ABSTRACT
Every social theorist or investigator has a social ontology. Thismay be quite implicit but it is also unavoidable because we can say nothing without making some assumptions about the nature of social reality examined. Philosophers of social science, until about fifteen years ago, used to represent the basic parting of the ways as the division between Methodological Individualists (who held that social reality could be reduced to the doings and beliefs of ‘other people’) and Methodological Collectivists (who held that ‘social facts’were irreducible, but nonetheless real and influential). Some certainly still hold to these traditional generic positions.2 Thus Anthony King has recently come to the defence of ‘interpretive sociology’ and of its methodologically individualist ontology, though it is not entirely clear whether he is defending ‘interpretivism’ alone or the ontological position in general, which is shared by such disparate exponents as Rational Choice theorists. However, for many of us working on the allied problem of ‘structure and agency’
or the links between micro-and macro-phenomena, it seemed that the old debate should not be continued, but rather that its very terms ought to be superseded. We were more concerned with how structure shaped interaction, and interaction, in turn, reshaped structure, than with promises of reductionism or, for that matter, ‘constructionism’, which merely seemed to place a ‘big etcetera’ alongside micro-sociological propositions.3 Undoubtedly we found the reductionist charter incoherent in its very individualism. As Bhaskar wrote,
the real problem appears to be not so much that of how one could give an individualistic explanation of social behaviour, but that of how one could ever give a non-social (ie, strictly individualistic) explanation of individual, at least characteristically human behaviour! For the predicates designating properties special to persons all pre-suppose a social context for their employment. A tribesman implies a tribe, the cashing of a cheque a banking system. Explanation, whether by subsumption under general laws, advertion tomotives and rules, or redescription (identification), always involves irreducibly social predicates.4
