Contingent or Necessary? A Response to Stephen Norrie

Stephen Norrie’s response to my original paper is a defence of Bhaskar’s realism contra my appeal for a more contingent form of realism that abandons necessity. In this reply I counter a number of misunderstandings of my position on Norrie’s part, but conclude that on matters of emergence and mechanism our views are similar and the most important difference is between Norrie’s micro‐level determinism and my position of ontological contingency.