Facts are only selected for enquiry against a pre-existing conceptual criterion
Evidence
An enquiry into a series of facts to discover the relations between them presupposes a “concept” that permits one to distinguish that series from other possible series of facts. How can there take place a choice of facts to be adduced as proof of the truth of one’s own assumption if one does not have a pre-existing criterion of choice? But what is this criterion of choice to be, if not something superior to each single fact under enquiry? An intuition, a conception, which must be regarded as having a complex history, a process that is to be connected with the whole process of the development of culture (etc.). This observation may be connected with the other one on the “sociological law”, in which one simply repeats the same fact twice, the first time as a fact and the second time as a law, and which is a sophism of the double fact and not a law at all. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1637
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Concept-first method: enquiry presupposes a conceptually-laden criterion of selection, with history — a usable methodological principle.
- XREF: Connects to ‘sociological law’ critique and later to poststructuralist critiques of fact-claims that Islamophobia studies deploy.