ABSTRACT
In the literature of social science in general, and even in political theory where there is greater focus on concepts, there is considerable persistent confusion about the concept of a concept and particularly about the relationship between words and concepts. Even in a work as analytically astute and sensitive to language as Hanna Pitkin’s valuable and influential The Concept of Representation (1967), the slippage between words and concepts prompts one to ask what constitutes the connection. Pitkin deployed a central organizing metaphor in her discussion of representation:
We may think of the concept as a rather complicated, convoluted, three dimensional structure in the middle of a dark enclosure. Political theorists give us, as it were, flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken at different angles. But each proceeds to treat this partial view as the complete structure. It is no wonder, then, that various photographs do not coincide, that the theorists’ extrapolations from these pictures are in conflict. Yet there is something, there, in the middle of the dark, which all of them are photographing; and the different photographs together can be used to reconstruct it in complete detail.
