When he would accept a positive response from an opponent, it was typically as a set-up for then undermining some larger edifice with a well-timed “okay, but if X is Y, then what is Y?” Socrates in fact often directly ridiculed the notion that he could answer his own questions of this form, such as when he replies to a student, “you come to me as though I professed to know about the questions which I ask” . As the Greek scholar W. K. C Guthrie describes it, “the essence of the Socratic method is to convince the interlocutor that whereas he thought he knew something, in fact he does not” . Despite the original negative application of this method, this form of direct questioning has since been widely adopted with the expectation that it should lead to a positive defi- nition of a term. Socrates liked to point out that seemingly satisfactory articulation does not necessarily imply knowledge, and more recent thinkers have argued that the converse is also true and some knowledge simply resists articulation. This latter insight is well captured in Henri Bergson’s statement that “philosophical systems are not cut to the measure of the reality in which we live” and Michael Polanyi concise declaration that “we can know more than we can tell” . The implication here is that while a seemingly satisfactory answer to “what is X?” does not guarantee knowledge, an unsatisfactory answer or even none at all does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding or meaning.
This point is implied by Cowen, Shenton, and Ferguson when they use their seemingly defeatist response to “What is ‘development?”’ as a rhetorical device to introduce their more subtle investigation of the term. That approach does not, however,barley fodder system offer a framework for understanding how this central term is used in interdisciplinary discussions or suggest a strategy to avoid or unravel semantic confusion when the term is used. This potential disconnect between understanding and articulation revolutionized the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began his career in the philosophy of language with an exceptionally linear and positivistic view, to the extant that he wrote his first major work as a numbered list of declarative propositions. In his preface to this work, Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus, he claimed that the “whole meaning [of the book] could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent” . This task of characterizing and categorizing individual instances is common to many intellectual fields, with this descriptive survey providing the foundation for the study of relationships among types. In the biological sciences, for example, the current interest in ecological and evolutionary relationships only became possible after centuries of observational surveys and taxonomic classifications identified relevant groupings of individuals, such as populations, species, and communities. Once established, a descriptive typology of individual instances can support a wide range of questions about relationships, such as epistemological or pragmatic associations that might be informative of disciplinary or personal interests. Identifying which specific categories that an author references can help to clarify what sorts of games they prefer, what types of organisms they study, or what they mean when they talk about “development” even if they do not state this focus directly.
In some cases, such as biology, this inquiry into relationships can also focus on historical associations or other ontological relationships among types. A simplified conceptual example of categorizing individual instances and exploring relationships among general types is described in Figure 1.The beginnings of a descriptive typology of “development” can be seen in the dichotomies that are sometimes made in the interdisciplinary literature. One such common distinction is between “immanent development,” as the general process of societies changing over time, and “intentional development,” as the deliberate practice of intervening in an attempt to influence this change . Another is between “development” as a set of social ideals or goals, and either the immanent process of change or the intentional practice of intervention . These dichotomies are typically used to clarify an author’s interests, as in “this meaning, not that meaning,” and are not intended to represent a survey of the field. One exception is Alan Thomas who, in a response piece to Doctrines of Development, describes three general categories of use: immanent processes, intentional practices, and social ideals . His justification for extending simple dichotomies into a descriptive typology echoes Wittgenstein’s observational approach as he writes, ‘the question is one of usage … rather than of trying to show which meaning is the “correct” one’ . A well-developed classification scheme provides a starting point for additional semantic inquiries and can immediately reduce the confusion surrounding “development” in several ways. The first and most direct is that it provides a formal framework for interpreting individual uses of “development” in interdisciplinary literature, which is particularly helpful when the uses are surprising to a reader. Second, many authors make complex arguments that weave among alternative uses of “development,” and the ability to trace the change in the meaning among individual uses can provide additional and potentially nuanced insights into their broader argument. Third, it allows for the quantitative assessment of texts, which can be used to compare and contrast among diverse authors and works in order to clarify conceptual differences. Finally, while a descriptive typology cannot offer normative prescriptions of how “development” should be used, it can provide authors with a guide of how a use might be interpreted by an interdisciplinary audience, which can help them to avoid ambiguous or misleading language.
