Abstract

The state of recent as well as older research on social ontology suggests a paradigmatic approach according to which it is our consciousness that must provide the framework for conceptualizing the social in one way or another. I argue, however, that Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following opens up a new horizon for the ontology of the social. The fact that the rules of our language are social in nature, and that we need not be aware of them in order to follow them, shifts the problem of social ontology away from consciousness to what lies behind it. The result is that being social is not a function of our consciousness. The ontological conceptualization of the social must focus on our implicit knowledge instead, which is always an enabling condition for consciousness. For, we share some of this implicit knowledge with others, as can be seen from the case of language.