Panagiotis Kondylis

 
"The socioontological sense of the clearly epistemological distinction between law and causality can be formulated as follows: the absence of laws from causality, even though the principle of causality applies totally, in the field of the social sciences is from the beginning and essentially connected with the fluid and protean character of the socioontological, which must constitute the specific object of social ontology - in other words: it is connected, if one can put it this way, with the suitability of the socioontological matter to be cast into ever new moulds and to be subjected to ever new causalities. The task of social ontology is accordingly not to reduce the fluid and the varied phenomena to basic samples and basic genetic factors; what is sought is to show the spectrum of the forces and factors, which can only be constituted and become discernible from the - irreducible and inexhaustible - diversity of form. Social ontology does not offer a supreme or exclusive content-based or normative criterion for the contemplation of human society and history, but only that analysis of the bases from which it arises, because it is impossible to add such a criterion. It does not formulate regularities or causalities - least of all, laws - it does not say what people ought to do in this or that situation or how their social action should unfold. In no way does it wish to fulfil the functions of a Covering Law Model." (PM, p.186; PA, pp.250-51)

"For social ontology, the logic of the laying of its foundations lies at the fact of society, i.e. an ontic and epistemic level at which the elementary constitution of the other in the consciousness of the ego, regardless of how it plays out and how one comprehends it, must be presumed as an already expired process."(PM, p.310; PA, pp.414-15)