rather than interpretive practice.
The central premise is that institutional authority and obligation can be formalized as semantic relations and syntactic constraints, thereby enabling verifiable, machine-operable institutional processes.
Key areas of inquiry include:
- the representation of commitments as structured semantic chains;
- the role of syntactic form in delimiting institutional authority;
- the distinction between executable semantics and traditional legal or policy texts;
- the limits of existing fields—such as jurisprudence, political theory, and computer science—in modeling semantic jurisdiction;
- the design requirements for institutions whose behavior is inspectable, auditable, and computationally reproducible.
This domain establishes the theoretical foundation for language-native institutional architectures, including Semantic ISA, semantic order systems, and agent-executable governance protocols.