ABSTRACT
Social theoretical concerns regarding ontology or social ontologies or the ontological status, as it is sometimes put, of what different kinds of words consequential to social thought are about have proliferated during the last couple of decades. Furthermore, ontological concerns have surfaced in a number of notable exchanges among social theorists which can be seen as recent instalments in debate spanning many decades. Ontological questions are metaphysical questions in the sense that they attempt to settle what the ultimate reality of things is, and more specifically by being ontological ones they branch out into two related tasks: that of providing a definitive answer concerning the being or nature of an entity, and that of compiling a list of the kinds of entities populating reality, in other words a list of kinds of real things and real things only. Social ontology projects, far from redressing what is problematic in the above responses constitute more of the same.
