ADVERTISEMENTS:
After reading this article you will learn about the role of concepts in scientific investigation and development of science.
The aim of science is comprehension as complete as possible of the connections between sense experiences in their totality and “the accomplishment of this aim by the use of a minimum of concepts….” A concept is an abstraction of observed things, events or phenomena.
McClelland defines the term concept, as “a shorthand representation of a variety of facts. Its purpose is to simplify thinking by subsuming a number of events under one general heading.” Wherever any degree of abstraction is involved, whether in sophisticated scientific observation, in interpretative understanding or in the simple commonsense statements of fact, concepts are always used.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Talcott Parsons rightly remarks:
“…. There is no empirical knowledge which is not in some sense and to some degree conceptually formed.”
Science is based on facts, i.e., such propositions as are supported by material evidence. Science not only observes them but is charged with the responsibility of stating them. For stating such aspects as constitute the subject-matter of a particular discipline, the science must have some terms.
As we have just suggested, the terms having a reference to things about which a science tries to make sense are its concepts. Abraham Kaplan has put the matter succinctly.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Abraham Kaplan says:
“The important terms of any science are significant because of their semantics (they) reach out to the world which gives the science its subject matter. The meaning of such terms results from a process of conceptualization of the subject-matter. In this process, the things studied are classified and analyzed; several things are grouped together and particular things assigned to the several groups to which they belong. The concept ‘paranoid’, for example, puts into a single class certain set of persons and is itself analysed into such patterns as delusions of persecution, grouping together a set of actions, verbal or otherwise, as the case may be, and without regard to the actors performing them.”
The language of science evolves in order to deal with the problems of its concern for which the ordinary language has proved inadequate. Each science thus develops and utilizes certain concepts in order that it may be able to pose a range of significant problems for investigation, conduct empirical observation, organize its data to provide answers to the problems and to communicate its findings.
Of course, science employs as stated at the outset, the Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony, in its language.
The rule of scientific analysis is, ‘as few concepts as you dare and as many as you must.’ The principle decrees that science should attempt to explain all its phenomena in the most economical way, employing as few terms, concepts, symbols or formulae as possible.
The process of scientific investigation comprises, what to the investigator may appear to be flashes of insight, glimpses or conditions between things or events and awareness of distinctions and differences. In order to be retained, these have to be symbolized (as concepts) if they do not initially occur in an already symbolized state.
The ultimate goal of scientific investigations may be said to be the establishment of general theories which are indeed the larger conceptual schemes at a higher level of generality or abstraction. To reach this level of theorizing or conceptualization, the investigator needs to conduct his empirical observations and to analyse these observations in a particular conceptual framework at the lower levels.
In sum, scientific enquiry involves understanding the relationship among various concepts which symbolize objects, events, properties etc. that constitute the subject-matter of a given discipline. Concepts are needed to formulate the problem and to design ways of solving it.
It is our experience that some concepts are quite close to the objects or facts they represent. For example, the meaning of the concepts ‘Man’ may be easily clarified by pointing to specific men. The concept is an abstraction of the characteristics all men have in common; characteristics that are either directly observable or easily ascertained or measured.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Other concepts cannot, however, be so easily related to the facts or phenomena which they are intended or represent; motivation, need-disposition, attitude, role, adjustment, commitment etc. widely used by social scientists are concepts of this kind.
They are inferences, at a higher level of abstraction, from concrete events and their meaning cannot be easily conveyed by pointing to specific concrete objects, individuals or events.
The greater the distance between the concepts used in a study and empirical facts which they are intended to refer to, greater the possibility of their being misunderstood and thus greater the care that must be exercised in defining them precisely. The social sciences have, admittedly fallen by the way at this greatest hurdle of them all, viz., the exact definition of constructs.
A precise definition or explication of concepts being utilized by the researcher is a natural and sensible methodological requirement for any study. In one’s own private world, it would hardly matter what one means by what.
This personal idiosyncratic vocabulary which perhaps serves him alright as long as he is conversant with it, may keep things going. But in the world of the scientists, it would be disastrous if one’s concepts did not mean the same thing to other as they meant to scientist himself.
It would create serious problems of communication and correspondence among scientists (as also between scientists and common citizens) and affect the cumulative and integrated growth of knowledge adversely, if the same concept was used by different scientists in different senses or different concepts were used to describe really similar and indistinguishable entities or phenomena.
