Mattias and all,

I did some work on this along time ago but I have not revisited the area for some time. Ken can probably point to some recent generalised and useful sources on definitions, concepts, and categories and how we can intellectually arrive at useful ones in research. 

But here are a few thoughts. One of the classic ways of doing this sort of work is through logic and ven diagrams. This has major problems that lead to the classic binary thinking. 

I was particularly taken by Wittgenstein’s notion of a thread being made up of many strands, some of which touch each other—share space in common—but others on the same thread do not touch each other. Thus in natural language you can have the concept of a game, but it does not follow that all games have the same characteristics in common. Some sharing characteristics, some overlapping but sharing characteristics  with other games that have nothing in common with games elsewhere in the continuum, and so on. 

The general point to make is that all categories, binary or otherwise in natural language do not give us clearcut ways of making distinctions that are necessarily useful in a research context. They come with the detritus and remnants of usage that preceded us. They are a necessary starting point in any new area of research but quickly we find ourselves having to make distinctions that narrow the scope or we have to invent something entirely new to give voice to something everyone has missed till now. I’ve only done this once with the idea of Letness. (You would haver to go to my In Search of Semiotics to see how the idea emerges and gets used.

One way we found particularly productive in arriving at a useful distinction was when we were doing some philosophical research on the nature of Communication. There we looked at significant markers to arrive at a useful definition of Communication as a concept, looking at the boundary. Without pre-empting a definition of communication we went to the boundary of what we would consider to be communication and what would not be. For example, one of the phenomena we looked at was the discovery of pulsars, which for a brief moment was thought to be a communication from ET et al. What were the distinctions made by scientists in treating the signal as natural in origin, or as ‘civilisation’ in origin. We looked at a few other examples. The definition we now use emerged out of that analysis. You can find the paper we wrote about this here: https://communication.org.au/defining-communication-boundary/ <https://communication.org.au/defining-communication-boundary/>

The conclusions we came to from that have had a significant impact on the way we frame our practical communication and information design research.

Anyway, these are just some more ideas for you to consider in thinking through the tools you might use for your own thinking about dichotomies etc.

David


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