ABSTRACT
This chapter offers situation conventions as the fundamental form of the emergence of social ontology out of individual agent level ontology. This ontology ranges from the momentary common understanding of how to resolve a pronoun in this not yet completed utterance to deeply and complexly institutionalized conventions and processes of government, law, and economics. Persons are biological beings who participate in social environments. In particular, the ontology of persons is itself mostly, though not exclusively, social. Nevertheless, although Piaget was too simplistic in his characterization of the relation between the individual and society, this human social ontology can be modeled only with the general kind of action framework espoused and developed by Piaget. The presuppositions of major theoretical orientations today make understanding human social ontology impossible. Modeling human social ontology, then, is not independent of framework or grounding theories. It requires an action or interaction based model, one in the general pragmatic tradition of Peirce and Piaget.
