Schumpeter's Stipulative-Type Concepts: Methodology and Rhetoric

Les concepts de type stipulatif chez Schumpeter: méthodologie et rhétorique

Francisco Bellido ()
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Francisco Bellido: UEX - Universidad de Extremadura - University of Extremadura

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Abstract: This paper aims to ask whether Joseph A. Schumpeter devised a particular method of addressing conceptual problems in a scientific manner or not. While he refused ideal types to deem them an interesting conceptual apparatus of great utility, he acknowledged the risk of imposing the researchers' mental classification on social phenomena. In fact, his explicit research goals were oriented towards stipulative-type concepts. In that framework, to study social relationships and conceptual 'pictures' of the economic world, the most salient feature of a certain concept, from 'capitalism' and 'bourgeoise' to 'proletariat' and 'salary', do describe one or several prevalent specific types of relationships between agents and groups of agents in the context of Socialökonomie and sociological individualism, an alternative to methodological individualism.In the following chapters it will be argued that Schumpeter provided a specific sort of concepts both distinct from ideal-types and pure stipulation that can be labelled as 'stipulative-type' concepts. This methodological path is halfway both approaches and has the advantage of illuminating the conceptual contiguity of concepts in the mind of social agents and the virtuality of classifying social actions and groups as part of a far more complex map of political, economic, ideological and philosophical standpoints that agents assume in their behavior. However, the limits of this approach are severe: stipulative-type concepts add complexity when selecting certain observable features on how human agents conceive of their own action and behave drifting from Paretian 'derivations' and cognitive noise. To err in the stipulative assumption for a concept necessarily leads to a total distortion of the whole conceptual apparatus, thus hindering the connections between agents' actual behavior, the scientific concepts used by the social scientist and their mutual intelligibility.

Keywords: intelligibility; Schumpeter Socialökonomie methodology stipulative-type concepts ideal types intelligibility; Schumpeter; Socialökonomie; methodology; stipulative-type concepts; ideal types; intelligibility.; Schumpeter; Socialökonomie; methodology; stipulative-type concepts; ideal types (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10-20
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