Typologies are well-established analytic tools in the social sciences. They can be “put to work” in forming concepts, refining measurement, exploring dimensionality, and organizing explanatory claims. Yet some critics, basing their arguments on what they believe are relevant norms of quantitative measurement, consider typologies old-fashioned and unsophisticated. This critique is methodologically unsound, and research based on typologies can and should proceed according to high standards of rigor and careful measurement. These standards are summarized in guidelines for careful work with typologies, and an illustrative inventory of over 100 typologies is included at the end of the chapter.

Scholars engaged in comparative research on democratic regimes are in sharp disagreement over the choice between a dichotomous or graded approach to the distinction between democracy and nondemocracy. This choice is substantively important because it affects the findings of empirical research. It is methodologically important because it raises basic issues, faced by both qualitative and quantitative analysts, concerning appropriate standards for justifying choices about concepts. Generic claims that the concept of democracy should inherently be treated as dichotomous or graded are incomplete. The burden of demonstration should instead rest on more specific arguments linked to the goals of research. This chapter thus takes the pragmatic position that how scholars understand and operationalize a concept can and should depend in part on what they are going to do with it. The chapter considers justifications focused on the conceptualization of democratization as an event, the conceptual requirements for analyzing subtypes of democracy, the empirical distribution of cases, normative evaluation, the idea of regimes as bounded wholes, and the goal of achieving sharper analytic differentiation.

This chapter focuses on teaching the formation and analysis of concepts in research, emphasizing the importance of clarity in defining and measuring concepts. It presents a structured approach to conceptual thinking, outlining four steps: formulation, contextualization, operationalization, and measurement. Bussell highlights the role of examples and typologies to deepen understanding and discusses challenges in concept analysis, using “democracy” and “corruption” as primary examples. The chapter underscores the iterative process of concept development and its role in fostering rigorous academic research.

It is well past time to take scholarly disputes about words seriously, for where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Conceptual disagreement is a manifestation of disagreements about ideas. Yet no attempt has been made to measure the degree of conceptual disagreement that exists or to track those concepts identified as essentially contested. Accordingly, it is unclear how one might distinguish contested from uncontested concepts or test propositions about the causes of contestation. This chapter begins by introducing an approach to measuring conceptual contestation within social science. Next, the chapter explore factors that may help to explain variation in conceptual contestation. The characteristics of concepts – their value, abstraction, and normativity – explain most of the variability in conceptual contestation.

This autobiographical essay by David Collier traces the evolution of his interest in concept analysis within political science. Sparked by a challenging dissertation defense on the distinction between squatter settlements and slums, Collier was motivated to better understand and refine social science concepts. He reflects on foundational influences, including Sartori’s notion of concepts as “data containers,” and explores how defining and variable properties can structure meaningful comparisons. Collier highlights the role of vivid, resonant terminology in shaping scholarly communication, drawing on examples from Hirschman, Krasner, and Murra. He credits influential mentors such as Philippe Schmitter and colleagues such as Henry Brady, as well as inspiration from the Ostroms and cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Rosch. The essay underscores the importance of typologies, disaggregation, and sensitivity to conceptual stretching in empirical research, using the concept of corporatism and the idea of “critical junctures” as case illustrations. Collier also recounts his teaching experiences and collaborations, which reinforced his belief in the methodological and substantive value of rigorous concept work. The piece serves as both a personal narrative and a theoretical introduction to the study of concepts, setting the stage for the volume’s broader exploration of conceptual innovation in the social sciences.

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the Given’. I then explore how Peirce’s semiotic approach to philosophy of language and mind theorized signifying habits as symbols which draw icons and indices together into propositional structures, thereby generating meanings that are specifically applicable and indefinitely generalizable. This original account of concept formation is further illuminated through an examination of Peirce’s philosophy of perception, which makes particularly manifest the process whereby primitive indices, or ‘percepts’, are enfolded in symbolic meanings through habitual ‘perceptual judgements’.

I focus on how, for me, big questions such as, “How can we tell whether something is true?” were funneled by haphazard influences into specific interests. Classes on logic got me interested in the origins of concepts. Contact with Piaget’s theory of concept acquisition added a developmental dimension. Wondering about the meaning of words led to the problems of opaque contexts like belief reports. A brush with artificial intelligence made me focus on the distinction between implicit and explicit mental representations and consciousness. My thesis supervisor’s expertise in game theory led me to explore children’s perspective-taking. Work with Heinz Wimmer on the false belief task got me firmly entrenched in theory of mind research, focusing on simulation theory as its main opponent. And to get beyond documenting children’s flourishing achievements I turned to mental files theory to understand how perspectival thinking grows from our basic ability to think about objects.

