Social ontology is a branch of ontology and metaphysics that studies the nature and basic categories of the social world. It asks which kinds of social entities exist—such as social groups, institutions, social roles, and social categories—and what their existence consists in, including how they depend on and arise out of social interaction, shared attitudes and material realizations. A primary concern of social ontology is to distinguish genuine social entities from mere aggregates of individuals, and to clarify the relations between individual minds and collective phenomena—such as norms, organizations, and social structures. The field investigates, for example, the metaphysical status of corporations and states, the nature of money and property, the ontology of social categories such as gender and race, and the structure of social practices, rules, and institutions. Work in social ontology both draws on and informs many areas of philosophy—including the philosophy of social science, political philosophy, philosophy of language, metaethics, feminist philosophy and critical race theory—as well as empirical disciplines such as sociology, economics, anthropology, law, psychology and history. Influential contemporary contributors include John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, Amie Thomasson, Tony Lawson, Brian Epstein, Ruth Millikan, Sally Haslanger, Maurizio Ferraris, Lynne Rudder Baker and Hans Bernhard Schmid, among many others.
History Questions that are now classified as social-ontological can be found throughout the history of philosophy, for example in debates about the reality of peoples, states, churches or corporations. The explicit expression ontologie sociale ("social ontology") appears in nineteenth-century political and economic writings, such as Louis P. Massip's 1871 treatise Doctrine républicaine ou principes naturels et économiques d'ontologie sociale. Classical sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raised recognizably ontological questions in different terminology. Émile Durkheim's account of "social facts" as objective and coercive features of society, Max Weber's analysis of social action and ideal types, and Alfred Schutz's phenomenology of the social world all contributed to later discussions of what kinds of social entities there are and how they relate to individuals. From the 1960s onward, social ontology became an explicit topic in analytic philosophy through work on speech acts, collective intentionality and group agency. Searle's theory of institutional facts in The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and subsequent writings, Gilbert's plural-subject theory in On Social Facts (1989), Tuomela's studies of we-intentions and group agents, and related work by many other authors helped to establish social ontology as a distinct subfield. In the early twenty-first century the field underwent further consolidation. Dedicated venues such as the Social Ontology conference series (originating in the European Network on Social Ontology, founded in 2007), the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS, founded in 2012), and the open-access Journal of Social Ontology (established 2015) now provide institutional support for research across philosophy and the social sciences.
Central questions Philosophers working in social ontology typically distinguish several families of questions. One concerns existence and classification: which kinds of social entities exist, and how should they be taxonomized—for example as social groups, institutions, positions, social kinds or events? A second concerns dependence and realization: in virtue of what do social entities exist, and how do they depend on individual minds, bodies, artifacts and practices? A third concerns persistence and identity: under what conditions does a social entity continue to exist or cease to exist—for example when a parliament is dissolved, a corporation merges, or a club changes its members? Debate continues over whether social kinds are fully reducible to, or grounded in, non-social facts, or whether they exhibit emergent or irreducible features. Searle has argued that social reality is constituted by collectively accepted status functions imposed on physical objects and persons, and is thus ontologically dependent on underlying physical facts. By contrast, Lynne Rudder Baker and other non-reductive realists maintain that many social phenomena—such as legal systems, corporations and other "mind-dependent" items—are genuine constituents of ontology that cannot be exhaustively captured in purely physical terms. Social ontology also engages with contested social categories such as gender, race, class, disability and sexual orientation. In this context it overlaps with work in feminist philosophy and critical race theory on social construction and conceptual engineering. Sally Haslanger, for example, has defended analyses of race and gender as socially constructed structural positions within systems of domination and oppression that are nonetheless real and explanatorily important.
Major approaches
Collective intentionality and status functions One influential approach, associated especially with John Searle, explains social facts in terms of collective intentionality and "status functions". On this view, many social entities—money, property, marriages, governments—are physical objects or events that have been collectively recognized as having a particular status, typically defined by rights, obligations and other deontic powers. Searle summarizes these constitutive rules with the schema "X counts as Y in context C". Social ontology, on this picture, analyses the logical form of such rules and the background capacities that make collective acceptance possible.
Joint commitment and plural subjects Margaret Gilbert defends a "plural subject" theory, on which social groups and joint actions are constituted by joint commitments: individuals openly commit themselves together as a body to do something or to regard something as so. Such joint commitments ground group-level obligations and rights that are not reducible to the private commitments of each individual member. On this view, the existence conditions for many social groups are given by the continued presence of appropriate joint commitments, rather than by mere similarity or aggregation of individuals.
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