Pragmatism, Ontology, and Philosophy of the Social Sciences in Practice

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss two prominent views on the relevance and irrelevance of ontological investigations for the social sciences respectively, namely ontological foundationalism and antiontological pragmatism. I will argue that both views are unsatisfactory. The subsequent part of the paper will introduce an alternative role for ontological projects in the philosophy of the social sciences that fares better in this respect by paying attention to the ontological assumptions of actual social scientific theories, models and related explanatory practices. I will illustrate and support this alternative through discussion of three concrete cases. KeywordsSocial ontology, explanation, philosophy of science in practice, pragmatism, ontological foundationalism To appear in Philosophy of the Social Sciences | Revised draft, 2016-05-25 -please do not cite! 2

Towards a complex model of disaster behaviour

“…Lohse (2017, p. 5) provides an interesting ontological discussion on economics and the other social sciences, stating that ‘economics places a huge role on predictions of social – especially economic – events and processes. [Milton] Friedman … even called it the ultimate goal of economics as a positive science’.…”

Ontological Investigations of a Pragmatic Kind? A Reply to Lauer

“…And why should social scientists care what kinds of ontological frameworks are developed by philosophers? (Lohse 2017, 13f.). Unfortunately, the pragmatist approach presented by Lauer does not really provide a viable alternative for OM!…”

“…In the first part I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront the presented pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem via the vindication of the approach to social ontology developed in Lohse (2017), which Lauer discusses but (as I shall argue) misconstrues as realist.…”

“…This is a reply to Richard Lauer’s paper “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” which appeared in this journal in 2019. 1 Lauer’s paper is a contribution to what can be called “meta-social ontology.” Meta-social ontology is an emerging field that—in line with its big sister meta-ontology (or “meta-metaphysics,” see the essays in Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman 2009)—examines the purpose, the methods, and the viability of different approaches to social ontology (see Kivinen and Piiroinen 2006; Lohse 2017; van Bouwel and Weber 2008). Lauer’s meta-ontological contribution (a) critically assesses mainstream realist approaches to social ontology that are science-directed in that they aim at improving research in the social sciences and (b) presents a (possibly superior) alternative pragmatist approach to social ontology.…”

Rating and rewarding higher education for sustainable development research within the marketised higher education context: experiences from English universities

“…Interview transcripts were coded and analysed using a bespoke theoretical framework, which, in contrast with the broadly Critical Theory tradition of HESD research, combined tenets of Pragmatist theoretical perspective, with Constructionist/Interpretivist theoretical perspective, between which there are obvious commonalities (Goldkuhl 2012). Pragmatism is a theoretical tradition rooted in empiricism, rather than philosophy; it rejects metaphysical disputes and ideological dichotomies in search of useful and workable ideas, policies and 'ways forward' (Crotty 1998;Goldkuhl 2012;Morgan 2014;Lohse 2017). Although theoretical and methodological blurring in research has been subject to critique, including within HESD specifically (Dillon and Wals 2016), the pragmatist theoretical tradition, through its evasion of philosophy (West 1989), actually encourages pluralism (both ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically).…”