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1 results

  • 14 - Contested Concepts

  • from Research Notes 3
  • Edited by Zachary Elkins, University of Texas, Austin
  • David Collier, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book:
    Working with Concepts
    Published online:
    22 April 2026
    Print publication:
    09 April 2026, pp 298-311
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  • Summary

    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.