THE RHETORIC OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
One of the serious problems of our age is the question of how
scientific information, which is largely the product of special tools
of investigation, shall be communicated to the non-specialist world.
A few sciences operate in fields of theory so abstract that they can
create their own symbology, and most of what they transmit to the public
will be in the form of highly generalized translation. But there are
other sciences whose very success depends upon some public understanding
of what they are trying to solve, and these are faced with peculiar
problems of communication. None are in so difficult a position as social
science. The social sciences have been, since their institution, jealous
of their status as science, and that is perhaps understandable. But
their data is the everyday life of man in society, and naturally if
there is an area of scientific discovery upon which the general public
should be posted, it is just this one of the laws of social phenomena.
Caught between this desire to remain scientific and the necessity of
public expression, most social scientists are in a dilemma. They have
not devised (and possibly they cannot devise) their own symbology to
rival that of the mathematician and physicist. On the other hand, they
have not set themselves to learn the principles of sound rhetorical
exposition. The result is that the publications of social scientists
contain a large amount of conspicuously poor writing, which is now under
growing attack.[155] Some of these attacks have been perceptive as well
as witty; but I feel that no one has yet made the point which most needs
making, which is that the social scientists will never write much better
until they make terms with some of the traditional rules of rhetoric.
I propose in the study which follows to ignore the isolated small faults
and instead to analyze the sources of pervasive vices. I shall put the
inquiry in the form of a series of questions, which lead to cardinal
principles of conception and of choice.
I
_Does the writing of social scientists suffer from a primary
equivocation?_ The charge against social science writing which would be
most widely granted is that it fails to convince us that it deals clearly
with realities. This impression may lead to the question of whether the
social scientist knows what he is talking about. Now this is a serious,
not a frivolous, question, involving matters of logic and epistemology;
it is a question, furthermore, that one finds the social scientists
constantly putting to themselves and answering in a variety of ways. Any
field of study is liable to a similar interrogation; in this instance it
merely asks whether those who interpret social behavior in scientific
terms are aware of the kind of data they are handling. Are they dealing
with facts, or concepts, or evaluations, or all three? The answer given
to this question will have a definite bearing upon their problem of
expression, and let us see how this can happen in a concrete instance.
We have had much to say in preceding chapters about the distinction
between positive and dialectical terms; and nowhere has the ignoring
of this distinction had worse results than in the literature of social
science. We have seen, to review briefly, that the positive term
designates something existing simply in the objective world: the chair,
the tree, the farm. Arguments over positive terms are not arguments in
the true sense, since the point at issue is capable of immediate and
public settlement, just as one might settle an “argument” over the width
of a room by bringing in a publicly-agreed-upon yardstick. Consequently
a rhetoric of positive terms is a rhetoric of simple description, which
requires only powers of accurate observation and reporting.
It is otherwise with dialectical terms. These are terms standing for
concepts, which are defined by their negatives or their privations.
“Justice” is a dialectical term which is defined by “injustice”; “social
improvement” is made meaningful by the use of “privation of social
improvement.” To say that a family has an income of $800.00 a year is
positive; to say that the same family is underprivileged is dialectical.
It can be underprivileged only with reference to families which have
more privileges. So it goes with the whole range of terms which reflect
judgments of value; “unjust,” “poor,” “underpaid,” “undesirable” are all
terms which depend on something more than the external world for their
significance.
Now here is where the social scientist crosses a divide that he seldom
acknowledges and often seems unaware of. One cannot use the dialectical
term in the same manner as one uses the positive term because the
dialectical term always leaves one committed to something. It is a
truth easily seen that all dialectical terms make presumptions from the
plain fact that they are “positional” terms. A writer no sooner employs
one than he is engaged in an argument. To say that the universe is
purposeless is to join in argument with all who say it is purposeful.
To say that a certain social condition is inequitable is to ally
oneself with the reformers and against the standpatters. In all such
cases the presumption has to do with the scope of the term and with its
relationship to its opposite, and these can be worked out only through
the dialectical method we have analyzed in other chapters. When the
reader of social science comes to such terms, he is baffled because he
has not been warned of the presumptions on which they rest. Or, to be
more exact, he has not been prepared for presumptions at all. He finds
himself reading at a level where the facts have been subsumed, and where
the exposition is a process of adjusting categories. The writer has
passed with indifference from what is objectively true to what is morally
or imaginatively true. The reader’s uneasiness comes from a feeling that
the categories themselves are the things which should have been examined.
