The form of explanation we adopt for beliefs, actions, and practices revolves around the concepts of tradition and dilemma. The idea of a tradition captures the social context in which individuals both exercise their reason and act (Bevir 1999a, 174-220). A tradition is a set of understandings someone receives during socialisation. A certain relationship should exist between beliefs and practices if they are to make up a tradition. First, the relevant beliefs and practices should have passed from person to person and from generation to generation. The changes introduced by successive generations might even result in a tradition’s beginning and its present-day formulation having nothing in common apart from the links over time.

Second, traditions should embody appropriate conceptual links. The beliefs and practices that one generation passes on to another should display minimal consistency. Traditions cannot be made up of purely random beliefs and actions that successive individuals happen to have held in common. This idea of tradition differs from that of Burkean political scientists who associate the term with customary, unquestioned ways of behaving or with the entrenched folklore of premodern societies (cf. Oakeshott 1962, 123 and 128-9). At the heart of Bevir’s notion of tradition are situated agents using their local reasoning consciously and subconsciously to modify their contingent heritage.