ABSTRACT
The main barrier to metatheoretical unity, the cornerstone of successful interdisciplinarity, is an inadequate understanding of ontology. This chapter considers how critical realism can be developed in terms of deepening understanding of ontology. It argues for the need for an ontology. The ideas of dispositional realism, categorial realism, the different kinds of truth, TINA compromises, and emancipatory discourses are some of the far-reaching implications of the simple idea at the first step in the critical realism development of ontology, namely that being is unavoidable and that it is structured and differentiated. The deeper level of structure, that was of course there all along, is thus discovered and put back into the theory. This is a dialectical process in which the incompleteness of theories is gradually and progressively rectified by greater and greater completeness, leading to more comprehensive totalities.
