The term essentially contested concept was proposed to facilitate an understanding of the different interpretations of abstractions that have qualitative and evaluative notions[1]—such as "art", "philanthropy",[2] "power",[3] and "social justice".
[10] Although Gallie's term is widely used to denote imprecise use of technical terminology, it has a far more specific application; although the notion could be misleadingly and evasively used to justify "agreeing to disagree",[11] the term offers something more valuable: The disputes that attend an essentially contested concept are driven by substantive disagreements over a range of different, entirely reasonable (although perhaps mistaken) interpretations of a mutually-agreed-upon archetypical notion, such as the legal precept "treat like cases alike; and treat different cases differently", with "each party [continuing] to defend its case with what it claims to be convincing arguments, evidence and other forms of justification".
[15] Here, a number of critical questions must be asked: Barry Clarke suggested that, in order to determine whether a particular dispute was a consequence of true polysemy or inadvertent homonymy, one should seek to "locate the source of the dispute"; and in doing so, one might find that the source was "within the concept itself", or "[within] some underlying non-conceptual disagreement between the contestants".
[19] Gallie was very specific about the limits of his enterprise: it dealt exclusively with abstract, qualitative notions, such as art, religion, science, democracy, and social justice[20] (and, if Gallie's choices are contrasted with negatively regarded concepts such as evil, disease, superstition, etc., it is clear that the concepts he chose were exclusively positively regarded).
The following are extensions of Gallie's original seven features that have been made by various scholars from across multiple disciplines: Scholars such as H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Steven Lukes have variously embellished Gallie's proposal by arguing that certain of the difficulties encountered with Gallie's proposition may be due to the unintended conflation of two separate domains associated with the term concept: In essence, Hart (1961), Rawls (1971), Dworkin (1972), and Lukes (1974) distinguished between the "unity" of a notion and the "multiplicity" of its possible instantiations.
Consequently, those responsible for giving "instructions", and those responsible for setting "standards" of "fairness", in this community may be doing one of two things: It is important to recognize that rather than it just being a case of delivering two different instructions; it is a case of delivering two different kinds of instruction: As a consequence, according to Dworkin, whenever an appeal is made to "fairness", a moral issue is raised; and, whenever a conception of "fairness" is laid down, an attempt is being made to answer that moral issue.