Abstract
Readers of a Festschrift honoring J.W.N. Watkins will surely know that once upon a time there raged a hotly-debated argument over whether the concepts used in the social sciences are individualistic or not. Having not long ago reread that debate as it was preserved by John O’Neill,1 I find myself thinking that the non-individualist papers are hardly the worse for wear, and that the individualist ones no more persuasive now than then. But I have had my say on all that in the terms in which I understood the debate and have no desire to repeat again what I said all those years ago. I would, however, like to indicate something about the nature of the problem from a perspective that was very far from my mind in those earlier years when the debate was taking place, that is, from a perspective that I have come to think of as conceptual tension.
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Notes
John O’Neill (Ed.), Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1973.
Quoted in Morris Weitz, The Opening Mind, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. xi.
See J.M.Brennan, The Open-Texture of Moral Concepts, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1976
Julius Kovesi, Moral Notions, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 129.
W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and Historical Understanding, London, Chatto & Windus, 1964, ch. 8.
See William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd ed., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983
John Gray ‘Political Power, Social Theory, and Essential Contestability’, in D. Miller and L. Siedentop (Eds.), The Nature of Political Theory, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, pp. 75–101.
Weitz, op. cit.
Perhaps not entirely. I believe that R.G. Collingwood’s account of the scale of forms of overlapping classes in an attempt to deal with some form of open concepts (An Essay on Philosophical Method, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1933, chaps. 2 and 3), and that Hegelian dialectic is a technique for dealing with the sorts of open concepts that carry their histories with them.
On Hegel, see my ‘Dialectic and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History’, in L. Pompa and W.H. Dray (Eds.), Substance and Form in History, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1981, pp. 42–57
On Hegel ‘Force and the Inverted World in Dialectical Reprospection’, International Studies in Philosophy, XX (3) (1988), pp. 13–28.
See George E. Mendenhall, ‘Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition’, in E.F. Campbell, Jr., and D.N. Freedman (Eds.), The Biblical Archaeologist Reader, Vol. 3, New York, Doubleday & Co., 1970, pp. 25–53
Delbert R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969
D.J. McCarthy, Old Testament Covenant, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1973.
Steven Lukes, Individualism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1973.
Richard H. Popkin, A History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, New York, Harper & Row, 1964.
See Peter Laslett’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960.
Lukes, op. cit., p. 43
for the passage from Lovejoy, see his The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936, pp. 5–6.
Lukes, op. cit., p. 43
the passage from Weber is from Lukes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1930, p. 222, the translation being somewhat amended by Lukes.
P.H. Gulliver, Neighbours and Networks, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971.
See my ‘The Problem of the Given in Buber’s Conception of the Interpersonal’, in Arthur A. Chiel (Ed.), Perspectives on Jews and Judaism, New York, Rabbinical Assembly, 1979, pp. 135–143.
Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1949, p. 32 f.
Lukes, op. cit., Ch. 17.
See my ‘Why the Problem of Other Minds?’, Philosophical Forum, 2 (n.s.) (Winter 1971), 271–277.
See Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, tr., ed., with an Introduction by K.H. Wolff, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1982, p. 8 f.
K. Knorr-Cetina and A.V. Cicourel, (Eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology, Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
William James, Pragmatism, New York, Longmans, Green, Co., 1916, p. 43 ff.
For an account of the variations of kinship conceptions which are said to be found in the United States, see David M. Schneider, American Kinship, 2nd ed., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
For an ethnographic study of a society in which social and economic factors play considerable roles in the application of kinship terms, see P.H. Gulliver, op. cit.
Gallie, op. cit.
Brennan, op. cit.
Maurice Mandelbaum, in O’Neill, op. cit. p. 224 f.
Orvis Collins and June M. Collins, Interaction and Social Structure, The Hague, Mouton, 1973.
Don Handelman and Bruce Kapferer, ‘Forms of Joking Activity: A Comparative Approach’, American Anthropologist, 74 (3) (June 1972), 484–517.
Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, London, Oxford University Press, 1945
Meyer Fortes, The Web of Kinship Among The Tallensi, London, Oxford University Press, 1949.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1940.
Frederick Barth, Models of Social Organization, London, Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Paper no. 23,1966.
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Collins and Collins, op. cit., p. 81 note.
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Goldstein, L.J. (1989). Reflections on Conceptual Openness and Conceptual Tension. In: D’Agostino, F., Jarvie, I.C. (eds) Freedom and Rationality. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 117. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2380-5_6
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