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Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaconnotation that a person would attach to words such as freedom and justicewould be closely associated with that person’s mindset and experiences.Although a person would, therefore, employ common terms such as beautifuland ugly in his or her interpersonal communication, and would usuallyunderstand what other people mean when they use the terms (and would beunderstood by others when he or she uses these words), it is clear that the userwould attach specific idiosyncratic connotations to these terms: it is indeed thecase that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The conventional connotation ofa word is the commonly assumed meaning of that word: the meaning that hasimplicitly been agreed upon for the sake of communication. People agree touse words in a specific manner to ensure that communication and conversationbetween them is possible.When this distinction between subjective and conventional connotation isapplied to the social sciences, we find the following. To some extent eachresearcher employs scientific concepts in an idiosyncratic manner (subjectiveconnotations) that is associated with specific theoretical preferences, training,interests, and so on. Nonetheless, researchers within the same discipline and,more specifically, within the same paradigm or research tradition, tend to sharespecific conventional connotations. Because concepts have, at least to a certainextent, specific meanings within a given conceptual framework (theory,model), it is obvious that researchers from the same paradigm are likely to beable to communicate with relatively greater ease than would be the casebetween researchers from different schools or paradigms. In the remaining partof this chapter we shall consistently refer to conventional connotation when theterm connotation is employed.In chapter 3 we referred to the fact that the core concepts of the social sciencestend to be highly abstract in nature. Some of these concepts originated not inthe concrete world of everyday intercourse, but rather in highly abstract theory.A good example is the term alienation which was discussed in some detail inchapter 3. Concepts of which the meanings are determined by theory from theoutset, are also called theoretical concepts or constructs. An implication of thisis that the ontological status of such constructs is often in dispute. One mayask: Do such constructs denote or refer to real entities or structures? If aspecific term is developed entirely within the framework of a specific theory,does it have an existence independent of that theory? Can entities or structuressuch as the id, ego, and superego (Freud), cognitive dissonance (Festinger),labelling (Becker), anomie (Durkheim), and so on be said to exist, or are theymerely fictitious creations of highly imaginative social scientists? This is notthe place to discuss this highly philosophical problem. It is sufficient that wetake note of the very real denotative problem of a large number of concepts inthe social sciences. The obvious solution to the problem is to operationalizeconstructs in a rigid and accurate manner — an ideal which, as we haveindicated in an earlier section, is far easier said than done!127