ABSTRACT
Paradigms are made up, as indicated, of a number of features. These include, among others, assumptions about what the world is made of. Before looking for ‘empirical evidence’, or seeking to scour ‘the sources’, we must have some notion of what it is we are looking at: what, precisely, the past is made of. Whether explicitly aware of it or not, all historians operate in terms of categories and concepts which serve to shape and filter the ways in which they investigate and seek to represent the past. Chapter 6 will look at the ways in which conceptual frameworks affect the collection of evidence, and the ways in which they can be amended or developed; this chapter will first seek to clarify what is at stake when opting for one or another type of historical concept.
