system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
An ontology of society?

Do you know of any resources I can use to get information on what exists within a society and what some necessary processes are. These seem like obvious questions, but I haven't found anything that answers them thoroughly. I'm also not talking about something as fundamental as an ontology of the *social world*. I'm aware of social ontology. I'm asking for an ontology of a society itself. A more empirical, less abstract approach of just 1) What exists within it (people, governments, markets etc.) and 2) What the main processes are

Isn't this supposed to be common knowledge among anyone in the social sciences by now?
gpt
Well, this is not going to be very satisfying, but you're going to get very different answers depending on what field you ask, and there is no one resource that anyone can point you to that is going to make them all coalesce into something unified, because there is no unified theory of society, and many of the existing ones are either mutually exclusive, or simply largely ignore one another.

Your intuition is much the same as Auguste Comte's was two centuries ago, when he was writing The Course in Positive Philosophy. "We take a problem, we smash science into it until we figure it out. So why can't we just do the same thing with society? If we haven't figured it out, then it's probably because we haven't smashed enough science into it yet."

But it hasn't quite worked out that way yet. If you ask  Berger and Luckmann, their going to give you an answer on how we interact collectively and how our shared meanings form. If you ask Paul Krugman, he's going to give you a very different answer with a focus on macroeconomic forces. If you ask a whole bunch of people *over there* they're going to tell you about how we shape society, *over there* about how society shapes us, *and over there* how evolution has shaped us and collectively shaped society in turn and also shaped the extent to which it can shape us and we can shape it. And in the corner there's a bunch of people mumbling to themselves about how evolutionary psychology isn't really a science.

The short answer is, we don't really know, but a lot of people have very strong opinions on the matter.