We theorise like it or not. Any description of the natural or social worlds we inhabit, quite independently of its scientific status or level of subtlety, presumes an element of theory. None of us starts with a blank slate. We draw on a symbolic framework handed down and absorbed as if by osmosis from previous generations. We inherit a collection of language games or forms of life when we are socialised into a mix of lifeworld and expert perspectives. Society precedes us, for all that it neither exists independently of human activity nor is the product of it. We are all where we start from. But where we start from, whether as curious ‘lay’ citizens or as ‘professional/ expert’ physicists, biologists or sociologists, is replete with theories that we have to take on board, with varying degrees of reflexivity, about how things are and why they are as they are.

There are a few more preliminaries to be borne in mind before the substantive theories on society, social change and health that are especially pertinent to the issues raised in this volume are broached (see Scambler, 2018, 2023). As the previous paragraphs indicate, (empirical) data do not speak for themselves, as is still sometimes either claimed or assumed. In the remarks that follow I deploy a number of rubrics: ‘absence’, ‘explanatory focus’, ‘scope’, ‘going beyond is versus ought’, ‘philosophical grounding’, ‘fallibilism’, and ‘permeable boundaries’.

• • Absence: the concept of absence is borrowed from the work of Roy Bhaskar which is explored later in this chapter, although it did not originate with him. Being, Bhaskar maintained, is but a ripple on the surface of the ocean of non- being. What he means is that what presently is comprises but one possibility among others too innumerable and varied to even envisage. These possibilities cover what might have been (as reflected in the predilection for ‘what- if ‘ histories) and what might yet be. The importance of this for social and sociological theory lies in its ramifications. It is only too easy to focus exclusively on a sociology of the present, or an historical sociology of how the present came to be. To do so is entirely legitimate, but it distracts attention from absence, that is, from a sociology of what might have been and what might yet be.