Reflections on conceptual openness and conceptual tension

Leon J. Goldstein

pp. 87-110

in: Fred D'agostino, I. C. Jarvie (eds), Freedom and rationality, Berlin, Springer, 1989

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.