Social Ontology : some Basic Principles

The aim of this article is to explore the problem of social ontology, by developing the argument presented in The Construction of Social Reality (1995). After some preliminary distinctions (section 1), the article describes the logical structure of society using three concepts: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules and procedures (section 2). Some further developments of this approach are presented: the analysis of status indicators, and the case of institutions where there is a status function but no physical object on which it is imposed (section 3). Some remarks are also made about the taxonomy of institutional facts (section 4), about the relationship between conceptual analysis and empirical data (section 5), and, finally, about the concept of institutional facts (section 6).