 One of the more precise ways of clarifying claims about the building of social entities is to use various forms of the supervenience relation (see the entry on  supervenience).  A virtue of the supervenience relation is that it makes it easy to articulate important distinctions in precise ways. For instance, maybe the social properties of the U.S. Senate are exhaustively determined by the properties of U.S. Senators. Or maybe the social properties of the U.S. Senate are exhaustively determined by properties of the population of the entire U.S., or even of the entire world, not just by properties of Senators. This distinction can be clarified using the notion of “global supervenience” (see Macdonald &amp; Pettit 1981, Currie 1984, Kincaid 1986, Epstein 2009). There are, however, well-known shortcomings to the supervenience relation as well (see Fine 2001, Shagrir 2002, K. Bennett 2004a, Correia 2005). People interested in the building blocks of the social world often discuss different relations apart from supervenience, including identity, parthood, fusion, aggregation, set membership, constitution, and grounding (see entry on  ontological dependence,  Copp 1984, Ruben 1985, Baker 2004, Sheehy 2006, Effingham 2010, List &amp; Pettit 2011).