Just here, however, may lie the crux of the difficulty.
It begins to look as though the social scientist working with his regular
habits is actually a dialectician without a dialectical basis. His
dilemma is that he can neither use his terms with the simple directness
of the natural scientist pointing to physical factors, nor with the
assurance of a philosopher who has some source for their meaning in the
system from which he begins his deduction. Or, the social scientist
is trying to characterize the world positively in terms which can be
made good only dialectically. He can never make them good dialectically
as long as he is by theory entirely committed to empiricism. This
explains why to the ordinary beholder there seem to be so many smuggled
assumptions in the literature of social science. It will explain,
moreover, why so much of its expression is characterized by diffuseness
and by that verbosity which is certain to afflict a dialectic without a
metaphysic or an ontology. This uncertainty of the social scientist about
the nature of his datum often leads him to treat empirical situations as
if they carried moral sanction, and then to turn around and treat some
point of contemporary mores—which is by definition a “moral” question—as
if it had only empirical aspects. In direct consequence, when the
social scientist should be writing “positively,” like a crack newspaper
reporter, one finds him writing like Hegel, and, when the stage of his
exposition might warrant his writing more or less like Hegel, one finds
him employing dialectical terms as if they had positive designations.
Paradoxically, his very reverence for facts may tend to make him sound
like Hegel or some other master of categorical thinking. Anyone sampling
the literature of social science cannot fail to be impressed with the
proportion of space given to definition. Indeed, one of the most
convincing claims of the science is that our present-day knowledge of
man is defective because our definitions are simplistic. His behavior is
much more varied than the unscientific suppose; and therefore a central
objective of social study is definition, which will take this variety
into account and supplant our present “prejudiced” definitions. With this
in mind, the social scientist toils in library or office to prepare the
best definitions he can of human nature, of society, and of psychosocial
environment.
The danger for him in this laudable endeavor seems twofold. First, one
must remark that the language of definition is inevitably the language
of generality because only the generalizable is definable. Singulars and
individuals can be described but not defined; _e.g._, one can define
man, but one can only describe Abraham Lincoln. The greater, then, his
solicitude for the factual and the concrete, the more irresistibly is he
borne in the direction of abstract language, which alone will encompass
his collected facts. His dissertations on human society begin with
obeisance to facts, but the logic of his being a scientist condemns
him to abstraction. He is forced toward the position of the proverbial
revolutionary, who loves mankind but has little charity for those
particular specimens of it with whom he must associate.
In the second place and more importantly, the definition of non-empirical
terms is itself a dialectical process. All such definition takes the form
of an argument which must prove that the _definiendum_ is one thing and
not another thing. The limits of the definition are thus the boundary
between the things and the not-thing. Someone might inquire at this stage
of our account whether the natural scientists, who must also define, are
not equally liable under this point of the argument. The distinction
is that definitions in natural science have a different ontological
basis. The properties about which they generalize exist not in logical
connection but in empirical conjunction, as when “mammal,” “vertebrate,”
and “quadruped” are used to distinguish the genus _Felis_. The doctrine
of “natural kinds” thus remains an empirical classification, as does
the traditional classification of elements.[156] Consequently the genus
_Felis_ has a reality in the form of compresent positive attributes
which “slum” cannot have. The establishment of the genus is not a
matter of negating or depriving other classes, but of naming what is
there. On the other hand one could never arrive positivistically at a
definition of “slum” because its meaning is contingent upon judgment (and
theoretically our standard of living might move up to where Westchester,
Grosse Point, and Winnetka are regarded as slums). Thus “slum” no more
exists objectively than does “bad weather.” There are collections of
sticks and stones which the dialectician may call “slums,” just as there
are processions of the elements which he may call “bad.” But these are
positive things only in a reductionist equation. Of course, the natural
scientist works always with reductionist equations; but the social
scientist, unless he is an extreme materialist, must work with the full
equation.
It is a grave imputation, but at the heart of the social scientist’s
unsatisfactory expression lies this equivocation. Remedy here can come
only with a clearer defining of province and of responsibility.
