1 INTRODUCTION

Contemporary social institutions include complex organizations, or systems of organizations such as governments, police services, business corporations, universities, welfare institutions and the like; they also include, criminal justice systems (comprised of a police organization, courts, correctional facilities etc.), legal systems (comprised of a legislature, the law, courts, legal firms etc.), financial systems (comprised of retail and investment banks, a stock exchange, regulators, auditing firms etc.) and so on. Accordingly, on the one hand, there is a need for a general theory of social institutions and, on the other hand, a need for special theories of particular institutions, e.g., a theory of universities. So far so good. However, there is a further distinction that needs to be accommodated, namely, that between epistemic institutions and non-epistemic institutions. The raison d'etre and core business (so to speak) of some institutions is epistemic, e.g., knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Epistemic institutions include universities, news media organizations and intelligence agencies (of which more below).

Issues that need to be addressed in relation to epistemic institutions include: (1) An outline of one's favored general theory of social institutions, given that epistemic institutions are a species of social institution; in the case of this article, an outline of a joint action-based teleological theory (Section 2); (2) An analysis of the core constitutive concept(s) upon which the favored more specific theory of epistemic institutions is to be based and the relationship of this concept(s) to that of an epistemic institution; in the case of the joint action-based teleological theory, the core concept in question is joint epistemic action (Section 3); (3) An elaboration of the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic institutions, but also of distinctions between different subspecies of epistemic institution and in particular, in this article, between universities, news media organizations and intelligence agencies (Section 4).

It should be noted that the theories in question while they are descriptive in that they need to be anchored in contemporary social reality, they are also normative and, in the case of epistemic institutions, normative in that knowledge (and its cognates) are (typically) desirable human goods.

中文翻译：

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认知机构：一个基于联合认知行动的账户

1 简介

当代社会机构包括政府、警察部门、商业公司、大学、福利机构等复杂组织或组织系统；它们还包括刑事司法系统（由警察组织、法院、惩教设施等组成）、法律系统（由立法机关、法律、法院、律师事务所等组成）、金融系统（由零售银行和投资银行组成） 、证券交易所、监管机构、审计公司等）等等。因此，一方面需要社会制度的一般理论，另一方面需要专门的社会制度理论。特定机构的理论，例如大学的理论。到目前为止，一切都很好。然而，还需要进一步区分，即认知制度和非认知制度之间的区别。一些机构的存在理由和核心业务（可以这么说）是认知的，例如，知识获取和传播。认知机构包括大学、新闻媒体组织和情报机构（下文详述）。

需要解决的与认知制度相关的问题包括：(1) 鉴于认知制度是一种社会制度，概述一个人最喜欢的社会制度一般理论；就本文而言，是基于联合行动的目的论的概述（第 2 节）；(2) 分析最受青睐的更具体的认知制度理论所依据的核心构成概念，以及这些概念与认知制度的关系；在基于联合行动的目的论的情况下，所讨论的核心概念是联合认知行动（第 3 节）；(3) 阐述认知和非认知机构之间的区别，以及认知机构不同亚种之间的区别，特别是，

应该指出的是，虽然所讨论的理论是描述性的，因为它们需要立足于当代社会现实，但它们也是规范性的，并且在认知制度的情况下，知识（及其同源物）的规范性（通常) 可取的人类物品。