This would create, as one can easily visualize, confusion worst confounded. Such a confusion does unfortunately exist in the larger domain of the social sciences which have borrowed a majority of the words from current popular terminology, even though the meaning attached to them have been sharpened or adapted to serve their more exacting use.
It should now be plain why the need for a clear-cut definition of concepts utilized by the scientist at various stages in his research has been laid so much stress on. Explication refers to the process of making explicit what is implicit in the concepts. In the absence of explication of concepts, others would not know what one is talking about, let alone whether he is talking sense.
Ackoff aptly states, “the function of a scientific definition of a concept is to make explicit the conditions under which and the operations by which we can answer questions about that which is conceptualized.” Scientific requirement calls for explication of concepts at two levels.
(1) The concepts must be defined in abstract terms, giving the general meaning they are intended to convey. This may be called the ‘formal definition.’ Such a definition is designed to convey the general nature of the process or phenomenon in which the scientist is interested.
(2) The concepts must be defined in terms of the operations by which they will be represented in particular research. Such a definition is known as the ‘operational definition’ (sometimes, called the ‘working definition’) of the concept. Such definitions are designed to make possible the collection of data which the scientist or researcher is prepared to accept as the indicators or empirical referents of his concept.
Let us discuss each of the two types of definitions at some length.
At first glance, providing unambiguous formal definition for the concepts might appear to be a very simple task. Such may be the case in respect of certain standardized concepts that are in scientific currency. But formal definition usually present a host of difficulties of the kind Durkheim experienced. As John Madge points out, Durkheim chose the topic ‘suicide’ for his study as it (‘suicide’) could be easily defined.
Although he started by asserting that defining ‘suicide’ was fairly easy, almost at once, he experienced formidable difficulties.
For example, if a man is so unhappy that he refuses to eat and wastes away, will this amount to suicide or an illness of some kind or, when soldiers march into battle in circumstances under which they are certain to be killed, would that be suicide? In formulating a definition, it is not always possible to be certain about whether to include particular instances.
Durkheim after many years of examination of these different considerations, started with a preliminary definition. Subsequently, he found out its inadequacy and kept on modifying it.
Durkheim first definition was formulated thus:
“The term suicide is applied to any death which is the direct or indirect result of a positive or negative act accomplished by the victim himself.” But again Durkheim realized that his definition neglected one important feature: namely, that suicide should be an intended act.
He therefore arrived at the following subsequent definition:
“Suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly by a positive or negative act of the victim himself which he knows will produce this result.” This definition of suicide is recognizable and augurs fairly well with the reckoning by which official suicide statistics are kept. The above example drives home the point that it is usually not so easy to define a concept formally.
Let us now turn to a very simple case. Suppose we were interested in getting an answer to a ‘simple’ question in a housing survey. “How many people live in your house?” A moment’s consideration makes us realize that we will be concerned with a variety of such questions — should a son who is away at college most of the time during the year be included among those living in the house?
Should a boarder who travels during the week and is in his room only on week-ends be included? Should the maid who sleeps in three or four nights and spends the others at her family home be included? Theses questions amply testify to the difficulties one could come across in the course of providing formal definitions to concepts.
Lack of clarity in meanings of many psychological and sociological concepts is considerable since, understandably, the nature of the language of science depends on its methods of observation.
Says Theobald, “An investigator whose methods are limited to unaided perception will present his observation in the common descriptive language which will not have critical precision. On the other hand, the indirect method of observation will require precise abstract language to present its case.”
Comparing the definitions of a concept offered at different times in the history of science or different definitions offered at the same time, we generally find that there is a common core of meaning which runs through all the definitions.
The meaning toward which various definitions of the concept point is the true meaning of the concept. Some scientists advocate looking for a definition with which most scientists would agree, but if this were to become a general rule there would be little progress in defining.
We should, of course, seek to improve upon the definitions but improvement is possible only by taking the past and present definitions into account. The following procedure has proved very useful in arriving at better definitions of concepts.
(a) Examine as many definitions of the concept, past and present, as possible. Keep chronology of the definitions in mind.
(b) Try to get at the core of the meaning toward which most of the definitions seem to point.
(c) Formulate a tentative definition based on the ‘core.’
(d) See if the tentative definition covers all the cases you think it should, relative to your research objectives; where it does not, make necessary revisions.
(e) Submit the definition to as wide a critical appraisal as possible. Include scientists as well as non-scientists from various fields among the critics.