II
_Is social science writing marred by “pedantic empiricism”?_ The natural
desire of everyone to carry away something from his reading encounters
in this literature curious obstacles. Its authors often seem unduly
coy about their conclusions. After the reader has been escorted on an
extensive tour of facts and definitions, he is likely to be told that
little can be affirmed at this stage of the inquiry. So it is that,
however much we read, we are made to feel that what we are reading is
preliminary. We come almost to look for a formula at the close of a
social science monograph which takes an excessively modest view of its
achievement while expressing the hope that someone else may come along
and do something with the data there offered. Burgess and Cottrell’s
_Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage_ provides an illustration.
After presenting their case, the authors say: “In this study, as in many
others, the most significant contribution is not to be found in any
one finding but in the degree to which the study opens up a new field
to further research.”[157] Again, from an article appearing in _Social
Forces_: “The findings here mentioned are merely suggestive; and they are
offered in no sense as proof of our hypothesis of folk-urban personality
differences. The implementation of the analysis given here would demand
a field project incorporating the type of methodological consciousness
advocated above. Thus we need to utilize standard projective devices,
but must be prepared to develop, in terms of situational demands,
additional analytic instruments.”[158] And Herman C. Beyle in a chapter
on the data and method of political science, which constitute the
underpinning of his whole study, can only say that “the foregoing
comments on the data and technology of political science have been
offered as most tentative statements intended to provide a background
for the testing and application of the technique here proposed, that
of attribute-cluster-bloc identification and analysis.”[159] “Most
tentative” becomes a sort of leitmotiv. Everything sounds like a
prolegomenon to the real thing. Exclamations that social scientists are
taking in one another’s washing or are only trying to make work for
themselves are inspired by this kind of performance.
But, even after one has made allowance for the fact that social science
is not one of the exact sciences and that its disciples work in a field
where induction is far from complete, their fear of commitment still
seems obsessive. They could at least have the courage of the facts which
they have accumulated. Virtually everyone who is seeking scientific
enlightenment on this level knows that conclusions are given in the
light of evidence available, and that hypothesis always extends some
distance beyond what is directly observable. Indeed, everyone makes use
of the method of scientific investigation, as T. H. Huxley liked to
assure his audiences, but not everyone finds necessary such an armor of
qualifications as is likely to appear here: “On the basis of available
evidence, it is not unreasonable to suppose”; “It may not be improbable
in view of these findings”; “The present survey would seem to indicate.”
All these rhetorical contortions are forms of needless hedging.
It would be a different matter if such formulas of reservation made the
conclusion more precise. But in the majority of cases it could be shown
that the conclusion is obvious enough in terms of the discussion itself,
and they serve only to make it sound timid. These scholars move to a
tune of “induction never ends,” and their scholarship often turns into a
pedantic empiricism. They seem to be waiting for the fact that will bring
with it the revelation. But that fact will never arrive; experience does
not tell us what we are experiencing, and at some point they are going
to have to give names to their findings—even at the expense of becoming
dialecticians.
If the needlessly hedged statement is one result of pedantic empiricism,
another occurs in what might be called “pedantic analysis.” This is
analysis for analysis’ sake, with no real thought of relevance or
application or, indeed, of a resynthesis which might redeem the whole
undertaking. Just as it is assumed that an endless collection of data
will necessarily yield fruits, so it is assumed that a remorseless
partitioning will illuminate. But analysis can be carried so far that it
seems to lose all bearing upon points at issue. The writer shows himself
a sort of _virtuoso_ at analysis, and one feels that his real interest
lies in demonstrating how thoroughly a method can be followed. Let us
look, for example, at a passage from an article entitled “Courtship as a
Social Institution in the United States, 1930-1945.” The author has said
that activities of courtship show different patterns and that sometimes
the patterns need to be harmonized:
To be compatible, patterns should be adapted to the following
components: (1) the _hominid component_, which is the
biological human being; (2) the _social component_, which
includes the potentialities for social relations as they are
affected by “the number of human beings in the situation, their
distribution in space, their ages, their sex, their native
ability to interstimulate and interact, the interference of
environmental hindrances or helps, and the presence and amount
of certain types of social equipment”; (3) the _environmental
component_, or all the “natural” features of the situation
except the hominid, the social, the psychological and
artifactual components; it includes topography, physiography,
flora, fauna, weather, geology, soil, etc.; (4) the
_psychological component_, defined as the principles involving
the acquisition and performance of human customs not adequately
explained on purely biological principles; (5) the _artifactual
component_, which consists collectively of the material results
and adjuncts of human customary activities.[160]
It is not always safe for the layman to generalize about the value of
specific sociological findings, but I am inclined to think that this is
verbiage, resulting from analysis pushed beyond any useful purpose. There
is a real if obscure relationship between the vitality of what one is
saying and the palatability of one’s rhetoric. No rhythm, no _tournure_
of phrase, no architecture of the sentences could make this a good piece
of writing, for its content lies on the outer fringe of significance. It
is the nature of such pedantry to habit itself in a harsh and crabbed
style.
