Isaiah Berlin used the metaphor of a "fox" and a "hedgehog" to make conceptual distinctions in how important philosophers and authors view the world.
[1] Berlin describes hedgehogs as those who use a single idea or organizing principle to view the world (such as Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Plato, Henrik Ibsen and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).
Foxes, on the other hand, incorporate a type of pluralism and view the world through multiple, sometimes conflicting, lenses (examples include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Aristotle, Herodotus, Molière, and Honoré de Balzac).
One set of scholars has applied the notion of a conceptual framework to deductive, empirical research at the micro- or individual study level.
[11][12][13][14] They employ American football plays as a useful metaphor to clarify the meaning of conceptual framework (used in the context of a deductive empirical study).
Likewise, conceptual frameworks are abstract representations, connected to the research project's goal that direct the collection and analysis of data (on the plane of observation – the ground).
[18] Several types of conceptual frameworks have been identified,[13][14][19] and line up with a research purpose in the following ways: Note that Shields and Rangarajan (2013) do not claim that the above are the only framework-purpose pairing.