Given that speech acts are evanescent, the physical basis for the temporally extended existence of its products are – in small societies and in simple social interactions – memory traces and other psychological features of the people involved in these acts; and – in large societies and in more complex social interactions – documents.
Where for de Soto, it is commercial paper documents which create what he calls the "invisible infrastructure of asset management [...] upon which the astonishing fecundity of Western capitalism rests" Ferraris goes further and asserts that documents, both in paper and in electronic form, create the invisible infrastructure of contemporary social reality.
This amounts to saying that social objects turn out to be (as much as the ideal ones) closely linked to the forms of their inscription and recording.
[8] Keeping this in mind, Ferraris advances an innovative approach to social ontology called Documentality.
As noted by Barry Smith (2003), this perspective has difficulty in accounting for both negative entities – such as debts, which apparently do not have a physical counterpart – and the new, seemingly intangible, social objects generated by the Web.
First, it has been able to account for the substantial growth of documents and recording devices in the Web world, which is very well explained by the proposed constitutive law of social reality.
Third, instead of making social reality depend on the action of collective intentionality – with an increasing social constructivism (Searle 2010) – documentality is capable of substantiating a "new realism" (Ferraris, 2012) that helps continental philosophy come out of the impasses of postmodernism and reconnect with analytic philosophy.
According to the ontologist Barry Smith (forthcoming), with documentality, Ferraris advances an innovative approach to social ontology that implies three steps.
The first step is the recognition – on the ground of the theories developed by Smith himself, (see in particular Smith 1999) – of the sphere of social objects, meaning, entities such as money, artworks, marriages, divorces and joint custody, years in prison and mortgages, the cost of oil and the tax codes, the Nuremberg Trial and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and still, economic crises, research projects, lectures and university degrees etc.
These objects fill up our world more than stones, trees and coconuts do, and they are more important for us, given that a good part of our happiness or unhappiness depends on them.
[12] The third step thus leads to the individuation of the sphere of Documentality, understood as the search for and the definition of the properties that constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions for the being of a social object.
[15] It is argued that document acts, as understood by documentary theory can establish states and thereby bring about their existence, as well as manipulate them in various ways (such as surrendering them after a war).