doing so still risks serious confusion to the extent that the stipulated definition diverges from the readers’ unarticulated prior understanding. And there is no way to guage this without first explicating the meaning in current usage. In the end, social scientists may often find it necessary to refine and redefine ordinary language meanings. But without a clear statement of the prior meaning, even the stipulator will not know what she is doing with the concept.9 Another argument for explicating current usage is that the method can yield a deeper understanding of contested and unclear concepts like “identity.” The intuitions behind ordinary language meanings often have much interesting structure, which is likely to be missed if we jump to stipulating definitions. In their analyses of the concept of “identity,” both Gleason (1983) and Brubaker and Cooper (1999) conclude that the wholesale, chaotic spread of “identity talk” in popular and academic language has deprived it of any meaning at all.10 Quoting A.O. Lovejoy on the word “romantic”, Gleason says that “identity” has “come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign” (p. 914). Brubaker and Cooper believe that the term has acquired so many contradictory meanings and uses in sociology that it should be purged in favor of more specific terms. I will argue Brubaker and Cooper and Gleason are giving up too soon on both popular and “popular academic” usage.
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The construction of “identity”
If in need of a definition, one looks first to dictionaries. Here is the most relevant entry for “identity” in the OED (2nd edition, 1989): “The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.” Note that this does not easily capture what we seem to mean 9 One example of the confusion that can result from inattention to ordinary language meanings comes from the use of “rational” in rational-choice-influenced political science applications, where it has been popular to argue that contrary to conventional wisdom, phenomenon X (war, genocide, ethnic violence, etc.) can be explained as the product of rational actors making choices. But the meaning of “rational” in rational choice theory concerns primarily the efficiency of means for attaining desired ends, whereas in ordinary language “rational” also refers to whether a person’s ends are comprehensible or even morally defensible.
See also Mackenzie (1978), whose initial dismay at the proliferation of identity talk in the 1970s Britain leads him to speak of the “murder” of the concept. 10
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