ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of a disjunctive concept. It begins with a class of objects that are uniform in terms of some ultimate criterion. When one examines culturally defined forms of the disjunctive concept—social groups, for example, of elites or of the professions—one finds that there is a tendency for disjunctive definitions to be modified over time into more easily grasped conjunctive forms. All appropriate strategies depend upon the use of one or more negative instances. In the most efficient strategy, one finds a negative instance and chooses instances that differ from it in a single value. After one value has been thus located, one starts again from a negative instance, changing the values of other attributes until, in this way, one has located all the disjunctive defining attributes. The most general statement that can be made about attempts to attain disjunctive concepts is that they seem on the whole to be designed to attain conjunctive concepts.
