Documentality

Almost every day we engage with documents of a variety of different sorts. We buy plane tickets, collect receipts, sign contracts, request certificates, pay bills, renew passports, and change our bank account files. This issue of Monist will focus on “documentality,” i.e. the role and importance of documents for social ontology. Do documents embody some essential feature of modern society? And, if so, what role do they play in the constitution of social reality? What kind of entities are documents? Why do so many social and institutional acts require documents? How are changes in documents relate to changes in the social sphere? People strive to obtain green cards; they seek degrees and licenses that will enable them to obtain work and money. What, above all, are the sorts of things that we can do with documents? What is the relation between documents such as diplomas and the social status they bestow? What are the consequences of recent technological innovations which have magnified our capacity to create and store documents, but also made more urgent problems of document management and security. Contributors are invited to address these and other questions that are raised by the ubiquitous presence of documents in our lives.