reading 2 - concepts Flashcards
why do concepts need elucidating?
interpretivist vs positivist approach to concepts
- positivist = reconstruction
- interpretivist = elucidation
positivism vs interpretivism
diff conceptions/methodologies of social science
positivism =
- scientists can directly/neutrally observe a social world
- entities exist independently of how people think of them
- aims to formulate prepositions about entities based on identification and measurement of regularities
interpretivist =
- no “real” social entities (only culturally mediated social facts)
- social science always perspectival and entwined with the pursuit of moral or material goals
- aim to shed light on how shared meanings and their relation to power inform/structure the social world and the study of it
methodology vs methods
- methodology = basic presuppositions about the aims of inquiry, ways of knowing (epistemology), and the nature of the reality being studied (ontology)
- methods = techniques for gathering and analyzing information
experience-distant and experience-near concepts
experience-distant = concepts that specialists use to forward scientific, philosophical or practical aims
experience-near = commonplace words used in everyday contexts
-> seen as ambiguous and vague, ill-fit for theory building, bc have a tangle of meanings
!a concept can be more distant or more near + many concepts are both near and distant (diff meaning everyday life and specialists)
- interpretivists use experience-distant concepts even when attending to the native’s point of view bc they want to depart from the mental horizons of the people they try to understand
- positivists also use experience-distant concepts
neologism = coining completely new terms = rare (usually use concepts that also exist in everyday life)
conceptual reconstruction in positivist methodology
experience-distant concepts as tools to describe that brute reality: the relationship of concepts to the empirical world is one of “ideas” to “facts”
want to:
- represent phenomena in the empirical world as they actually exist (accurate description)
- reconstruct everyday words to meet research needs: make them precise
reconstruction is basically refashioning already existing terms in an effort to remove deficiencies as ambiguity and vagueness
the experience-near is squeezed into the experience-distant
conceptual elucidation in interpretivist methodology
to conceive of the experience-near concepts used by the people being studied not as bits of information about their individual and subjective states of mind, but as intersubjective conventions that provide insight into a shared social reality
- social reality cannot be understood apart from the language people use to operate in it
- Taylor: realities are practices, can’t be understood without language used to describe them (can’t study what it means to buy something without knowing the meaning of “buy”, “pay”, “cost” etc.) -> language is constitutive of social practices and inseperable from them
elucidation = aim to clarify the meaning and use of concepts in lived practices, not to fashion precise conceptual tools of the researcher’s design (reconstruction)
experience-near concepts = intersubjective constructions that provide people a set of common terms of reference
-> focus on shared terms or reference rather than expression of individual opinions
interpretivists try to mediate between experience-near and distant concepts -> negotiate the divide between the social world and everyday language used to mark it AND concerns of the scholarly community and specialized language used to investigate them
interest in how social actors shape and wield concepts to advance their own goals (e.g. pediatricians wanted to raise awareness about injuries to children -> medicalized “child abuse”)
self-awareness: investigating how concepts of social science shape the social world + how they shape and are shaped by relations of power
Sartori’s (positivist) approach to concepts
experience-distant concepts = data containers
- advocates for increasing our ability to discriminate the kind of things that belong inside the conceptual container (= the extension of a term) -> universal traveling concepts
- need to delimit the list of properties used to determine whether something belongs inside the container (= the intension of a term)
by increasing or decreasing intension, concepts can be arranged along a “ladder of abstraction”
- concepts with minimum intensions (minimal definitions) = top of the ladder
e.g. family: social group characterised by legitimate heterosexual intercourse with a function of bearing children (=universal traveling concept at the top of the ladder) + can be monogamous/polygamous, fertile/sterile etc. (=more discriminating, context-specific subtypes)
!encourages self-reflection + guards against ethnocentrism and anachronism
(interpretivist) issues with Sartori’s approach to concepts
- one-sidedness = privileging conceptualizations that are important to the researcher while ignoring meanings that are salient to the actors themselves = blinds sholars to actor’s self-understanding
