Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing various entities that arise from social interaction. These include groups, money, corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders, artifacts, artworks, language, and law. What are the building blocks of things like these? How are they constructed or set up? Are social categories and kinds produced by our attitudes? By our language? Our practices? Are they produced by causal patterns? And is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many varieties of social construction? These are all questions about social ontology.
Social ontology is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of research. Across fields of philosophy-in metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and so on-theorists are embarking on projects in social ontology and looking for frameworks to address questions about social construction and the nature of social entities. Social ontology also directly engages the social sciences, with important social ontological work being done by sociologists, legal theorists, economists, business theorists, cognitive scientists, and others, who address foundational and methodological questions. The purpose of the
Oxford Handbook of Social Ontology is to provide readers with a survey of topics in this large and interdisciplinary field, with authoritative overviews of key historical approaches to the nature of the social world, theories of the building blocks of the social world, theories of how the social world is constructed, and theories of important social domains that social ontologists are working on.
