ABSTRACT

In an important essay written in 1956 W. B. Gallie argues that people committed to partly discrepant assumptions and ideas are likely to construe shared concepts in rather different ways as well.1 They will share these concepts in the sense that in a number of situations they would agree in calling a particular set of practices a “democracy,” a “Christian doctrine,” or a “work of art,” but in other situations one party might deny that, say, the concept of democracy applies while the other affirms its proper application, or the contesting parties might disagree about the extent to which the concept applies to the situation at hand.