Quine and Critical Realism

Ontology has recently become a widely discussed subject in the social sciences with contributions from critical realists at the forefront of ontological debates. But the study of ontology runs the risk of being dismissed as irrelevant by ‘hard-headed ’ social scientists who claim to be uninterested in ‘purely abstract ’ thought. Social ontologists must not only defend their arguments and proposals, but also the motivation underlying an interest in ontology in the first place. Indeed, ontology was not considered to be a respectable subject within philosophy until relatively recently. Social scientists interested in ontology are engaged in the same arguments as philosophers were one generation ago. Certain recent developments offer a particularly interesting parallel with older battles waged within analytic philosophy. Central to these debates was the groundbreaking work of WVO Quine, who made frequent references to ontology in his contributions. One of Quine’s main objectives was to demonstrate that the development of scientific theory was always accompanied by some set of ontological assumptions. This was intended and seen as a threat to dominant positivist trends in philosophy which insisted that ontology was unverifiable hocus-pocus. Some forty years later, what appears to be a similar debate has surfaced in the social sciences. In this paper I will examine the apparent affinity between the Quineian turn towards ontology and the one advocated within Tony Lawson’s variant of critical realism. The claim that any student of the sciences must take seriously the ontological implications of the theories they study is, I will argue, central to both projects. In spite of this, there are deep divergences between the worldviews ultimately promoted by the two approaches. These divergences open up possibilities for deeper research into the relationship between critical realist social theorising and analytic philosophy that have not been widely discussed to date