Adding a dimension to a concept reveals new causes and effects.

Evidence

The gendered welfare state literature illustrates that adding secondary-level characteristics can generate whole new research agendas. By including dimensions of special relevance to women and by putting the welfare state on the independent variable side of the equation, we gain dramatic new insights into the workings and nature of public policy in developed countries. By including these dimensions on the dependent variable side, we begin to think differently about the role of groups like labor unions in the creation of the welfare state. Here again we see the core and intimate relationship between causal theories and concepts. To include a new dimension in a concept is to see a new cause or a new effect. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 613

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Lakoff and Johnson’s argument that conceptual framing determines which causal relations become visible at all.
• SEED: Angle: ‘You can’t test what you haven’t named’ — how concept architecture silently sets the horizon of causal discovery across the social sciences.