Fundamentality in the Social World

This paper suggests that the notions of fundamentality and fundamentalia that are useful for understanding the social world are substantively different than the notions of fundamentality and fundamentalia that are useful for understanding the objects of the natural sciences. I describe these differences. Joints in the social world can be created and destroyed. Simply describing social joints can in some circumstances create them. After arguing for the distinctness of fundamentality in the physical world from fundamentality in the social world, I suggest that the distinction can be used to frame the difference between traditional metaphysics and social metaphysics more generally.