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What is a dollar bill? A piece of paper with no intrinsic value, yet it functions as money because we collectively treat it as such. This simple observation opens the central question of social ontology: what kind of reality do social entities have, and how do they relate to the individuals who constitute them? The history of inquiry into this question is a long struggle between two opposing intuitions: that social reality is nothing over and above the actions and attitudes of individuals, and that social wholes possess properties that cannot be reduced to their parts. Every major framework in social ontology can be understood as a response to this tension.
The earliest systematic framework, Methodological Individualism, emerged in the seventeenth century with Thomas Hobbes, who argued that social order arises from the agreements of self-interested individuals. In the twentieth century, Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek sharpened this into a methodological doctrine: all explanations of social phenomena must be grounded in facts about individuals—their beliefs, desires, and actions. For the individualist, a social entity like a corporation is simply a convenient shorthand for a pattern of individual decisions and contracts. Money, on this view, is a convention that individuals adopt to solve coordination problems; its reality is exhausted by the mental states of those who use it.
Methodological Holism arose in the nineteenth century as a direct counterposition. G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim argued that social wholes—nations, classes, institutions—have emergent properties that cannot be reduced to individual psychology. Durkheim famously claimed that social facts are “sui generis” and constrain individuals from the outside. For the holist, a labor market is not just a collection of individual exchanges; it is a structure with its own dynamics, such as wage levels and unemployment rates, that shape individual choices. The holist worries that individualism misses the causal power of social structures, while the individualist worries that holism reifies abstractions and obscures human agency. This opposition set the terms for nearly all subsequent debate.
By the late twentieth century, philosophers began to notice that both individualism and holism had neglected a crucial intermediate phenomenon: shared mental states. How do individuals come to act together in the first place? This question gave rise to three closely related frameworks that reframed social ontology around collective intentionality.
Searlean Social Ontology, developed by John Searle from the mid-1990s, locates the foundation of social reality in collective intentionality—the capacity of individuals to share intentions, beliefs, and desires. Searle argues that institutional facts (money, marriage, government) are created by constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in context C,” where the Y status is assigned through collective acceptance. For example, a piece of paper (X) counts as a dollar bill (Y) in the context of the US economy (C) because we collectively accept that status. Searle’s framework transformed the debate by providing a micro-foundation for social reality that did not reduce to individual intentionality alone. However, critics argue that his account of collective acceptance is too thin to explain the normative force of social institutions.
Plural Subject Theory, developed by Margaret Gilbert in the late 1980s, addresses this gap by introducing the concept of joint commitment. For Gilbert, a group exists when individuals jointly commit to act as a body—for example, when two people jointly commit to take a walk together, they form a plural subject. Joint commitment creates obligations and entitlements among the parties, giving social groups a normative structure that Searle’s account lacks. Gilbert’s framework is particularly powerful for understanding phenomena like promises, agreements, and team reasoning. Where Searle emphasizes constitutive rules, Gilbert emphasizes the normative bonds that hold groups together.
We-Mode Theory, developed by Raimo Tuomela in the 1990s, complements both Searle and Gilbert by distinguishing between two modes of reasoning: I-mode (individual) and we-mode (group). In we-mode reasoning, individuals think and act as group members, accepting group goals and beliefs as their own. Tuomela argues that we-mode reasoning is irreducible to I-mode reasoning and provides the basis for genuine group agency. Compared to Gilbert, Tuomela places more emphasis on the functional role of group beliefs and goals, and compared to Searle, he offers a more detailed account of how collective intentionality operates in practical reasoning. All three frameworks share the insight that social reality is built on shared mental states, but they disagree on the nature of those states—whether they are constituted by acceptance, commitment, or mode of reasoning.
While collective-intentionality frameworks focused on mental states, other theorists argued that social reality is better understood through causal structures or embodied practices.
Critical Realism, developed by Roy Bhaskar in the 1970s, offers a stratified ontology that distinguishes between the real (underlying causal mechanisms), the actual (events that occur), and the empirical (what we observe). For critical realists, social structures—such as capitalism or patriarchy—are real causal mechanisms that exist independently of our awareness of them. They generate events (e.g., economic crises) that may or may not be observed. This framework contrasts sharply with both individualism and collective-intentionality approaches: it insists that social structures have causal powers that cannot be reduced to individual actions or shared intentions. Critical realism emerged partly as a reaction against the empiricism and postmodernism that dominated social theory in the 1970s, and it remains influential in sociology and political economy.
Practice Theory, developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens in the 1980s, takes a different route. Instead of focusing on rules, intentions, or causal mechanisms, practice theory centers on embodied routines—the habitual, often tacit activities through which social order is reproduced. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes the durable dispositions that individuals acquire through socialization, which generate practices without requiring explicit rules or conscious deliberation. For practice theory, a gender norm is not a constitutive rule or a joint commitment but a pattern of embodied behavior that is reproduced through everyday interactions. Practice theory offers a flat ontology that avoids the macro-level reification of holism and the micro-level mentalism of collective-intentionality frameworks. It coexists with critical realism as a rival alternative, with practice theorists criticizing critical realism for positing unobservable structures, and critical realists accusing practice theory of neglecting causal mechanisms.
Feminist Social Ontology, emerging in the 1990s, builds on and critiques both practice theory and critical realism. Feminist theorists such as Sally Haslanger and Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir argue that social ontology cannot be separated from questions of power, oppression, and justice. Haslanger’s ameliorative approach asks not just what social kinds are, but what they should be—for example, she argues that gender categories are social constructions that serve to perpetuate inequality, and that we should revise them to promote justice. Feminist social ontology introduces intersectionality as an ontological concern: social categories like race, class, and gender are not independent but mutually constitutive. This framework challenges earlier frameworks for being insufficiently attentive to power dynamics. For instance, where practice theory might describe gender norms as habitual routines, feminist social ontology insists that those routines are shaped by and reinforce hierarchical power relations. Where critical realism posits structures like patriarchy, feminist social ontology adds a normative dimension: the point is not just to describe structures but to change them.
Today, no single framework dominates social ontology. The leading frameworks—Searlean social ontology, practice theory, feminist social ontology, and critical realism—each have their own strengths and domains of application. Searlean social ontology is widely used in philosophy of law and economics for analyzing institutional facts. Practice theory is influential in sociology and anthropology for studying everyday social reproduction. Feminist social ontology has reshaped debates about gender, race, and disability. Critical realism remains a major force in critical social science.
What do these frameworks agree on? They all reject the idea that social reality is a mere fiction or epiphenomenon; they agree that social entities are real and causally efficacious. They also agree that social reality is constructed—though they disagree sharply on what “construction” means. The main fault lines are three: (1) normativity—whether social ontology should be purely descriptive or also ameliorative; (2) the role of rules versus practices—whether social order is best explained by constitutive rules, joint commitments, or embodied routines; and (3) the place of power—whether power is a peripheral or central feature of social reality. Methodological individualism, while no longer dominant in philosophy, remains influential in economics and rational choice theory, where it continues to be challenged by holist and practice-based alternatives. The debate between individualism and holism has not been resolved; it has been transformed and enriched by the insights of collective intentionality, critical realism, practice theory, and feminist critique.