Choosing between alternative concepts in a worrisome world: Urgency as criterion

What criteria should guide political scientists in choosing between alternative conceptions? This paper complements existed criteria by suggesting in addition the ‘urgency criterion’. The urgency criterion pertains to how far the chosen conception reflects the worrisome and therefore the urgent aspect(s) of the political world. This criterion can serve when scientists are choosing between conceptions, and when prioritizing aspects of conceptions. The paper highlights a persistent obstacle responsible for specific lacuna in the literature: Taking into consideration existing criteria for good concepts (elaborated in the paper), scientists may still encounter a particular difficulty when deliberating between conceptions that cope equally with the rest of the criteria. In some cases, this is due to different (ethical) normative assumptions. Back in 1956, when Gallie characterized ‘essentially contested concepts’ he was pointing to this kind of obstacle. Gerring and Cojocaru (2024) show empirically that a prominent characteristic of essentially contested concepts is, in addition to their centrality and high level of abstraction, a dominant ethical ‘normativity’. The urgency criterion can potentially mitigate this difficulty, and so help scientists in the structuring of value-laden and contested concepts in political science, such as ‘democracy’, ‘corruption’, ‘social cohesion’, ‘poverty’, ‘equality’, and so forth. It can be viewed as an alternative to other common strategies, such as simply avoiding making decisions about contested concepts, or turning to political ideals only. Use of the criterion reflects a broader view that criteria are required for good concepts, even when those concepts build on evaluative and normative assumptions. After all, pointing to ‘essentially contested concepts’ is not about ‘agreeing to disagree’, but about acknowledging an important ongoing contestation (Gallie 1956, Collier et al. 2006). For good arguments, it is here assumed, such contestation needs to be disciplined with some criteria. In some cases, it will be shown, the urgency criterion is employed naturally and implicitly. An example used below is the way that political scientists of previous decades have conceptualized ‘political polarization’. This paper draws out the lesson to be extracted from such cases and the upshot of making the criterion explicit, inviting discussion of consequences and limitations. The paper is inspired by the Sartori-Collier tradition, also called the Semantic-Pragmatic approach to conceptualization in political science. This tradition highlights a self-aware and well-reasoned process of concept formation and concept structuring. The discussion can be regarded also as a special – domain specific – case of what philosophers call ‘concept engineering’, that is, “the project of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices” (Cappelen 2020, 132). However, a prominent special characterization of political science concepts, beyond their being ‘political’, is that they are linked to indicators and measurements, so the meaning that we ascribe to them affects not only their use in the jargon of political science and political theory but also their measurement representations and quantitative assessments. The implication of this is far reaching: concept engineering in this domain may result in different measurement-devises and scores.