ABSTRACT
The preference for specificity in the identification of practices may seem at best like sheer pedantry, at worst a serious handicap to social-scientific investigation. The point about scientific categories and generalisations having to accord with local realities is a point about epistemological priority. The concept of "function" is used in different ways across the natural and social sciences, so further clarification is in order. Since the differences are systematic, they are likely to be relevant to many of the causal generalisations that can be made about the practices in question. The practice of military intervention in the eighteenth century was a routine and important feature of preparing for and waging war. One point of the focus on specificity in identifying historical practices is to emphasise the enormous, and consistently underappreciated, importance of description and conceptualisation to the social-scientific enterprise.
