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Taking a side in the debate over ontological emergentism in social theory, this article defends an outlook that Margaret S. Archer has dubbed "central conflation": an antidualistic position appreciating the interdependency of agency and structure, individuals and society. This has been a popular outlook in recent years, advocated broadly by such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, and Anthony Giddens. However, antidualism has been challenged by those who believe the key to success in social science lies in level-ontological emergentism. Archer's own morphogenetic theory is an explicitly dualist version of that approach. I answer Archer's arguments for emergentism, in so doing clearing a path for the even fuller acceptance of antidualism by theorists.

In this paper, two alternative naturalistic standpoints on the relations between language, human consciousness and social life are contrasted. The first, dubbed "intrinsic naturalism," is advocated among others by the realist philosopher John Searle; it starts with intrinsic intentionality and consciousness emerging from the brain, explains language as an outgrowth of consciousness and ends with institutional reality being created by language‐use. That standpoint leans on what may be described as the standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution. The other type of naturalism, in contrast, making use of the concept of evolutionary niches, suggests that the search for the explanatory mechanisms of language and consciousness should begin with the human community (of social action), because that is the cultural niche for everything distinctively human to evolve, including language and human consciousness.

En el presente artículo se analizan los enfoques relacionalistas de las ciencias sociales en términos de una distinción conceptual entre la "filosofización de la sociología" y la "sociologización de la filosofía". Estos marcan dos actitudes diferentes con respecto a la metafísica filosófica y sus compromisos ontológicos. El pragmatismo de los autores tiene su origen en el relacionalismo metodológico de Dewey, el cual se compara con los enfoques realistas con un compromiso ontológico, así como con el relacionalismo metodológico de Bourdieu. Se argumenta que la filosofía pragmática de las ciencias sociales es una herramienta adecuada para ayudar a los científicos sociales en su labor metodológica, en particular en lo que respecta a los estudios de casos basados en problemas.

In this article, relationalist approaches to social sciences are analyzed in terms of a conceptual distinction between "philosophizing sociology" and "sociologizing philosophy." These mark two different attitudes toward philosophical metaphysics and ontological commitments. The authors' own pragmatist methodological relationalism of Deweyan origin is compared with ontologically committed realist approaches, as well as with Bourdieuan methodological relationalism. It is argued that pragmatist philosophy of social sciences is an appropriate tool for assisting social scientists in their methodological work, especially as regards problem-driven case studies.