The primary step in literary composition is _invention_, or the
discovering of something to talk about. No writer is finally able to
make good the claim that his subject matter is one thing and his style
of expression another; the subject matter enters into the expression
inevitably and extensively, although sometimes in ways too subtle for
elucidation. What of the invention of this passage? If we take the word
in its etymological sense of “finding,” are not these distinctions
“findings” for findings’ sake? Analysis carried to such a humorless
extreme reflects discredit upon the very principle of division which was
employed.
It may appear contradictory to call the social scientist a “tendentious
dialectician” and a “pedantic empiricist” at the same time. But the
contradiction is inherent in his situation and merely expresses the
equivocation found earlier. In all likelihood the empiricism is an
attempt to compensate for the dialectic. If a writer feels guilty about
his dialectic exercises (his definitions), he may seek to counterweight
them with long empirical inquiries. The object of the empirical analysis
is primarily to give the work a scientific aspect and only secondarily to
prove something. In fact, this is almost the pattern of inferior social
science literature.
III
_Does social science writing suffer from a melioristic bias?_ This
question directs our attention to the matter of vocabulary. There is
danger in criticising any writer’s vocabulary through application of
simple principles, because demands vary widely. For some purposes a small
vocabulary of denotative terms will be satisfactory. Other purposes
cannot be adequately met without a large and learned vocabulary which
may, incidentally, sound pretentious. Our question then becomes whether
the ends of social science are being well served by the means employed.
For example, social scientists are often charged with addiction to
polysyllabic vocabulary. Other men of learning show the same addiction,
but there are special reasons for weighing critically the polysyllabic
diction of social scientists.
Of course, when one faces the issue concretely, one discovers that there
is no single standard by which a word is classified “big.” Some words
are called “big” because they actually have four or five syllables and
hence are measurably so; other words of one or two syllables are called
“big” because, coming out of technical or scientific vocabularies, they
are unfamiliar to the average man;[161] others, actually no longer, are
called “big” because of the company they keep; that is to say, they are
words of learned or dignified association. Sometimes a word seems big
when it is simply too pretentious for the kind of thing it is describing.
Readers of H. L. Mencken will recall that he obtained many of his best
satirical effects by describing what was essentially picayune or tawdry
in a vocabulary of grandiloquence.
A cursory inspection will show that social scientists are given to words
which are “big” in yet another respect: they have a Latin origin. Even
in analysis of simple phenomenon the reader comes to expect a parade of
terms which seem to go by on stilts, as if it were important to keep from
touching the ground. Without raising questions of semantic theory, one
inclines to wonder about their relationship to their referents. In course
of time one may come to suspect that the words employed are not dictated
by the subject matter, but by some active principle out of sociological
theory. To see whether that suspicion has a foundation, let us try a test
on a specimen of this language.
The passage which will be used is fairly representative of the ordinary
social science prose to be encountered in articles and reports. The
subject is expressed in the title “Social Nearness among Welfare
Institutions”:
It was noticed in the preceding sections that the social
welfare organizational milieu presents an interdependence,
a formal solidarity, a coerced feeling of unity. However
divergent the specific objectives of each organization,
theoretically they all have a common purpose, the care of the
so-called underprivileged. Whether they execute what they
profess or not is a different question and one which does not
fall within the confines of these pages.[162]
There occur in this short excerpt about a dozen words of Latin origin
for which equivalents of Anglo-Saxon (or old English, if the name is
preferred) origin are available, and this without giving up presumably
operational terms like “organizational” and “milieu.”[163] In place of
“noticed,” why not “seen”? In place of “divergent,” why not “unlike”?