(f) Make final revisions on the basis of the legitimate criticisms you receive.
It was stated earlier that formal definitions of concepts entering the scientific corpus of a discipline are not enough. In addition, quite often the researcher-scientist needs to offer an operational definition’ to the concepts. To this point we now turn.
The operational definition of a concept purports to specify the operations which observe, measure and record the phenomena symbolized by the concept. Thus, the scores on a particular scale for measuring I.Q. may be said to be the operational definition of the concept ‘intelligence.’
Samuel Stouffer, the director of the ‘American Soldier Studies’, defined the crucial concept’ personal adjustment’ operationally as under: “…. It is assumed that, on the average, men who said they were in good spirits, that they were more useful in the army than the civilians, that they liked the Army, were better adjusted to the Army than men who were negative in several of those expressions.”
Bradburn tried to define operationally, the elusive concept of ‘Happiness.’ He states “one way to find out whether people are happy is to ask them. “Respondents were accordingly asked to answer the following question: Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days — would you say, you are very happy or not too happy.”
Now that the nature of operational definitions has been exemplified, the reader should be able to appreciate their value in scientific research. The operational definitions afford an understanding of the ‘true meaning’ of the concept.
“The true meaning says professor Bridgman the inventor of operational definitions, “is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.” What is important for us to know is what the researcher assumes to be the empirical indicators of his concept.
This is what really matters. No word has meaning if the circumstances under which it is used are not specified. A concept, on this view, is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.
What the researcher says social cohesion is, cannot be regarded as being of much consequence; how he goes about assessing the degrees of social cohesion through the use of certain instruments is what constitutes the true meaning of social cohesion for purposes of his research. Thus operational definitions insist on meaning in deed and not in words.
Dodd, in the Dictionary of Social Science, states:
“A definition is an operational definition to the extent that the definer (a) specifies the procedure (including materials used) for identifying or generating the definiendum and (b) finds high reliability or (consistency in application of) his definition.” In short, as Bachrach says, “the operational definition of a dish … is its recipe.”
Among sociologists for instance, operational definitions have been postulated by Chapin, Lundberg, Alpert and Kirkpatrick. In Alpert’s words, no definitions have any meaning apart from the methods which have been employed. Says Lundberg, on the basis of such premises, “space is that which is measured with a ruler, time is that which is measured by a clock, force is that which makes pointers move across the dial.”
Very useful as these operations often are, we must constantly remind ourselves that an undue emphasis on such definitions is likely to defeat the ultimate purpose of social science research. Sociologists do not seem to be agreed among themselves about the importance of operational definitions. The critics have justly opined that a concept does not merely mean a set of operations.
The operations are simply the techniques one has to use in order to get at and measure something behind these operations and the phenomenon itself. An operational definition is best applied to un-complex concepts such as time, temperature etc., but not to such complex ones as social cohesion, morale, love, anxiety etc.
It can without doubt offer a high level of precision when applied to un-complex concepts. But it fails us just when we are in most need of clarity.
The crux of the matter with reference to operational definitions is that we do not say we are measuring unless we know what we are doing, that is, unless we know both how to get the numbers and what the numbers stand for. A set of numbers, operationally generated, means nothing unless it is taken as indicating a relationship between aspects of the world which in their theoretic setting are concepts.
One cannot maintain that the concept is just a set of operations, because sometimes a situation arises in which one has a perfectly clear concept and is trying to discover an operation whereby to measure its values; there are as yet no operation, although there certainly is a concept.
It would, however be a wrong attitude to scale down operational definitions, for the social science also depends on empirical confirmation which is best obtained by operational definitions. After all our best efforts to reduce qualities into quantities through operationalization, the qualities essentially remain qualities and the magic of quantification does not change their innate texture.
Blummer rightly states that “the vagueness of a concept is equivalent to a difficulty in observing clearly a thing to which the concept is presumed to refer to, indeed this difficulty of knowing what to observe, being able to observe it and knowing how to observe it, is the crucial obstacle in bringing the concept into touch with experience.”
At the present stage of social sciences, we find a compromise between these positions. We may deal with the problem more easily by remembering that the concept is a set of directions. It directs the communicant to a particular kind of experience, one which to some extent has been shared.
If it does not do so, communication becomes hazardous. Thus whether the concept is defined in a purely formal manner or in an operational manner, the definition turns our attention to this experience.