Social ontology

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.