ABSTRACT
Throughout the earlier chapters of this book, I have considered both the declarative and traditional forms of mapping sentences, although I emphasised the traditional form of mapping sentence in the first chapter. In this chapter, I provide more details to support my claims that the declarative mapping sentence may be used with profit and as a trustworthy instrument within qualitative research and philosophical scholarship. In offering further information about the declarative mapping sentence, including some details about its philosophical and linguistic sources, I provide examples of the uses of this approach. The multiple examples I have included in this chapter come from my own research (these include studies I have undertaken in the areas of philosophy and fine art) and from that of other scholars who, in the examples I have chosen, have considered areas as diverse as religious behaviour, the evaluation of IT systems, and clinical reasoning. My aims in this chapter are to argue that by providing clear definitions, in the form of well-structured mereologies that bound and structure a research domain, the declarative mapping sentence may be used to design, conduct, and analyse complex non-numerical research. The examples I provide of research from the literature of the use of mapping sentences in their declarative form support these assertions.
