Commanding a clear view: Words, concepts, and social science

Abstract

To lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am broadly sympathetic to Frederic Schaffer's overall campaign in favor of conceptual elucidation: "investigating the ways in which the social world is built up linguistically and the ways in which social actors deploy concepts to pursue their goals." On numerous previous occasions I have been, like Schaffer, decidedly critical of scholarly efforts to "fix" the meaning of a concept (like the West or civilization) and then to use that scholarly reconstruction as a base from which to legislate appropriate and inappropriate practical claims using that concept—as though our task as scholars were to correct the social world rather than to explain and understand it. So Schaffer's careful explication of techniques for elucidation, grouped under the headings of "grounding," "locating," and "exposing," provides a refreshing alternative to the sort of advice about concept analysis one typically receives from scholars engaged in the kind of project I think rather problematic.