Chen’s concluding chapter is a full-fledged defense of Brown and Levinson against their critics. In terms of theoretical assumption, Chen argues that rationality, per Brown and Levinson, does not belong to Westerners only, neither is individualism monopolized by them. In terms of utility, Chen demonstrates that Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness is perfectly capable of accounting – and, in fact, was designed to account – for the dynamism of social interaction. The accusations that it cannot stems from an insufficient appreciation of the richness of the theory, particularly the formula for measuring the weightiness of face threat. The second part of the chapter is a critique of the research strand “politeness evaluation.” Chen argues that this strand suffers several weaknesses. It is proposed as a reaction to the norm-based approach in politeness research but ends up being norm-searching. It is meant to capture variation, but what it has offered the field is little more than a list of facts that were expected in the first place. Finally, it is claimed to investigate the “moment of evaluation,” but such a moment – the judgment of politeness at the time of speaking – is practically impossible to capture.

Ecologists generally hold out hope that a unified understanding of ecosystems is possible because, in Darwin’s words, they are governed by 'laws acting around us'. But at the same time, ecologists take delight in the idiosyncrasies of nature, in the features that are unique to an organism or an ecosystem, in the phenomena that resist general theory. Sometimes this duality leads particularists to condemn the search for laws and universal theory and theorists to denigrate natural history as stamp collecting. Such conflicts are foolish. Here I demonstrate that the search to understand the species–area relationship (SAR) and the other patterns studied by macroecologists as well, exemplify how a well-defined boundary can be drawn between two legitimate domains: the phenomena that are unified by theory and those that are idiosyncratic.