In place of “objective,” why not “goal”? Instead of “execute what they
profess,” why not “do what they say”? Did these terms not suggest
themselves to the writer, or were they deliberately passed by?
It might be arbitrary to insist that any one of these substitutes is
better than the original, but the piling-up of such terms causes language
to take on a special aspect. There are, of course, margins within which
preference in terminology means little, but a preference for Latinate
terms as marked as this must be, to employ one of their customary
expressions, “significant.”
That significance lies in the kind of attitude that social scientists
must have in order to practice social science. It seems beyond dispute
that all social science rests upon the assumption that man and society
are improvable. That is its origin and its guiding impulse. The man
who does not feel that social behavior and social institutions can be
bettered through the application of scientific laws, or through some
philosophy finding its basic support in them, is surely out of place in
sociology. There would really be nothing for him to do. He could only sit
on the sidelines and speculate dourly, like Nietzsche, or ironically,
like Santayana. The very profession which the true social scientist
adopts compels him to be a kind of a priori optimist. This is why a large
part of social science writing displays a _melioristic bias_. It is under
compulsion, often unconsciously felt, I am sure, to picture things a
little better than they are. Such expression provides a kind of proof
that its theories are “working.”
An indubitable connection exists between the melioristic bias and a
Latinate vocabulary. Even a moderate sensitivity to the overtones of
language will tell one that diction of Latin derivation tends to be
euphemistic. For this there seem to be both extrinsic and intrinsic
causes. It is a commonplace of historical knowledge that after the Norman
Conquest the Anglo-Saxons were forced into a servile role. They were sent
into the fields to do chores for the Norman overlords, and Anglo-Saxon
names have clung to the things with which they worked. Thus to the
Anglo-Saxon in the field the animal was “cow”; to the Norman, when the
same animal was served at his table, it was “beef” (L. _bos_, _bovis_).
So “calf” is translated “veal”; “thegn” becomes “servant”; “folk” becomes
“people,” and so on. This distinction of common and elegant terms
persists in an area of our vocabulary today. Another circumstance was
that Latin for centuries constituted the language of learning and of the
professions throughout Europe, and from the fourteenth century onward,
there occurred a large amount of “learned borrowing.”[164] This reflects
the fact that those cultures which carried civility and _politesse_ to
highest perfection drew from a Latin source. Finally, I would suggest
that the greater number of syllables in many Latinate terms is a factor
in the effect. Whatever the complete explanation, the truth remains that
to give a thing a Latinate name is to couple it with social prestige and
with the world of ideas, whereas to give it a name out of Anglo-Saxon
is to forgo such dignifying associations. Thus “combat” sounds more
dignified than “fight”; “labor” has resonances which “work” does not
have; “impecunious” seems to indicate a more hopeful condition than
“needy” or “penniless”; “involuntary separation” sounds less painful than
“getting fired.” The list could be extended indefinitely. With exceptions
too few to make a difference, the Anglo-Saxon word is plain and workaday,
whereas the word of Latin derivation seems to invest whatever it
describes with a certain upward tendency. Of course, the Anglo-Saxon word
has its potencies, but they are not those of the other. It seems to cling
to the brute empirical fact, while its Latinate counterpart seems at once
to become ideological, with perhaps a slight aura of hortation about it.
Whenever one hears the average man condemning a piece of discourse as
“flowery,” it is most likely that he is pointing, with the only term at
his command, to an excess of Latinate diction.
In the same connection, let us remember that the last few years have
seen much newspaper wit at the expense of the language of government
bureaucracy, which is even more responsive to the melioristic bias. The
bureaucrat lives in a world where nothing is incorrigible; the solution
to every contemporary difficulty waits only for the devising of some
appropriate administrative machinery. Compared with him, the social
scientist is a realist, for social science at least begins by admitting
that many situations leave something to be desired. The bureaucrat’s
world is prim and proper and aseptic, and his language reflects it
(perhaps one could say that the discourse of the bureaucrat is social
science “politicalized”). At any rate, here we might profitably look
at a specimen of bureaucratic parlance from Masterson and Phillips’
_Federal Prose_, a recently published burlesque of official language.
