ABSTRACT
Ontological commitments, whether philosophical or scientific, logically precede substantive claims, and serve as the often-unacknowledged basis on which empirical claims are founded. In this sense, ontological commitments are “founda - tional”—not in the sense that they provide unshakable grounds that universally guarantee the validity of claims that are founded on them, but “foundational” in the sense that they provide the conditions of intelligibility for those claims. In that way, ontological commitments are world-disclosing, since they make a particular kind of tangible world available to a researcher (Habermas 1990, 321). A claim such as “democratic states do not go to war with one another” implicitly makes a number of ontological presuppositions. The claim makes scientific-ontological presupposi - tions that a state’s “democracy-ness” is a conceptually separable attribute of that state and most likely also presupposes that a state’s standing as a democracy is something that is visible to external scholarly observers and specifiable in an abstract fashion.1 The claim also makes philosophical-ontological presuppositions, although these are somewhat further removed from the individual claim and pertain more to the overall intellectual context within which the claim makes sense; hence one needs to know something about the broader body of scholarly literature within which a claim has standing in order to explicate the philosophical-ontological commitments that it tacitly presumes.
