Skewed empirical distributions justify causal theories rather than concept revisions.

Evidence

One trap in this area is to confuse the empirical distribution of cases with the conceptual continuum. It may be a fact of life that halfdemocratic, half-authoritarian regimes are unstable and short lived (just as some chemical and physical states are unstable), but that empirical fact calls for a theoretical and causal explanation, not for a change in the concept itself. The actual distribution of cases along the basic-level continuum should not play a very strong role in conceptbuilding. It is the job of causal theory to explain the empirical distribution of cases. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the trust literature’s insistence that theory-building should not be dictated by observed case frequencies (e.g. the Pareto/jealousy-of-gods warning against letting data shape the model).
• SEED: An essay on how social scientists repeatedly smuggle the observation that few cases occupy a middle category into the claim that the middle category doesn’t exist.