Les concepts souffrent-ils de négligence bénigne en sciences sociales? Eléments d’analyse conceptuelle et examen exploratoire de la littérature francophone à caractère méthodologique

Abstract

Concepts are essential to any scientific endeavour aimed at ‘discovering’ the nature of ‘reality’. Yet, concepts and their analysis have received scant attention from scholars as objects worth studying and teaching in and of themselves, especially in comparison to data collection and analysis techniques. When scholars venture into analyzing concepts, they generally proceed informally, thereby raising serious concerns in terms of the validity of their findings. Conceptual analysis seems to be unrecognized and even unappreciated. This article aims to mitigate this problem. We first offer a few basic principles of conceptual analysis drawn from North American political science. After examining the nature of concepts and their importance to science, the work of Giovanni Sartori is used to establish a few rules and principles to follow when performing conceptual work. Using a sample of francophone methodological literature, we then conduct a plausibility probe of the hypothesis according to which conceptual analysis suffers from ‘benign neglect’. Based on this empirical test, we conclude that while many books explicitly deal with conceptual analysis, very few do so systematically.