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Article: What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences.
- Article from:
- Polity
- Article date:
- March 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a Division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Nowhere in the broad and heterogeneous work on concept formation has the question of conceptual utility been satisfactorily addressed. Goodness in concept formation, I argue, cannot be reduced to `clarity,' to empirical or theoretical relevance, to a set of rules, or to the methodology particular to a given study. Rather, I argue that conceptual adequacy should be perceived as an attempt to respond to a standard set of criteria, whose demands are felt in the formation and use of all social science concepts: (1) familiarity, (2) resonance, (3) parsimony, (4) coherence, (5) differentiation, (6) depth, (7) theoretical utility, and (8) field utility. The significance of this ...