Meaning and Concept of Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being and of what exists. In social research, ontology asks the question “What is there to know?” about society – in contrast to epistemology’s question “How can we know it?”. Every researcher, often without realizing it, carries basic assumptions about the nature of social reality. For example: is society a concrete entity with its own structures and rules, or is it merely a collection of ideas and interactions we call “society”?
Philosophical ontology deals with broad categories of existence (matter, mind, spirit, etc.), while social ontology asks what makes up the social world. Do categories like “social class” or “the economy” exist independently and exert influence, or are they just convenient labels for groupings of people? Is “society” something unique unto itself (a reality sui generis), or simply the sum of individuals and their interactions? Ontological assumptions about society range on a spectrum. At one end lies Realism (objectivism), which treats social facts as hard, external entities that exist independently of our beliefs. At the other extreme is Nominalism or subjectivism (social constructionism), which sees social reality as fluid and entirely constructed by people’s interpretations.
The philosopher W.V.O. Quine famously put the ontological question simply: “What is there?” He replied in a word: “Everything.” This wry answer suggests that, in principle, everything that exists is acknowledged as real. In practice, however, the real issue is deciding which entities we should count as part of our ontology – that is, which things are worthy of study. Ontology, in short, is the foundation that determines what kinds of “things” a researcher assumes are in the social world.
Major Ontologies
1. Realism (Objectivism)
Realism is the position that a structured social reality exists independently of our minds. In social science this often becomes naturalism: the idea that society follows real, law-like patterns and can be studied with objective methods similar to the natural sciences. Realist thinkers assume social institutions and patterns are out there to be discovered. This view emphasizes independence (social objects exist no matter what individuals think) and determinism (human behavior is driven by external forces as much as by free will). It lends itself to an etic perspective: the researcher stands outside social groups and observes them from a distance, aiming for objectivity.
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) exemplified realist sociology. He insisted that “social facts [are] things”, meaning that society’s norms, laws, and institutions exist outside individuals and constrain our behavior. Laws, customs, and even collective rates of behavior (such as the suicide rate) are real features of society, not just reflections of private choices. Durkheim argued that society molds individual actions through external forces like moral rules, education, or law. In his famous words, “the most basic rule of all sociological method … is to treat social facts as things.” Treating social phenomena as things meant measuring them – for example, using statistics on marriage or crime to uncover the “laws” behind social stability.
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was another key realist thinker. He founded positivism, arguing that society operates according to stable, invariant laws. Comte believed that just as physics discovers natural laws (like gravity), sociology should uncover its own laws of social organization. He envisioned a “positive stage” of knowledge in which metaphysical explanations give way to careful observation and reason. Under Comte’s vision, a sociologist would focus on measurable social facts. For example, a positivist might treat a statistic like the crime rate as evidence of an underlying law-like social process. In this way, Realist sociology seeks objective patterns in society as if society were a “thing” to be studied like nature.
2. Constructionism (Constructivism/Nominalism)
Constructionism rejects the idea of a single fixed reality waiting to be discovered. It takes a nominalist stance: the social world is created through human interactions, language, and beliefs. In this view, what we call a “social fact” exists only because people agree that it exists. If collective belief in something fades, that “thing” effectively disappears. Social categories and institutions exist only as long as people continuously give them meaning. Nothing in the social world is inevitable or natural; instead, every category is sustained by shared human consciousness.
A hallmark of constructionism is mind-dependence: social phenomena exist only when people construct and interpret them. Different groups may construct different realities, leading to multiple realities rather than a single universal truth. Constructionism also emphasizes active agency: humans are not passive recipients of social forces, but active creators of their world. Each generation externalizes its ideas (builds a social world), objectifies them into institutions, and then re-internalizes them as “reality” for the next generation. If people collectively stopped believing in a certain institution, it would lose its force.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann captured this view in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). They wrote: “Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.” In other words, society comes into being through human activity, and it only appears objective because people have externalized it into institutions and routines. For example, money is just paper and ink, but because we all believe in its value and use it regularly, money takes on an objective reality that shapes behavior. If everyone suddenly stopped accepting money, its social power would vanish. Reality itself – everyday knowledge, laws, even scientific “facts” – is seen as socially constructed through language, conventions, and power relations.
Max Weber (1864–1920) took a constructivist or interpretive turn by insisting that we must understand Verstehen – the subjective meanings that individuals attach to their actions. He famously defined sociology as the science that seeks “to interpret the meaning of social action” in order to explain it. For Weber, an action only makes sense when seen from the actor’s point of view. To explain phenomena like class, religion, or authority, a sociologist must grasp how people themselves define those phenomena. We cannot fully explain why individuals behave as they do without knowing what their behavior means to them. This is a core idea of constructionism: the inner world of meanings is as real to social life as any external structure.
Under strict constructionism, many familiar categories become fluid and contingent. For instance, race or gender are understood not as fixed natural divisions but as social ideas that have been constructed over time. Roles like “childhood” or “adulthood” can be very different in different cultures or eras. The Thomas theorem encapsulates the logic: “If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” What matters is not an ultimate objective reality, but the meanings people create. Constructionists therefore focus on language, symbols, and narratives. They often use qualitative methods – interviews, participant observation, discourse analysis – to uncover the many emic realities (the world as understood by participants). A number or statistic is not taken at face value; it is itself treated as a social product that must be explained.
