ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book reflects on the fundamental predicament of contemporary philosophy and the social sciences. It points out that meta-ontology and also epistemology are dependent upon gnoseological assumptions, and that gnoseological approaches are explicitly or implicitly informed by social ontologies, that is to say, the theoretical schemes about the ‘nature’ of language, interaction, intersubjectivity, subjectivity, imagination, reflectivity, etc. When the study of social ontology comes to the fore, one can notice that the debates on social ontological investigations are, to a large extent, battles between naturalists and anti-naturalists. The former utilise naturalist imageries and (illegitimately) transfer and project them to the explanation of whole-parts relations in the social domain. Ignorance of the key links between philosophy and the social sciences has led to relatively distinct mountains of published articles which do not relate in some way to grand theories or social ontologies.
