Ontological Investigations of a Pragmatic Kind? A Reply to Lauer

Abstract

This article is a reply to Richard Lauer’s “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” and an attempt to contribute to the meta-social ontological discourse more broadly. In the first part I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront his pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem rooted in a philosophy of the social sciences in practice.

Social Ontology and the Identification of Generic Performativity in Social Science: A Case of Performative Financialization

“…He emphasized the relative and interpretative aspects of SO: “Ontological investigations are investigations of the inferential properties of a linguistic framework, particularly those that can be understood as existentially quantified formulas or that concern individuals assumed by that framework” (Lauer 2021, 28-29). Furthermore, to deal with Lohse’s (2021) challenge, 17 Lauer highlighted the linguistic aspects of SO and maintained his pragmatic stance by arguing that the “ontological assumption” should not be understood in its extremely realist sense. In brief, Lauer (2021) suggested reconsidering ontological assumptions of different discourses in communities such as a specific scientific community.…”

“…17Lohse (2021, 8) defended his realistic stance by maintaining that the practice-based “approach is open to the possibility of a plurality of incompatible social ontologies and is not wedded to the ideas that there is only one right way of conceptualizing the social world or that we can approximate a true conceptualization of the social world.” Lohse (2021, 8) further stated that the aim of SO in social science is integrating different social ontologies through conceptual clarification and an immanent critique of theories and explanatory frameworks.…”

Ontological Anti-Foundationalism in Sociology

“…One of the key issues in this field is the relationship between ontology and the social sciences. Some believe that social ontology should provide a foundation for the social sciences (see for example Epstein 2015, 6-9), while others argue that it should be based on the social sciences and examine their internal ontologies without attempting to change them (see for example Kincaid 2021;Lauer 2019Lauer , 2021Lohse 2017Lohse , 2021.…”

Rescuing Ontological Individualism

“…Naturalism is more a family of views than a single doctrine and may be articulated in different forms. For some examples, see the recent debate sparked byLauer (2019) and continued byLittle (2021),Lohse (2021),Kincaid (2021), and Lauer (2021).…”