# Traces, Documents, and the Puzzle of ‘Permanent Acts’ **Opening (not a real abstract):** Social ontology originates with the shift from Austin’s pragmatic question (1962): ‘how to do things with words?’ to Searle’s ontological question (1995): ‘what kinds of things do we do with words?’ In Making the Social World Searle ultimately characterizes social entities of many kinds as involving what he calls “standing permanent speech acts” (2010, 86). From this perspective, the social entity is not only the product of an act, comparable in this respect to ordinary artifacts, but a special sort of product that in some sense embodies the act itself. Entities like private property and money, Searle tells us, can appropriately be described as involving permanent acts of this sort: So what we think of as private property, for example, involves a kind of standing speech act. It is a kind of permanent speech act affixed to an object. It says that the owner of this object **Authors:** [[terrrone]]