ABSTRACT
The social sciences study social entities, including social facts, social actions, and social objects. Social entities seem to differ from merely natural objects like sticks and stones in an important respect, however: they are, in some sense, human constructions and would not exist without human habits, practices, beliefs, and/or agreements. Social facts, as Durkheim observed, have “coercive power, by virtue of which they impose themselves” on human, independent of every human's will, and it was this which, on his view, marked them out as “thing-like” entities distinct from mere products of our own imagination or fantasy. The social world is puzzling since it seems to be at once a human creation, and something that may be unknown to human, and even coercive of human. The way to unravel these puzzles lies in understanding the different ways in which social entities may be created, and the different senses in which they may depend on human intentionality.
