An essentially contested concept is an abstract term or phrase that provides value judgements which can be contested. The term essentially contested concept was proposed to facilitate an understanding of the different interpretations of abstractions that have qualitative and evaluative notionsThey are "evaluative" in the sense that they deliver some sort of "value-judgement".—such as "art", "time", "philanthropy",Daly (2012) "power", and "social justice". The notion of an essentially contested concept was proposed in 1956 by Walter Bryce Gallie.Published immediately as Gallie (1956a); a later, slightly altered version appears in Gallie (1964).
Essentially contested concepts involve agreed on abstract concepts or phrases, but whose usage and interpretation is disputable by others (e.g. "social justice", "This picture is a work of art").Hart (1961, p. 156) speaks of "a uniform or constant feature", and "a shifting or varying criterion used in determining when, for any given purposes, cases are alike or different". They are abstract concepts, "proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users",Gallie (1956a), p. 169. The dispute is about the proper use of the concept; and all argue that the concept is being "used inappropriately" by others (Smith, 2002, p. 332). and these disputes "cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone".Gray (1977), p. 344. Usually, essentially contested concepts are found in the social sciences where confusion arises due to experts using terminology inconsistently and often failing to specify the relationship between an abstract term and the meaning of that term.
For example, in historical studies, it has been observed that there are no particular standards for historical topics such as religion, art, science, democracy, and social justice, as these are by their nature "essentially contested" fields that require diverse tools particular to each field beforehand in order to interpret topics from those subjects. When scholars talk about "religion," "art," "science," "democracy," etc., there is no one definition of such terms that is generally accepted, and thus they are essentially contested by default among scholars.
Identifying the presence of a dispute Although Gallie's term is widely used to denote imprecise use of technical terminology, it has a far more specific application; although the notion could be misleadingly and evasively used to justify "agreeing to disagree",A statement that, in essence, is usually nothing more than a simple observation that the apparent dispute it is simply a consequence of the same label being applied to different referents. the term offers something more valuable:Rhodes (2000), p. 1.
The disputes that attend an essentially contested concept are driven by substantive disagreements over a range of different, entirely reasonable (although perhaps mistaken) interpretations of a mutually-agreed-upon archetypical notion, such as the legal precept "treat like cases alike; and treat different cases differently", with "each party [continuing] to defend its case with what it claims to be convincing arguments, evidence and other forms of justification".Gallie (1956a) p. 168.
Gallie speaks of how "This picture is painted in oils" can be successfully contested if the work is actually painted in tempera;Gallie (1956a), p. 167. while "This picture is a work of art" may meet strong opposition due to disputes over what "work of art" denotes. He suggests three avenues whereby one might resolve such disputes: Discovering a new meaning of "work of art" to which all disputants could thenceforward agree. Convincing all the disputants to conform to one meaning. Declaring "work of art" to be a number of different concepts employing the same name.
Otherwise, the dispute probably centres on polysemy.The embedded meaning of the term polysemy is that the polysemous word’s meanings have multiplied over time (in the sense of its original meaning being extended). When discussing finance, "bank" is an essentially contested concept; because the discussion involves establishing the "correct" application, meaning or interpretation of this polysemous term. In a different dispute over banks, where one speaks of financial institutions and the other of riparian zones, it is obvious that two homonyms have been confused. Here, a number of critical questions must be asked: Has the term been incorrectly used, as in the case of mistakenly using decimated for devastated (catachresis)?Which is "a conflict between truth and error" (Garver, 1990, p. 259) Do two or more different concepts share the same word, as in the case of ear, bank, sound, corn, scale, etc. (homonymy)? Is there a genuine dispute about the term's correct application that, in fact, can be resolved? Or, is it really the case that the term is an essentially contested concept?
Contested versus contestable Barry Clarke suggested that, in order to determine whether a particular dispute was a consequence of true polysemy or inadvertent homonymy, one should seek to "locate the source of the dispute"; and in doing so, one might find that the source was "within the concept itself", or "[within] some underlying non-conceptual disagreement between the contestants".Clarke (1979), p. 123.
Clarke drew attention to the substantial differences between the expressions "essentially contested" and "essentially contestable", that were being extensively used within the literature as if they were interchangeable.
Clarke argued that to state that a concept is merely "contested" is to "attribute significance to the contest rather than to the concept". Yet, to state that a concept is "contestable" (rather than "merely contested") is to "attribute some part of any contest to the concept"; namely, "to claim that some feature or property of the concept makes it polysemantic, and that [from this] the concept contains some internal conflict of ideas"; and it's this state of affairs that provides the "essentially contestable concept" with its "inherent potential [for] generating disputes".Clarke (1979), p. 124.
Features In 1956 Gallie proposed a set of seven conditions for the existence of an essentially contested concept.See Gallie (1956a). 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 justiceGallie (1956a), passim. Kekes (1977, p. 71) offers art, morality, logic, the novel, nature, rationality, democracy, culture, science, and philosophy as another set of examples of "concepts" that are essentially contested. (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,"Freeden (1998), p. 56. and GerringGerring (1999), p. 385. asks us to imagine just how difficult it would be to "[try] 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";Gallie (1956a), p. 180. or, as GrayGray (1977), p. 337. 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."
The following are extensions of Gallie's original seven features that have been made by various scholars from across multiple disciplines:
Essentially contested concepts are evaluative, and they deliver value-judgements.Baldwin stresses that whilst "not all value judgements are appraisive", "[any act of] appraisal presupposes an accepted set of criteria" (Baldwin (1997), p. 10. Essentially contested concepts denote comprehensively evaluated entities that have an internally complex character.For this reason, Benn and Gaus (1983, pp. 3-5) advocate using the term "complex-structured concepts". The evaluation must be attributed to the internally complex entity as a whole. The different constituent elements of that internally complex entity are initially variously describable. 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. Psychological and sociological causes influence the extent to which any particular consideration is salient for a given individual, regarded as a stronger reason by that individual than by another, and regarded as a reason by one individual and not by another.Mason (1990), p. 96. The disputed concepts are open-endedGallie cites "democracy" an example of a concept being "open" in its character: "Politics being the art of the possible, democratic targets will be raised or lowered as circumstances alter, and democratic achievements are always judged in the light of such alterations" (Gallie, 1956a, p. 186, emphasis added). and vague, and are subject to considerable modification in the light of changing circumstances.Because, in the absence of this condition, it is possible that experience could establish one instantiation as "universally more acceptable than another" (Gallie, 1956a, p. 174). This further modification can neither be predicted nor prescribed in advance. 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;Swanton (1985), p. 815. 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.Mason (1990), p. 85. 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.For, otherwise, it would only be, at best, an essentially "contestable" concept. Each party must (at least to a certain extent) understand the criteria upon which the other participants’ (repudiated) views are based. Disputes centred on essentially contested concepts are "perfectly genuine", "not resolvable by argument",Connolly (1974, p. 40) expressed the view that once the participants in a particular political dispute realized that the concept was an essentially contested concept, the ensuing political discussions would be far more "enlightened" (Connolly, 1974, p. 40). and "nevertheless sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence".All from Gallie (1956a), p. 169. 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. 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.