Ordered typologies distract from the continuous concepts that generate them

Evidence

If the typology is partially or completely ordered, the recommendation is to focus on the row and column concepts, their underlying continua, and their interaction. The row and column concepts are doing the heavy conceptual work. If one follows the recommendation then the typology disappears and we are left with the core, two concepts and their interaction. The typology distracts attention from what is most important: the two concepts. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 1317

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book-so-far theme that many typologies are implicitly ordered rather than nominal, and to the measurement literature on ordinal versus interval scaling.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘When your classification is hiding your variables’ — how 2x2 matrices in social science smuggles continua into nominal cells and what gets lost.