- universalism = neglecting linguistic/historical specificity of a concept -> translanguage/transhistorical generalizations that don’t hold up
- objectivism = adopting a value-free objective stance that regards how everyday or social science concepts are embedded in relationships of power = carries a moral/political force that goes undetected/unacknowledged by the researcher
Universalism is a particular manifestation of one-sidedness; one-sidedness can result from objectivism; and objectivism can be both product and cause of universalism
the problem of one-sidedness
Sartori definitions = ignores wide range of experience-near ways in which people themselves understand what a concept means
-> criteria of a concept that exists independent of how people conceive a concept
- e.g. Sartori concept of family not good bc family has broad range of meanings in everyday life, e.g. can also include dead people + childless couples can also be seen as family + parents don’t have to be married
-> definition reifies a particular/partial conception -> delimits the kinds of research questions one asks and what one finds puzzling or alarming
dangers with one-sided concepts:
- risks imposing an arbitrary partial and decontextualized understanding of a concept -> can guide investigation in unexamined ways
- uncertain explanatory value
- diverts attention from the ways in which people construct the concepts and how the conceptualizations shape the ways that people act
the problem of universalism
difficulties with applying meanings around the world or back in time
- many languages don’t have the same words that cover the same semantic space as a concept or refer to institutions composed of the same elements
concepts (in this case families) don’t exist as brute realities independent of human conceptual schemes
A social scientist could well identify and compare “families” of Sartori’s conception around the world or back in time, but what would such an operation teach us if those people do or did not act as if they were members of a family? To assume that everyone around the world and over time has possessed a conception of “family”—and the specific repertoires of action, attachment, obligation, etc., which go along with it—is to fall prey to ethnocentrism and anachronism
the problem of objectivism
meanings are often contested, bound up with issues of power, justice and morality
Sartori presents value-free objective definition of family seemingly detached from a broader context of political contestation
solution Sartori’s definition
David Collier + Steven Levitsky:
descending the ladder of abstraction is not the only way to form precise concepts
precise concepts can be created by identifying properties missing from the minimal definition -> diminished concepts: subtypes that are not full members of the family
- e.g. democracy + diminished concepts of limited-suffrage democracy + illiberal democracy
-> conceptual scheme can integrate more variety
problems =
- e.g. with concept of family: on what grounds should we deem one type of family to be less than another? -> deligitimization
- can lead to misrecognition: when is something a subtype and when should something be seen as its own thing
interpretivist questions about family
any concept employed by social scientists:
- should take into account the range of meanings it holds within a given community if it is going to have explanatory value
- is bound to particular linguistic and historical contexts
- is both conditioned by and an instrument of power, and therefor embedded in broader politics
-> interpretivist questions as:
- what are the various meanings of family in every day talk?
- how do people construct their own families?
- how do boundaries and meanings of family shift from context to context?
- what are equivalents of family in other languages and times?
- how are everyday and social science understandings of family conditioned by relations of power?
modes of elucidation:
- grounding: lay out attends to broad range of ways in which actors themselves understand a concept
- locating: interpretivist approach investigates linguistic and historical particularity
- exposing: interpretivist approach brings to light how everyday and social science concepts are embedded in webs of power
= strategies to situate concepts, to examine the relationship between experience-distant and experience-near
important bc:
- help us identify and critique overreaching or erroneous assumptions as well as hidden power positions built into the reconstructed concepts of positivist social science
- can help formulate better policies, provoke diff kind of politics, clarify our thinking, expand moral imagination
(dangers of elucidation)
- potential to contract rather than expand our moral imagination,
- treat the people we are studying as a means to our own enrichment
- render the vulnerable or powerless more visible to those who seek to tighten their control over them.
While such dangers cannot be eliminated, there are ways to reduce them.
Perhaps most fundamental is to simply acknowledge the existence of risk and the ethical responsibilities that it imposes.
