 Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., "fairness"), but not on the best realization thereof.They are "concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users", and these disputes "cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone".Although Gallie's term is widely used to denote imprecise use of technical terminology, it has a far more specific application.