Abstract
Economics has been criticized for lacking reality for a long time. Lawson (1997, 2003) argues that its neglect of ontology is the underlying cause of this problem rather than just the unrealistic assumptions of the models. He espouses social ontology for economics, elaborating the nature of social being. First, I examine this claim from the viewpoint of a philosophical realism, and make it clear how critical realism theorises the reality presupposed by natural science. Second, I examine Searle’s social ontology (Searle 1995, 2009) as a representative argument for philosophical theorizing of social reality. I agree his dissection of social reality, however, his theory of the creation of social reality seems to rely on the linguistic aspect too much to make sense of the materiality of the social realm. Therefore, thirdly, I sketch out how the emergence of social reality is inseparable from the emergence of economic reality as a possible solution to the morphogenesis of social reality.
