Set Theory

By B. Satyanarayana, T. V. Pradeep Kumar, Shaik Mohiddin Shaw. 2019

QCA is a set-theoretic method. But what are sets and how does a set-theoretic approach differ from other approaches? At the most basic level, a set can be defined as a group of elements that share certain characteristics. For George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, one way to see sets is as a “containerlike entity” (Lakoff and Núñez 2000, 140) and James Mahoney describes sets as “boundaries that define zones of inclusion and exclusion” (Mahoney 2010, 7). Given these understandings, it is apparent that sets and concepts are closely interlinked. In fact, most social science theories are grounded in set theory, either explicitly by using the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, or implicitly by invoking the set-theoretic logic without expressly referring to necessity and sufficiency (Goertz and Mahoney 2012; Schneider and Wagemann 2012).2

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Citations in the corpus

• FairSight: Visual Analytics for Fairness in Decision Making (2019, methodology): “Here, we adopt the symmetric Hausdorff distance [19], referred to as Group Separation score, to measure the separation between the individuals from the two groups A and B:”