1. In Communication Studies, the prevailing view of language is as a logical system that functions independently of the relations between cognition and language by contrast with the experiential view in which they are inter-dependent.

2. Technical terminology is not immune to the vagaries of usage. The meaning of terms varies in research projects where the problems addressed differ. The experiential view of language use can account for the myriad definitions of particular terms. "Linguistic expression is associated with a particular way of conceptualizing a given situation" (Lee, 1). From this point of view, the experiences researchers have of problematic situations govern their conceptions of them.

3. The logical view of language use does not invite the close examination of the use of research terms. Given the vagaries of the technical uses of terms, communication researchers should take a more experiential view of language which does account for terminological flux.

The three main logistical operations are planning, implementing, and adjusting (sustaining) resources to achieve a particular goal. 

If the resources are considered to be concepts and these three operations apply to research endeavors, then it is appropriate to speak of conceptual logistics.

A problematic is the detailed description of a problem that relates selected concepts to each other to form a model of the problem situation for the purpose of allowing researchers to raise answerable questions about it.

Questions (and the concepts used to formulate them) are constrained by methodological assumptions which are often concealed in terms borrowed from previous research projects. (See Ragin, The Comparative Method.)

 

Borrowing Terms Borrowing existing terms entails borrowing assumptions about different research problematics. The advice to novice researchers to borrow terms from authoritative researchers can commit them to unproductive attempts to study a problem unlike the one for which the term was originally invented. The appropriation of terms from conceptual domains other than the researcher’s is common and widespread. However, borrowed terms are usually reconceived to fit new contexts of use. Borrowing terms from other disciplines often takes place in circumstances where researchers read publications outside of their own conceptual domain. Borrowers are not often in dialog with researchers in the domains from which the terms were introduced. Were there more cross-disciplinary communication, extrapolating from one domain to another would be more productive. The insularity of disciplines has a “tower-of-babel” effect on sharing terminology. The conceptual logistics project aims at building lines of communication across disciplines.

 

Two Observations Theoretical lexicons are “toolkits” from which researchers draw to do the work their current projects require.  For the most part, researchers do not regard their theoretical lexicons as “toolkits,” despite considerable evidence to the contrary. A close review of the use of concepts by researchers, for example, shows that they frequently re-conceptualize their projects even when they retain the initial terms with which they defined their problematics. This results in using the same term to name different conceptions. Researchers are thought to rely on discipline-specific theoretical “paradigms” from which methodologies can be derived that authorized their research findings. Studies of the use of concepts in the development of research projects shows that pre-existing concept clusters—not paradigms—provide a lexicon of technical terms from which researchers borrow to develop theorems that match the problems they are attempting to solve and then redefine as their investigation proceeds. Dudley Shapere, in his “Scientific Theories and Their Domains” (1977), offers an alternative to Kuhn's "paradigm”—a “conceptual domain." For Shapere, a body of inter-related information that points to an important problem attracts researchers.  Once the researchers begin to investigate it collaboratively, their discussions about it constitute it as a conceptual domain of inquiry The logistical analysis of researchers’ use of concepts supports Shapere’s view.

The publication of research leaves out the messiness of the process of researching—the days, months, years of futility that sometimes plague researchers.

As researchers match their conceptual models against the data, they usually have to adjust the models to fit

It is not always the case that an experiment is successful.   It is not uncommon that an experiment is tweaked conceptually and run one or more times before it achieves an acceptable result.  Once the experiment was started, the only way to claim that no conceptual adjustments were made would be to regard the failed experiments as different experiments.  But this doesn't make sense.  Considered as a continuum, conceptual adjustments permeate the process.

Conclusion

Conceptual logistics assumes that the following statements are "givens":

The meaning of words change with their use.  Over time, some words have come to mean the opposite of what they originally meant.

Technical terminology is not immune to usage. 

The history of any discipline is strewn with abandoned meanings. 

Researching entails continuous conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing.

Each research project emends the terminology with which it was initially formulated. 

Terms are always “working” terms, redefined to suit the parameters of the problems under investigation. 

Therefore, a viable way to become aware of the nuances of conceptualization in delineating research problematics is to study how terms are used to conceive them.

Therefore, a viable way to improve communication across disciplines is to study each other’s use of the concepts underlying the terms in their publications.

 

CODA “Conceptual blending” as it is delineated in Fauconnier and Turner’s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities can be understood as an explanation of the way the research process works. The process of blending various conceptions of everyday experiences of frames into an abstract concept of a “news frame” (such as “war on terrorism”) reveals ways in which researchers who use the term, “frame,” in their research have subtly differing conceptions of the phenomenon.

The expectation that researchers working on different projects in various fields use the “same” definition of a common term is unrealistic. The expectation that researchers working on different projects in the same field use the “same” definition of a common term is also unrealistic.

Logistical studies of the use of concepts in research show that it is normal for conceptualizations to vary from project to project while using the same terms.