The authors posed for themselves as one exercise the problem of how a
bureaucrat would express the ancient adage “Too many cooks spoil the
broth.” Their translation is a caricature, but, like caricature, it
brings out the dominant features of the subject: “Undue multiplicity
of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single
function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product
as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of
personnel.”[165] One notices, first of all, the leap into polysyllabic
diction, along with the total disappearance of those homely entities
“cooks” and “broth.” “Personnel,” for example, is an abstract dignifier,
and “resultant product” is safe, since it does not leave the writer on
record as affirming that the concoction in question actually is broth.
He is further protected by the expunging of “spoil,” with its positive
assertion, and he can hide behind the relativity of “deterioration of
quality ... as compared with....”
Such language, when used to express the phenomenology of social and
political behavior, gives a curious impression of being foreign to
its subject matter. The impression of foreignness may be explained as
follows. In all writing which has come to be regarded as wisdom about the
human being, there is an undertone of the sardonic. Man at his best is a
sort of caricature of himself, and even when we are eulogizing him for
his finer attributes, there has to be a minor theme of depreciation, much
as a vein of comedy weaves in and out of a great tragedy. The “great”
actions of history appear either sublime or ridiculous, depending on
one’s standpoint, and it may be the part of sagacity to regard them as
both at the same time. This note of the sardonic is found in biblical
wisdom, in Plato’s realism of situations, and even in Aristotle’s
dry categorizing. It appears in the _Federalist_ papers,[166] as the
authors, while debating political theory in high terms, kept a cagey eye
upon economic man. Man is neither an angel nor any kind of disembodied
spirit, and the attempt to treat him as such only arouses our sense of
the ridiculous. The comic animal must be there before we can grant that
the representation is “true.” The typical social science report, even
when it discusses situations in which baseness and irrationality figure
prominently, does not get in this ingredient. Every social fact may be
serious, but not every social action is serious because action is not
fully explainable without motive. It is this abstract man which causes
some of us to wonder about the predications of an unhumanistic social
science.
The remedy might be to employ, except where the necessity of
conceptualizing makes it difficult, something nearer the language of
the biblical parable (one shudders to think how our bureaucrat would
render “A sower went forth to sow”), or the language of the best British
journalism. I have often felt that writers on social science might learn
a valuable lesson from the limpid prose of the _Manchester Guardian_.
There one usually finds statement without eulogistic or dyslogistic
tendency, adequacy without turgidity. It is perhaps the nearest thing
we have in practice to that supposititious reality, objective language.
There is some truth in the observation of John Peale Bishop that, whereas
American English is more vigorous, English English is far more accurate.
A good reportorial medium will be, to a considerable extent, an English
English, and it will reflect something of the English genius for fact.
To sum up, the melioristic bias is a deflection toward language which
glosses over reality without necessarily giving us a philosophic
vocabulary. One could go so far as to say that such language is
comparatively lacking in responsibility. It is the language that one
expects from those who have become insulated or daintified. It carries
a slight suggestion of denial of evil, which in lay circles, as in
some ecclesiastical ones, is among the greatest heresies. Perhaps the
sociologist would inspire more confidence as a social physician if his
language had more of the candor described above, and almost certainly he
would get a better understanding of his diagnosis.
IV
_Do the social scientists lose more than they gain by a distrust of
metaphor?_ Dr. Johnson once remarked of Swift, “The rogue never hazards
a metaphor,” and that may well be the reaction of anyone who has plowed
through the drab pages of a contemporary sociologist. It has long
been suspected that sociologists and poets have little confidence in
one another, and here their respective procedures come into complete
contrast. The poet works mainly with metaphor, and the sociologist will
have none of it. Which is right? Or, if each is doing instinctively the
thing that is right for him, must we affirm that the works they produce
are of very unequal importance?
One can readily see how the social scientist might be guided by the
simple impression that, since metaphor characterizes the language of
poetry, it has, for that very reason, no place in the language of
science. Or, if he should become more analytical, he might conclude
that metaphor, through its very operation of analogy or transference,
implies the existence of a realm which positivistic study denies. To use
metaphor, then, would be to pass over to the enemy. But he would be a
very limited kind of sociologist, a sort of doctrinaire mechanist, not
fully posted on all the resources open to scientific inquiry.
There are two more or less familiar theories of the nature of metaphor.
