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.