Social roles and their descriptions

Abstract

This paper offers two main contributions. On the one hand, it establishes a general formal framework for developing a foundational ontology of socially constructed entities, in the broadest sense of this notion; on the other hand, it further contributes to understanding the ontological nature of roles. The key choice here is to put all social entities in the domain of discourse: besides social individuals, we also consider ‘reified ’ social concepts and roles, as well as their descriptions, i.e, the ‘social conventions ’ or ‘contexts ’ that define them. This allows us to formally characterize in a first-order theory the relationships among all these entities. 1