A popular refrain in many countries is that people with mental illnesses have “nowhere to go” for care. But that is not universally true. Previously unexplored international data shows that some countries provide much higher levels of public mental health care than others. This puzzling variation does not align with existing scholarly typologies of social or health policy systems. Furthermore, these cross-national differences are present despite all countries’ shared history of psychiatric deinstitutionalization, a process that I conceptualize and document using an original historical data set. I propose an explanation for countries’ varying policy outcomes and discuss an empirical strategy to assess it. The research design focuses on the cases of the United States and France, along with Norway and Sweden, in order to control for a range of case-specific alternative hypotheses. The chapter ends with brief descriptions of contemporary mental health care policy in each of the four countries examined in this book.

The chapter ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on Concepts’ by Frans A. J. de Haas takes up another aspect of concept theory, that is, the endeavour to define what a concept is. Furthermore, he explores the interactions between the Peripatetics and the Stoics, as they are evidenced by Alexander, on ontological as well as psychological and epistemological issues. De Haas also offers a systematic study of part of Alexander’s rich vocabulary denoting concepts, thoughts, and universals, and of a correspondingly rich collection of verbs referring to the human activities of abstracting or constructing concepts. Importantly, this analysis sheds light on Alexander’s understanding of ennoia and noêma, and on Alexander’s views concerning the epistemic reliability of concepts and the unity of concepts in the human soul.

What is the a priori principle of the new faculty? Kant apparently gives two answers in the Critique: First, he presents a ‘principle of systematicity’ that is supposed to authorize us to regard nature as a system with respect to its particular, or empirical, laws. This is also paraphrased as the principle that for every object in nature an empirical concept can be found, and Kant provides a transcendental deduction for it. Satisfaction of the principle is accompanied by pleasure, but it seems clear that this cannot be the pleasure of taste. A second principle is later entitled the principle of taste. The relation, if any, between these principles is a long-standing problem. I focus in this chapter on the first formulation and attempt to elucidate the role it plays in guiding the imagination in the process of concept formation and discuss the relation of the principles in Ch.7.

It became almost a cliché to say that in the twenty-first century education cannot be based on teaching specific content and skills but should focus on “learning how to learn” and on the development of more general cognitive abilities. There are two major proposals for handling this problem. The first suggests focusing on students’ general cognitive and problem-solving skills which can then be applied in any content area. The second proposal is to develop cognitive strategies “inside” the curricular areas. The first approach thus calls for an addition of a new learning subject – “cognitive lessons” – while the second presupposes a rather radical reform of curricular teaching/learning that would assign cognitive goals to subject lessons. “Instrumental Enrichment” is analyzed as an example of a standalone cognitive program that develops such general skills as analytic perception, comparison, and classification that can then be “bridged” to curricular material. The cognitive infusion approaches propose to infuse cognitive skills into the curricular lessons without significant changes in the curricular material itself. Finally, the developmental education approach presupposes a rather radical change in the curricular material that would allow every curricular lesson to be turned into a cognitive lesson.

This chapter focuses on how children’s everyday knowledge when entering school is different from subject matter knowledge and argues that children’s emotional imagination and motive orientation is a foundation for their acquisition of subject matter knowledge. We discuss how imagination supports children’s generalizations of experience, so that it becomes possible for them to move between the general and the concrete in analyzing and using knowledge about the world. We also argue for a dialectical relationship between the culturally developed content the children’s encounters in their interactions in the world and the formation of mind. Within the cultural-historical approach to learning and development Davydov was the first to clarify how concepts, within a subject matter system, that are related through the historical development of its content may become the foundation for children learning in school. Supporting the development of theoretical thinking among school pupils serves both to develop thinking with subject matter knowledge, and support children’s person formation.

This chapter presents an approach to the study of learning which analyzes small groups – such as a dyad, a group, a classroom – or large groups – for example, a community or a social movement. This approach is based on a situativity or sociocultural theory of cognition and learning, where learning is “situated” within complex social and material contexts known as activity systems. Sociocultural theories are related to cultural-historical activity theory, situated learning theory, distributed cognition theory, and cultural psychology. These theories suggest that a full account of learning must extend beyond individualist psychology to analyze and explain social practices, technological artifacts, interactional patterns, and the different roles occupied by the participants.