Power: ambiguous not vague

ABSTRACT

The major problems for complex multi-dimensional social science concepts is incoherence, often hidden by the fact that they are also vague. Analytically, precisifying can demonstrate we have incompatible intuitions about the meaning of complex normative terms. Simple vague terms can be precisified with ‘coding decisions’. Vagueness differs from ambiguity. Ambiguity occurs when a term is used to mean two quite different things and can be handled by the subscript gambit. Power is neither vague nor incoherent. We can identify a simple sense underlying all accounts of ‘power’. Ambiguous usage concerns the extension to which the simple term is applied.

KEYWORDS:

• Ambiguity
• concepts
• essential contestability
• freedom
• incoherence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article is about social or political power. There might be reasons for distinguishing ‘social power’ from ‘political power’ depending on how one defines the modifier. When I use the term ‘power’ I am writing about the general idea of power in society. Where such distinctions are necessary, I will make them.

2. I had earlier called it, rather long-windedly, ‘the methodological criterion of conceptual analysis’ (Dowding and Van Hees 2007).

3. All concepts are partly normative, but some (much) more so than others. I have argued elsewhere that we should try to define our concepts in a manner that is as non-normative as possible (Dowding 2012, 2016, ch. 8).

4. I use the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ interchangeably.

5. In other words, history is not as important for the issue of vagueness as it is for idea of essential contestability, though this is not to claim that history is irrelevant to vagueness. See Section IV.

6. When small, one of my children once said to me, ‘I wish you you’d make me do things rather than just ask me.’ His point was that he didn’t want to take on the responsibility himself, but would sooner I forced or coerced him. I have argued elsewhere that we should not allow the normative aspects to determine the definition, i.e., we should not define coercion such that justified force does not count as coercion (Dowding 2012). That is to give too much emphasis to the normative intension over the extension of a term and create ambiguity, making normative disputes harder to resolve.

7. By ‘agent’ I do not only mean individual humans, but also anything that has agency, collections of individuals, organization, firms, governments, and so on: anything to which we can ascribe agential power.

8. Though, of course, it does not disappear in my stipulation, since for me ‘power over’ is a subset of ‘power to’.

9. Ambiguity in this sense is apparent in the dispute between Barry (2002, 2003) and Dowding (2003), for example.

10. I think Steven Lukes need have no dispute with this way of characterizing the three faces. What he does dispute (Lukes 2021) is my claim elsewhere (Dowding 2019) that we can analyse the three faces through the collective action problem.

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Keith Dowding

Keith Dowding is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Political Philosophy, School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He has published over ninety articles in major journals and twenty books most recently It’s the Government’s Fault, Stupid, (2020), a new edition of Rational Choice and Political Power (2019), Power, Luck and Freedom: Collected Essays, (2017), The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science (2016). He edited the Journal of Theoretical Politics 1996–2013.