ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters in the fourth part of this book. The part of the book generates status functions through speech acts of declaration. Philosophers have indeed appealed to collective intentionality in accounts of virtually all aspects of social reality: social groups, social kinds, and status functions. Social ontology studies the nature of the elements of the social world, things such as universities, university presidents, artifacts, checks, and opera performances. Using the distinction between grounds and anchors, Epstein classifies theories of social construction into four categories: theories that take attitudes to be grounds of social facts and theories that take attitudes to be anchors of social facts. Further categories are: theories that take non-mental facts as grounds for social facts, and theories that take non-mental facts to be anchors of social facts.
