ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I outline rival positions on the ontology of social groups, ontological individualism and realism (or holism). 1 Ontological individualism maintains that ultimately we need only refer to individual persons and their relations when describing the social world (i.e. the domain of human interaction), offering explanations of social phenomena, forming judgments or developing theories. Realism or holism by contrast is the thesis that reference to social groups is ineliminable from such discourse and that they are entities in their own right. A social group is a type of object over which we quantify in our folk and formal social scientific discourses.
