Essentially Contested Concepts
*Great* stuff on the previous questions. Assuming I've got computer access on Tuesday, we'll take a look at some of your answers in more detail.But we'll be moving on to the material that exlains, to a significant extent, how I think about the material in this course--the idea of essentially contested concepts.
We'll read the essay that coined the term and the concept (Gallie), and an essay that demonstrated what difficulties this concept causes for social science (Connolly). I think these are important essays, and the challenges that face those who analyze these sorts of concepts are made clearer by attention to this idea. Some questions to think about, as you're reading:
1) Why can't we simply settle all these contestations by looking it up in the dictionary?
2) What are Gallie's 5 conditions for essentially contested concepts? Other than the ones he discusses, what are some other examples?
3) What does it mean to refer to a concept as "appraisitive"? What particular challenges do these concepts provide for those who want to study them as impartial social scientists? What about those who study them as normative political theorists.
4) Some have suggested that if we grant that concepts like democracy and power are "essentially contested," we might as well throw up our hands and say "anything goes" when analyzing these concepts. Do you agree? Why or why not?
5) Connolly suggests that if we accept the idea of essentially contested concepts, it raises some serious concerns for how we do social science research. What does he mean? Is this true?
6) A different approach to concepts like "power," "democracy," and "art" might be to a)acknowledge that many people use many different definitions of these concepts, and b) argue that one group of people is simply correct about the definition, and the others are incorrect or confused in some way. Why, according to Gallie/Connolly, should we reject that approach?
(Feel free to post any other comments or questions on the Gallie and Connolly articles, or the idea of ECCs more broadly, in this discussion thread).
posted by djw @ 2:23 PM
10 Comments:
We can't simply settle all these contestations by looking it up in the dictionary because a word like 'love' may be thought up differently by many people. Words are constantly changing.
Gallie's 5 conditions for essentially contested concepts are:
1. Appraisitive
2. Internally Complex character
3. Initially variously describable. 4. 'Open' in character
5. Used aggressively and defensively 6. Shared understanding of all participants
7. Each conception purports to best capture what is shared in the understanding of all participants.
Appraisitive would mean to make a value to something, to strive for or want to accomplish.
This reading reminded me a lot of this quote from Waking Life:
"Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration, and this is where I think language comes from. It came from out desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like the word water, we came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting is when we use the same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experience. What is frustration? Or love? When I say love, the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, through their memories of love, or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand because words are inert. they're just symbols, they're dead, you know? And so much of our experince is intangible. So much of what we percieve cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet you know when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we've connected andwe thing that we're understood I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for."
This quote came to mind especially with the discussion on 'Descriptive' and 'Normantive' Concepts when the author quotes Kovesi by saying "we always describe from some point of view, never from a perspective we could call the 'descriptive point of view.' which I thought was interesting.
We can't just look these contestations up in the dictionary because it can change and have different meanings.
You can't look up words like "power," "democracy," or "love" because they are always evolving and because you can't separate yourself out of the picture completely. You are both an observer and a participant in the social system you are studying. It doesn't seem to me that there is any way to truly objectively define it. Power becomes a meaningful concept when we include the context (who, how, what, etc.) paired with our own subjective experience.
To respond to question 5, I agree that the idea of essentially contested concepts raises some concern for research for social science when viewed in terms of a scientific method (with independent variables, etc.) because you often have no control of the world or social system you are studying. Therefore, maybe we have to reevaluate our findings in social science and acknowledge that they are "unscientific," at least in terms of what we think defines scientific research. Often, it seems as if a lot of social science is very generalized to conform to traditional science research rules. I don't know, maybe we should think of social research as its own entity with its own rules.
Let us consider some advantages and disadvantages to accepting essentially contested concepts. Lukes writes that to engage in the disputes of essentially contested concepts is itself to engage in politics (SL2, p. 30). His statement implies that the vary nature of politics, because of enormous diversity of economic, social, and religious factors, is essentially contested. In other words, politics can be thought of as the combination of differences. Although Lukes’ statement does not necessarily side one way or another, the advantages of diversity are a necessity. As Rawls asks, “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?
I am not suggesting that diversity always lead to essentially contested concepts, because it is obviously true that two groups who profoundly disagree over a concept can believe that concept to mean the same thing. However, I do contend that society as Rawls describes it must necessarily debate over essentially contested concepts, because there are so many appraisive notions in society. Gallie identifies art as one of these; certainly another is love. The advantage of leaving these ideas contested is that they allow for the individual to freely choose their own definition of good or bad art, or how to best love, based on their own social aspirations. Essentially contested concepts allow for the basis of a free society.
With regard to the concept of power, I argue that while these contested concepts confuse the literature, they serve the same purpose as the concepts of art and love. There is no doubt that allowing philosophers to use “power” as an essentially contested concept sometimes amounts to arguing over apples and oranges, but again, narrowing “power” down to a single definition has two distinct disadvantages. First, it allows for only one definition, which will necessarily exclude all others and eliminate the expression of diversity. Second, the question of how to agree on which normative definition to choose arises. Ultimately, the definition picked will be that of the loudest fans, or plainly speaking, the majority.
It is possible to conclude that picking a normative definition for the concept of power seriously endangers the project of understanding power discourse. Leaving the concept essentially contested may confuse the arguments, but it is a necessary evil if we are to gain a perspective that reflects equally all of society.
I believe that there is no way to settle these contestations by simply looking them up in the dictionary because people still can have opinions on what they
think the definitions of these words are. They are not tangible. A chair you can easily define, but love has different meanings to different people.
The point of discussing these concepts is to get closer to a clear cut definition. That is why they are so important to discuss. The dictionary type definitions are the ones that help us the most when discussing any issue. That is why the goal of behavioralists is so important which Isacc's also fails to see. The range of definition cannot be so great, the narrow views of power that many people including issac dislike, is the one thing that gives the debate on power control and constraint from a wide range of views. Therefore it is important to argue these concepts and look for the dictionary type definition.
essential contestability explains that many disputes about concepts are intractable and actually endless. Such concepts contain an “open” character , and there is no way of getting the best use. as for Gallie, there is “no clearly definable general use which can be set up as a correct or standard use”
We can’t settle all these contestation by looking it up in the dictionary because people will have their own opinions. It can be a shared values because everybody wants freedom and justice, but on their own terms. Even when you do look up power, democracy, or freedom up in the dictionary, it comes up with more than one definition.
The concepts of power are something to be debated over and over again. The formation of the power and the most effective form of power would be evolved as time and environment changes the contexts for power relations. The view toward and understanding power would be the samething since power should be evolved with the history.
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