Options to do so include explicitly stating their intended meaning and contrasting it with other uses, adding adjacent qualifiers to clarify an individual use of “development,” and replacing the term entirely with a more specific phrasing.This formal survey of the use of “development” in development studies combined depth, through focused analysis of critical texts, and breadth, through a broader sampling of journal articles across a 40-year period. The previously identified books by Sen, Ferguson, Moser, and Escobar were selected to meet the depth requirement, and the textual analysis focused on the prologues or introductions where the authors explicitly wrestled with semantic issues. The journal World Development was selected to meet the breath requirement, as it is a leading publication in the interdisciplinary field and has been semantically self-conscious from the first issue in 1973,hydroponic barley fodder system when the editors introduced the journal by identifying the diverse concepts that they associate with “development” . Textual analysis was limited to journal articles from 1973, 1993, and 2013 that used the word “development” in the title. As all articles published in this journal are presumably about “development” in some form but it is also possible that they might not use the word itself, this filter was applied to ask the more specific question, “when an author prominently and explicitly associates their text with ‘development’ in an interdisciplinary context, how do they then use the term?” This selection was further restricted to original research articles of greater than 3 pages, and excluded all book reviews, speech transcripts, and short comment articles. The selected articles are listed in Appendix 1. The final descriptive typology used for classification emerged as the result of an iterative learning process and does not presume to be exhaustive or authoritative within the field. This resulting typology was then reapplied to the same texts to quantify patterns of use within and across the selected works. All individual uses of the term were classified within each text, with the exception of keywords, legends, footnotes, and references. All acronyms containing “development” were interpreted as full uses of the term and classified accordingly. Proper nouns and direct quotations containing “development” were recorded but not classified within the typology, as they did not represent the author’s word choice. Uses that were considered to be outside of the commoninter disciplinary discussion of “development” were also recorded as “unrelated.” These were primarily uses that referred to the emergence of a specific product, idea, or activity, such as the “development” of a new technology. Occurrence of related terms such as “developing” and “developed” was also recorded and classified as referring to societies, not referring to societies, or within proper names or quotes. Immediately adjacent qualifiers, such as “economic [development]” or “[development] plan” where recorded during the analysis. Where multiple qualifiers were used, such as “land development banks” and “regional development policy,” only the more specific qualifier was recorded, which was usually the one following “development.”
The final textual analysis of all selected journal articles was performed over three days with the articles analysed in a random order. The interpretation and categorization of each individual use was based primarily on the immediately surrounding text, as this is what a reader would first turn to when faced with a surprising use of the term. However, the “principle of charity” was also used to ensure that the local contextual interpretation was consistent with or at least not contradictory to the author’s larger stated interests. This approach, which was popularized by W.V.O. Quine, maintains that effort should be made to interpret a text or argument in a way that is rational, internally coherent, and as viable of an argument as is possible . This general strategy helps to avoid over simplified interpretations and straw-man arguments, and is particularly appropriate for “development” owing to the diverse and sometimes rhetorical or even sarcastic use of the term in the literature. However, some individual uses of “development” resist classification, such as when an author’s broader position is not straightforward and there are no adjacent qualifiers or the individual uses are highly variable. Rather than demand classification of every use and thereby sprinkle ambiguity throughout the analysis, such rare instances were simply marked as “unclear.”The results are presented in three sections, with focused discussion following each set of results and the more general discussion reserved for the conclusion. The first section is a summary of the four general and 22 specific categories of use identified in the final descriptive typology. The second section is the application of this typology to the interpretation of the four provocative and semantically self-aware texts, which combines the textual analysis of uses of “development” with a broader interpretation of these selections and authors. The results of this textual analysis are summarized in Appendix 2. The final section is the survey of articles from World Development from 1973, 1993, and 2013. This analysis focuses exclusively on the use of the word “development,” and does not attempt to balance this with the broader interests of each article, as the goal is instead to track patterns of use over time within this interdisciplinary field.Attempts to understand the interaction of the processes, patterns, and practices associated with “development” has led to a fourth general use that references the perspectives that are associated with these reflective discussions. This might include public conception of processes, patterns, or practices, the broad and often implicit institutional vision behind interventions, general strategies or theories guiding interventions, general intellectual discourse on the topic, and formalized knowledge and associated commentators that emerge from this discourse. It may also be rhetorically undefined, such as in asking, “what is ‘development?’” In theory, these four general categories relate to each other very neatly. Societies are always changing and these changes can often be observed and influenced , and this interaction of processes, patterns, and practices can also be studied and assessed . However, the actual use of “development” is far more complicated. While some authors may restrict their discussion to a single general or even specific category of use, many others will deliberately build more complex arguments that use “development” in multiple ways. For example, it is common to criticize specific practices as being dissociated from the underlying processes or inspired by unrealistic patterns. Other authors may wander from one category of use to another in a single text and in ways that are not always immediately clear in context or necessarily deliberate.