ABSTRACT
I have outlined broad objectives and modes of explanatory reasoning that are sponsored by the theory of social ontology sketched earlier. Although in so doing I have drawn some inferences about general procedures of enquiry that are often likely to be involved, there remains one procedure to which I have hardly referred explicitly, yet which is vital to any cognitive enterprise. I refer to the method or process of abstraction. Despite the limited explicit attention given to it in modern social theorising (including, curiously, the contributions of Bhaskar), abstraction is an indispensable method in science. Moreover, given the often found assertion that orthodox 'economic modelling' is itself based upon abstraction, it seems vital that I indicate why the procedure to which I refer does not at all reduce to the activities of the 'modelling' project in question.
