Essentially Contested Concept - Features

Features

In 1956, Gallie proposed a set of seven conditions for the existence of an essentially contested concept. Gallie was very specific about the limits of his enterprise: it dealt exclusively with abstract, qualitative notions, such as art, religion, science, democracy, and social justice (and, if Gallie’s choices are contrasted with negatively regarded concepts such as evil, disease, superstition, etc., it is clear that the concepts he chose were exclusively positively regarded).

Freeden remarks that "not all essentially contested concepts signify valued achievements; they may equally signify disapproved and denigrated phenomena", and Gerring asks us to imagine just how difficult it would be to " to craft definitions of slavery, fascism, terrorism, or genocide without recourse to "pejorative" attributes".

These features distinguish Gallie's "essentially contested concepts" from others, "which can be shown, as a result of analysis or experiment, to be radically confused"; or, as Gray would have it, they are the features that relate to the task of distinguishing the "general words, which really denote an essentially contested concept" from those other "general words, whose uses conceal a diversity of distinguishable concepts":

(1) Essentially contested concepts are evaluative, and they deliver value-judgements.

(2) Essentially contested concepts denote comprehensively evaluated entities that have an internally complex character.

(3) The evaluation must be attributed to the internally complex entity as a whole.

(4) The different constituent elements of that internally complex entity are initially variously describable.

(5) The different users of the concept will often allocate substantially different orders of relative importance, substantially different "weights", and/or substantially different interpretations to each of those constituent elements.

(6) Psychological and sociological causes influence the extent to which any particular consideration is:

(a) salient for a given individual,

(b) regarded as a stronger reason by that individual than by another, and

(c) regarded as a reason by one individual and not by another.

(7) The disputed concepts are open-ended and vague, and are subject to considerable modification in the light of changing circumstances.

(8) This further modification can neither be predicted nor prescribed in advance.

(9) Whilst, by Gallie’s express stipulation, there is no best instantiation of an essentially contested concept -- or, at least, none knowable to be the best -- it is also obvious that some instantiations will be considerably better than others; and, furthermore, even if one particular instantiation seems best at the moment, there is always the possibility that a new, better instantiation will emerge in the future.

(10) Each party knows and recognizes that its own peculiar usage/interpretation of the concept is disputed by others who, in their turn, hold different and quite incompatible views.

(11) Each party must (at least to a certain extent) understand the criteria upon which the other participants’ (repudiated) views are based.

(12) Disputes centred on essentially contested concepts:

(a) are "perfectly genuine",

(b) "not resolvable by argument", and

(c) "nevertheless sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence".

(13) Each party’s use of their own specific usage/interpretation is driven by a need to uphold their own particular (correct, proper and superior) usage/interpretation against that of all other (incorrect, improper and irrational) users.

(14) Because the use of an essentially contested concept is always the application of one use against all other uses, any usage is intentionally aggressive and defensive.

(15) Because it is essentially contested, rather than “radically confused”, the continued use of the essentially contested concept is justified by the fact that, despite all of their on-going disputation, all of the competitors acknowledge that the contested concept is derived from a single common exemplar.

(16) The continued use of the essentially contested concept also helps to sustain and develop our understanding of the concept’s original exemplar/s.