ABSTRACT
The social sciences are unusual, as compared to the other sciences, with respect to how they investigate the objects they work on. Chemists, for instance, take it to be an ordinary part of the job to gure out the building blocks of molecules. Cell biologists spend a good chunk of their time investigating the parts of cells, and climatologists the composition of atmosphere, oceans, and landmasses. It is a common and well-established task for scientists to work out the building blocks of objects and phenomena. Social scientists, on the other hand, tend to skip this task: with few exceptions, publications are devoted to models and empirical investigations, without inquiring into building blocks. Occasionally a brief controversy will are up about the nature of social entities-the topic that is now starting to be called “social ontology”— but it has received little attention in the course of scientic practice.
