Resilience: some philosophical remarks on ostensively and stipulatively defined concepts

Abstract

The notion of resilience has become widely diffused in sustainability research over the past two decades. This process has not unfolded without contention and critique of the concept has often focused on its content. In this article, we discuss how concepts, including resilience, come to be defined in scientific terms. We distinguish between ostensively defined concepts that point to some phenomena and stipulatively defined concepts where the content is given in the definition itself. We argue that although definitions are remarkably similar across many disciplines where resilience is used—most notably psychology and ecology—they may nonetheless differ in whether they are to be taken as stipulative or ostensive. This situation has interesting consequences for the ways in which different disciplines can be connected and integrated. It is notable that integration on the basis of ostensive definition turns on sharing the extension (the phenomena itself) of the concept, but not necessarily the intension (the definition), whereas integration on the basis of stipulatively defined concepts works in the opposite way.