3. Critical Realism
Critical realism stakes out a middle ground. It agrees that a real world exists independently of our minds (as realism asserts), but it also acknowledges that our knowledge of it is always mediated by theory and context (as constructionism emphasizes). Critical realists propose a stratified ontology: reality has layers that may not be immediately apparent. A useful metaphor is to distinguish three domains of reality: the empirical (what we observe or experience), the actual (events that occur whether we observe them or not), and the real (the deeper structures or mechanisms that generate those events).
For example, a researcher might empirically observe rising unemployment (the empirical). The jobs might actually be disappearing (the actual), but a critical realist would ask: what underlying mechanism causes this trend (the real)? Maybe it is the real force of a global market restructuring or a shift in technology. Those causal powers – economic structures, class relations, organizational routines – exist even if we don’t see them directly. Critical realism emphasizes that the “real” level has causal powers, whether or not those powers are constantly active.
Another key idea in critical realism is the distinction between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of knowledge. The intransitive dimension is the reality itself – the social structures, objects, and mechanisms that exist in the world. The transitive dimension is our knowledge and theories about that reality, which can change over time. Critical realism holds that scientific theories (the transitive knowledge) may evolve, but they refer to a reality (the intransitive dimension) that does not simply change when we change our minds. For example, changing economic theories does not by itself change how factories or markets actually operate.
Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) is the founder of critical realism in social science. He argued that to truly explain social phenomena, researchers must uncover the generative mechanisms that produce them. Simply observing regularities (like crime rates, poverty levels, or voting patterns) is not enough; one must explain them by identifying deeper causes. Critical realism often has an emancipatory motive: by revealing hidden structures of power or exploitation, researchers hope to help people overcome them. In other words, knowledge is not just descriptive but can be an instrument for understanding and change.
In many ways, Karl Marx (1818–1883) anticipated critical realism. Marx argued that beneath the visible workings of capitalism lay an unobserved structure of exploitation. The market’s “invisible hand” hides the fact that workers produce surplus value taken by capitalists. Marx famously wrote: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” In other words, people’s material and social conditions (their real economic relations) exist outside of and prior to their ideas, and those conditions shape beliefs and institutions. This is a realist insight (there is a real base of economic relations) combined with a recognition that ideas and consciousness emerge from that base (a nod to the transitive nature of our understanding).
The Role of Ontology in Research
Ontology may sound abstract, but it underpins every stage of the research process. It is the philosophical foundation that shapes how a researcher conceptualizes their subject, what they look for, and how they interpret findings. In fact, we can think of a hierarchy: Ontology → Epistemology → Methodology. Once a researcher adopts an ontological stance, this usually leads naturally to an epistemological view (what counts as knowledge) and then to choices of method (how to gather that knowledge).
For example, consider a study of human intelligence. A researcher with a realist ontology might assume intelligence is a fixed trait. They would likely adopt an objectivist epistemology, believing intelligence can be measured impartially, and thus use quantitative methods like standardized tests. In contrast, a researcher with a constructionist ontology might see “intelligence” as a socially defined concept. They would take a subjectivist epistemology, aiming to understand how people define intelligence, and use qualitative methods (interviews, observations in classrooms, etc.) to explore how the idea of intelligence is constructed in context.
Ontology also dictates what counts as valid evidence. A positivist/realist researcher demands external, observable data. They collect statistics, measure variables, and often assume these facts speak for themselves. For them, social concepts (like poverty or health) are turned into numbers or scales that are treated as objective. By contrast, an interpretivist/constructivist sees such “hard” data as already interpreted. They would argue that a statistic like “12% unemployment” reflects certain definitions and methods of counting; it is not a brute fact but a social artifact that itself needs explanation. Interpretivists look for evidence in words, narratives, and contexts – the meanings people create. A survey number is not self-explanatory but a clue to how society (and the researcher) has framed the issue.
Ontology also makes the researcher’s own position explicit. Realist traditions often assume the researcher can be an impartial observer – a “God’s-eye view” of society. Constructionists and critical realists, however, emphasize reflexivity: the idea that researchers are part of the social world they study, with their own backgrounds and biases. This means researchers must reflect on how their identity, culture, or perspective might influence the research. For example, a feminist sociologist might consider how her gender and values shape her choice of questions and interpretation of data. Recognizing this does not paralyze the researcher, but it makes her critically aware of how knowledge is produced.
Finally, ontology lies at the heart of the classic structure vs. agency debate in sociology. A holist or structural ontology holds that social structures (institutions, class systems, cultural norms) are real forces that shape individual behavior. Durkheim, for instance, treated institutions like law or education as entities with a reality and power of their own. In contrast, an individualist ontology (often linked to constructionism or methodological individualism) claims that only individuals and their actions are truly real; societal forces are just shorthand for many individual actions. Weber leaned toward this by insisting we understand society from the individual’s point of view. Critical realism seeks middle ground: it accepts that structures are real and constrain us, but also that individuals’ beliefs and actions reproduce and change those structures. In practice, a researcher’s ontology will influence whether they focus on institutional forces or personal meanings (or both) when explaining a social outcome.
In summary, ontology is the framework that makes social research coherent. It defines what kinds of things we think populate the social world – whether we see society as an objective realm of facts, a fabric woven from human meanings, or some layered combination. By clarifying our ontological stance, we give direction to our methods and interpretations. It ensures that we are not merely collecting data in a vacuum, but investigating a specific vision of reality. Without a clear ontology, a study risks becoming a mere catalog of observations without insight. Ontology guarantees that our research remains a coherent inquiry into the kind of social reality we aim to understand.
