Tony Lawson (1999, 2003a, 2003b), Sandra Harding (1999, 2003), Drucilla K. Barker (2003), Fabienne Peter (2003) and Julie A. Nelson (2003) have debated the merits and dismerits of critical realism as the basis of feminist social research. However, the dialogue was left unfinished, and no clear agreement was attained. Some key features of that failure are analyzed in this paper, and it is suggested that critical realists and poststructuralist feminists cannot gain much from uncontextualized ontological and epistemological arguments in their dialogue. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]