ABSTRACT
At the time of writing my first book, A Realist Theory of Science (1975), ontology was a taboo subject. It would have been impossible for ontology to have been the central theme for a respectable conference. In fact if someone talked about ontology there would be a certain frisson: it was not the sort of thing that nice people talked about. Thirty years on it seems that everyone is talking about ontology. I wouldn’t want to say this is entirely due to critical realism but I think perhaps that critical realism has played some role in it. However, much of what I wish to say here will be an attempt to deflate ontology. I shall argue that although ontology is important, we also have to pay attention to other features of the intellectual landscape, including epistemology and issues to do with judgemental rationality – issues that have been of secondary importance for critical realists until recently. To get my corrective in at the start, I would say that we need to rebalance critical realism by paying more attention to the transitive and intrinsic alongside the intransitive, and the epistemological and axiological within ontology, than we have done.
