Introduction: ontology, philosophy and the social sciences

Ontology, understood broadly as a concern with the nature of being, is currently enjoying a revival. Indeed, the recent rekindling of interest in ontological matters has prompted the perception of ontology as the latest buzzword or even paradigm shift. 1 Whereas this interest is evident across the disciplinary spectrum – from philosophy to artificial intelligence and computer science 2 – this book focuses upon the recent developments that have taken place within the social sciences. Until recently, social scientists tended to treat ontology with a great deal of suspicion. In large part, this may have arisen from the identification of ontology with metaphysics, which tends to be seen both as inaccessible to social scientists without the correct philosophical training and, in any case, as quite irrelevant to their concerns. 3 In this context, it is perhaps surprising to see just how much of a comeback ontology has made in recent years. Indeed it is now common for researchers in a range of social science disciplines not only to refer explicitly to ontology but to describe their work as in some sense ontological or as part of an ontological project. It is this turn to ontology in the social sciences that forms the central focus of this book. As will become clear, however, in practice this turn has taken a variety of different forms and can be understood from quite different vantage points.