The dual character of essentially contested concepts

Abstract

This paper puts forward and examines the claim that essentially contested concepts (hereafter ECCs)—as they are originally presented by W.B. Gallie in his seminal paper “Essentially Contested Concepts” (Gallie 1956b)—share a conceptual structure with dual character concepts (hereafter DCCs) first identified by Joshua Knobe, Sandeep Prasada, and George Newman in “Dual Character Concepts and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation” (Knobe, Prasada, and Newman 2013). The proper employment of ECCs is said to inevitably involve endless and rationally irresolvable yet genuine disputes that are sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence. DCCs are concepts that encode both a descriptive dimension and an independent normative dimension: people employing DCCs have been found to be employing two sets of criteria of category membership that match with the two dimensions, which makes it possible to judge a given object as a category member in either or both senses. I do not seek to show that ECCs and DCCs match one-to-one with each other. Instead, I explore their distinct and theoretically significant structural affinities that make way for a better understanding of these concept types and their structures. I argue that ECCs encode a descriptive and a normative dimension in much the same way as DCCs. This connection may be thought as accidental or as a mere similarity that does not justify further conclusions, however, and that is why I further bolster my case by juxtaposing natural kind concepts (hereafter NKCs) with ECCs and DCCs. Concepts are particularly elusive objects of study. By a three-way comparison I seek a firmer ground for the identification of genuine similarities that indicate a shared structure, as surprising as the combination of these concept types may seem at first. I show that making categorizations with DCCs and NKCs requires a reference to an underlying deep structure, and I argue that it is also the case with ECCs. This ultimately means that psychological essentialism has an important role to play in the phenomenon of essential contestability. Much of my argument rests on evidence amassed by comparing different perspectives on concepts, and therefore it is best to note in advance that both DCCs (see Knobe, Prasada, and Newman 2013; Newman and Knobe 2019) and ECCs (see Evnine 2014) have been directly linked to NKCs before. However, no such connection has been proposed as holding between DCCs and ECCs until this paper. At the end of the day, I claim that the structural commonalities between these three types of concepts outweigh their respective differences for the purpose of explaining the nature of ECCs, specifically. By no means do I wish to suggest that all questions one may have about ECCs will be answered, or even can be answered, by this account. Instead, I hope to offer a theoretical framework for seeing ECCs in a new light and for understanding why many of the issues arise in the first place, especially regarding alleged essentialist underpinnings of Gallie’s thesis. Structural similarities between mostly theorized ECCs, recently identified DCCs, and the already well-established class of natural kinds should make ECCs less mysterious as objects of study. Exploring the shared conceptual characteristics should also offer further guidance on which conceptual operations are possible in the case of each concept type, but apart from a few general suggestions made here and there, I am content to leave it to future research.