Contested concepts get defined mainly by what they negate, not what they affirm

Evidence

One of the many challenging features of gray zone concepts is that they often appear in semantically unbalanced settings. By semantically unbalanced I mean extreme focus on one pole and lack of attention to the other. The democracy example illustrates this nicely. An example close to my interests and heart is “negative peace,” which has been almost always conceptualized as not-war and rarely as not–positive peace. “Health” in practice, e.g., WHO, is defined as the absence of illness (and much more controversially as the absence of handicap, e.g., deafness is not-health): it has almost no positive health-defining features. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 1158

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘semantically unbalanced’ as extreme focus on one pole of a concept with neglect of the other.
• XREF: Connects to earlier highlights on silence and ‘negative peace’ being defined as mere absence rather than positive presence.