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Because classical demands on conceptual understanding are quite strong and can prove potentially inhibiting within a scientific context, various philosopher/scientists in the late 19th century proposed that certain predicates could be provided with an alternative form of ‘meaning’ through distributed normativity, i.e., through implicit definition within a syntactic web of interconnection. Applied mathematics, however, warns that such globally unified webs often do not provide optimal descriptive platforms. On the basis of these considerations, it is argued that the ‘facades’ of Chapter 6 often represent better ‘linguistic engineering’ solutions to certain descriptive problems.

This chapter present a general introduction to the issue of conceptual innovation in environmental policy. It argues that attention to concepts is important for understanding argument and practice in the environmental domain. Over the past half century there has been more or less continuous development in the thought categories used to structure discussion of environmental issues. The chapter offers a basic framework for understanding conceptual change in the environmental sphere and presents the outline of the chapters to follow.

This chapter provides a conclusion to the volume. It begins by synthesising some of the main findings of the eleven individual concept studies. It then considers the light these studies shed on processes of conceptual innovation in the environmental policy domain. Finally, it considers what these cases, and attention to concepts and conceptual innovation more generally, can tell us about the underlying structure and evolution of the environmental policy domain. In particular it discusses four cross-cutting themes which emerge from this enquiry: science and policy, environmental limits, economy and environment, and environmental equity.

This chapter explores two key components of activist political theory: the dialectical method and the concept of the avant-garde. Combining features from both ideal and nonideal approaches, and defined as a method based on learning from the trials, errors, and successes of the past, dialectic assists theorists in identifying normative interpretations that aim to offer both a fundamentally appropriate analysis of conflict and to promote political transformation. The chapter introduces the idea of avant-garde political agency in the context of illustrating a process of moral learning informing the dialectical development of normative views. It explains how avant-garde political agents contribute to conceptual innovation by rendering normative views politically effective and motivationally sustainable, and by preparing the ground for the emergence and development of progressive normative theories.

This chapter examines the evolution of concepts used in the environmental policy domain since the emergence of modern environmental governance. It includes a general discussion of environmental concepts including root terms which have generated 'families' of environment-related concepts: 'environment', 'sustainable', 'eco' or 'ecological' and 'green'. This is followed by a discussion of different types of concepts and an examination of concepts that play a particularly important role in structuring the policy realm. Examples here include meso-level analytic or management concepts such as the 'polluter pays principle', 'the precautionary principle', 'ecosystem services', resilience' , 'environmental security', and so on. Finally, the chapter explores the temporal evolution of the conceptual field tracing the evolution of the categories used to think about the environmental domain.

This chapter introduces the role of avant-garde political agency in constructing an appropriate account of the relation between normative principles and political agency. The case of global justice is presented as one example in the pursuit of what is called activist political theory, a mode of theorizing interested not only in the identification of justice-based concerns but also in guiding transformative political action. Whilst placing the familiar controversy between statists and cosmopolitans within a more fundamental dispute concerning the relationship between ideal and nonideal approaches, the author endorses a dialectical alternative. This alternative, it is argued, can guide a theory able to both defend global egalitarianism at the level of principle and to render it politically and motivationally effective at the level of agency.

The concept of the environment is today so closely interwoven into political argument that it is hard to imagine a world without it. But the contemporary understanding of the environment as a nature on which we depend, but that threatened by human activity, is a comparatively new creation. This chapter explores the emergence of this modern conception of 'the environment', considers its uptake in political practice, and examines some of its difficulties and ambiguities.

This chapter discusses how people often appeal to what they would ordinarily say, and even to what they would ordinarily think, in the exercise of generally shared concepts. When one wonders about personal identity, freedom and responsibility, the mind and its states and contents, justice, rightness of action, happiness, and so on, the main focus is not just the words or the concepts. There are things beyond words and concepts whose nature people wish to understand. The metaphysics of persons goes beyond the semantics of the word “person” and its cognates, and even beyond the correlated conceptual analysis. Philosophical progress might then take a form similar to the kind of scientific progress that involves conceptual innovation.

Philip Anderson’s influential article “More Is Different” is examined and its recommendation of adopting a constructionist rather than a reductionist approach is discussed. It is argued that Anderson is defending a form of conceptual emergence. Philosophical counterparts to constructionism are examined, in particular Russell’s views on logical constructions and Occam’s Razor. Constructionism is compared with reductionism. The distinction between ontological reduction and ontological eliminativism is clarified, as is the relation between bridge laws and transordinal laws. Nagel reduction and Kemeny-Oppenheim reduction are analyzed. The role of new concepts in emergence is related to forms of functional reduction and dependency relations and some deficiencies of functional reduction are suggested.

This chapter argues that global history is not a self-contained field but one in need of theoretical and terminological support from various parts of the systematic social sciences. A strong candidate for conceptual inputs is historical sociology—an old discourse that originated with the founding fathers of sociology and can in turn profit from a close attachment to global history. Different kinds of global history require their respective conceptual tools many of which can be provided by a historical sociology that keeps a balance between the richness of anthropological description and the formalism of network analysis. A particularly fruitful topic of mutual interest is that of time and temporalities.