Realism. From social ontology to documentality The natural outcome of critical ontology is the twofold acknowledgement of the external world as unamendable and of the domain of objects which Kantian transcendental philosophy rightly applies to: that of social objects. This new phase of Ferraris’ thought was ideally inaugurated with the publication of Dove sei? Ontologia del telefonino (2005) [Where are you? Ontology of the Cell Phone, forthcoming for Fordham UP] and went on with Babbo Natale, Gesù adulto (2006), Sans Papier (2007), La fidanzata automatica (2007) and Il tunnel delle multe (2008). The basic thesis is that the distinction between ontology and epistemology, combined with the acknowledgment of the ontological autonomy of the sphere of social objects (regulated by the constitutive law "object = inscribed act"), allows for the correction of Derrida's thesis that "there is nothing outside the text "(literally, and asemantically,"there is no outside text") so as to theorize, against Searle, that “there is nothing social outside the text." This leads to the mature stage of Ferraris’ thought, fully exposed and systematized in what may be considered his summa: Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce (2009) [Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, Fordham UP, 2010] - and a monographic issue of the ‚“Monist“ (Edited by Maurizio Ferraris and Leonardo Caffo). Documentality The most influential ontology of social reality, formulated by the American philosopher John Searle (1995), is based on collective intentionality, which allegedly ensures that certain physical objects (e.g. a piece of paper) are transformed into social objects (e.g. a banknote). As noted by Barry Smith (2003), this perspective has difficulty in accounting for both negative entities – such as debts, which apparently do not have a physical counterpart – and the new, seemingly intangible, social objects generated by the Web. The theory of documentality proposed by Maurizio Ferraris (2005) aims to solve these problems by arguing that social objects are always recordings of social acts. This accounts for both negative entities and the virtual entities of the web, which consist precisely of recordings just like any other social object. For the theory of documentality, the constitutive rule of social reality is "Object = Inscribed Act", where “inscribed” is equal to “recorded”. That is: a social object is the result of a social act (such as to involve at least two people), which is characterized by its being recorded on some support, including the minds of