  This is not a point about nomenclature but a claim that a proper discipline has boundaries that enable a coherent inquiry. For Oakeshott, the category that defines coherent inquiry into human conduct is not “social” but “intelligent”. Intelligence, here, is not the quality of being bright or stupid but of having agency, the capacity to think and choose. An excavated object is either a manifestation of intelligence (an inscribed tablet) or not (a rock). In making this distinction, he is not suggesting that the experienced world is made up of two kinds of things but rather that we experience the world differently according to the categories of understanding that we bring to it. For an understanding to be coherent, it must distinguish between the intelligent and the not-intelligent because these categories are mutually exclusive. Propositions about the biochemistry of thinking cannot explain the cognitive content of a person’s thoughts. No inquiry can generate a self-consistent body of knowledge if its objects are categorially ambiguous. These claims restate Oakeshott’s point that cross-modal arguments are necessarily incoherent. Much of social science is undermined by efforts to understand intelligent conduct as the product of not-intelligent physiological, psychological, or social processes seen as natural, that is, operating independently of understanding. Such efforts cannot generate genuine knowledge because they involve a categorial error. Coherent explanation is impossible when 