[1] Notable contemporary philosophers who study social ontology include John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Amie Thomasson, Tony Lawson and Ruth Millikan.
Rudder Baker rejects Searle's physicalism, favoring instead pluralism.
"(i) primary kinds, (ii) the relation of constitution, and (iii) the existence of intention-dependent phenomena."
She considers "constitution" to be "a time-indexed, contingent relation of unity between items of different primary kinds" at any given time.
To illustrate, she describes a piece of sheepskin (x), which at a given time (t) might come to constitute a new object--a diploma(y).
She calls these things intention-dependent (ID) objects, and as examples she gives kitchen utensils, precision instruments, and credit cards.
She writes, "a property is social if and only if its instantiation requires that there exist communities of creatures with attitudes (like believing.
For example, universities have the primary kind property of engaging in teaching and research.
She writes, "The fact that we create the social world does not call for any consternation or special explanation.
Why shouldn’t we persons – with our abilities, imaginations, and desires – be able to create genuinely new kinds of things?"
"Social theories had better contain properties like living in poverty, being a bureaucracy, and participating in political elections that we all pre-theoretically recognize.