Abstract

Although there is already an important discussion regarding social ontology (a first-order investigation about social entities, e.g., social objects, social events, social relations, and social categories), not much attention has been paid to social meta-ontology (a second-order inquiry concerning what it means and how to answer whether there are any such entities). With the intention to contribute towards bringing the latter into the philosophical spotlight, I submit here a brief survey of the meta-ontological issues about two specific kinds of social entities, viz., social and institutional practices. After elaborating on Thomasson’s easy approach to ontology, I argue that it can be extended to account for the existence of those social entities.