In this paper, I argue that conventionalised social kinds, including legal institutions like marriage, operate through collective recognition rather than functional realization (the Functionalist View). I propose a Constructivist View where legal kinds are constructed by relevant communities through collective recognition. The central concept I introduce is Social Amendment: the process by which relevant communities collectively recognize new entities as belonging to existing social kinds, thereby expanding kind membership without functional constraints. I demonstrate that social kinds exist on a continuum of conventionalisation, with properties held together by causal mechanisms (real social kinds) or fiat (conventionalised social kinds). Legal artefacts exemplify strictly conventionalised kinds where collective recognition determines the membership of the kind. Using marriage as a case study, I show how this framework resolves the tension between functional and recognition-based approaches to legal kinds. The Constructivist View bridges the artefact theory of law with social ontology, revealing their convergence through conventionalised social kinds. This approach aligns with token-first theories of kind construction and demonstrates how legal institutions evolve through collective recognition rather than functional adaptation, while showing compatibility with existing socio-ontological accounts.
Current political debates in many countries concern not just questions about the redistribution of resources but are also about the very nature of these countries, and about who belongs to them. Yet while these might seem like questions which have a social-ontological dimension to them, social ontology as a discipline has tended to focus on other types of social entities than nations or countries. This paper explores an anti-realism about such social entities coupled with a fictionalism about them (and possibly many other social entities as well), but where the reality of so-called sociomaterial assemblages is still recognized. On this approach, something like a politics of interpretation is an ever-present feature of social constructions like nations and countries. And while social fictionalism does not tell us which way to go on these political issues, it does help open them up for possible alternatives to dominant narratives.