One holds that metaphor is mere decoration. It is like the colored lights
and gewgaws one hangs on a Christmas tree; the tree is an integral tree
without them, but they do add sparkle and novelty and so are good things
for such occasions. So the metaphors used in language are pleasurable
accessories, which give it a certain charm and lift but which are
supererogatory when one comes down to the business of understanding what
is said. This theory has been fully discredited not only by those who
have analyzed the language of poetry, but also by those who have gone
furthest into the psychology of language itself and have explored the
“meaning of meaning.”
A second theory holds that metaphor is a useful concession to our feeble
imagination. We are all children of Adam to the extent that we crave
material embodiments. Even the most highly trained of us are wearied by
long continuance of abstract communication; we want the thing brought
down to earth so that we can see it. For the same reason that principles
have to be put into fables for children, the abstract conceptions of
modern science require figures for their popular expression. Thus the
universe of Einstein is represented as “like” the surface of an orange;
or the theory of entropy is illustrated by the figure of a desert
on which Arabs are riding their camels hither and thither. From the
standpoint of rhetoric, this theory has some validity. Visualization is
an aid to seeing relationships, and there are rhetorical situations which
demand some kind of picturization. Many skilled expositors will follow
an abstract proposition with some easy figure which lets us down to
earth or enables us to get a bearing. There is some value, then, in the
“incarnation” of concepts. On this ground alone one could defend the use
of metaphors in communication.[167]
There is yet another theory, now receiving serious attention, that
metaphor is itself a means of discovery. Of course, metaphor is intended
here in the broadest sense, requiring only some form of parallelism.[168]
But when its essential nature is understood, it is hard to resist the
thought that metaphor is one of the most important heuristic devices,
leading us from a known to an unknown, but subsequently verifiable,
fact of principle. Thus George de Santillana, writing on “Aspects of
Scientific Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century,” can declare, “There
is never a ‘strict induction’ but contains a considerable amount of
deduction, starting from points chosen analogically.”[169] In other
words, analogy formulates and to some extent directs the inquiry. Any
investigation must start from certain minimal likenesses, and that may
conceal the truth that some analogy lies at the heart of all assertion.
Even Bertrand Russell is compelled to accept analogy as one of the
postulates required to validate the scientific method because it provides
the antecedent probability necessary to justify an induction.[170]
We might go so far as to admit the point of George Lundberg, who has
given attention to the underlying theory of social science, that
artists and philosophers make only “allegations” about the world, which
scientists must put to the test.[171] For the inquiry may go from
allegation to allegation, through a series of metaphorical constructs.
This in no wise diminishes the role of metaphor but rather recognizes the
role it has always had. If we should speak, for example, of the “dance of
life,” we would be using a metaphor of considerable illuminating power,
in that it rests upon a number of resemblances, some of which are hidden
or profound. If we push it vigorously, we may be surprised at some of
the insights which will turn up. Our naïve question, “What is it like?”
which we ask of anything we are confronting for the first time, is the
intellect’s cry for help. Unless it is like something in some measure, we
shall never get to understand it.
The usual student of literature is prone to feel that there is more
social psychology in _Hamlet_ than in a dozen volumes on the theory of
the subject. Hamlet is a category, a kind of concrete universal; why
would he yield less as a factor in an analysis than some operational
definition? At least one social psychologist has felt no hesitation about
employing this kind of factor, the only difference being that his is
Babbitt, of more recent creation. Ellsworth Faris, in developing a thesis
that every person has several selves, presents his meaning as follows:
Moreover, whatever the list of personalities or roles may be,
there is always room for one more, and indeed for many more.
When war comes, Babbitt will probably be a member of the
committee for public defense. He may become a member of a law
enforcement league yet to be formed. He may divorce his wife
or elope with his stenographer or misuse the mails and become
a Federal prisoner in Leavenworth. Each experience will mean
a new role with new personal attitudes and a new axiological
conception of himself.[172]
This is none the less illuminating because Babbitt is not the product of
a controlled scientific induction. He is a sort of “alleged” symbol which
works very well in a psychological equation. Surely, it is enlightening
to know that some men are like Babbitt and others like Hamlet, or
that we all have our Babbitt and Hamlet phases. But here we should be
primarily interested in the fact that the Lynds’ _Middletown_ (1929)
followed rather than preceded Lewis’s _Main Street_ (1920). In the best
of literary and sociological worlds, _Main Street_ directs attention to
Middletown, and _Middletown_ reduces Main Street to an operable entity.
The task of taking language away from poetry is a larger operation than
appears at first, and in the eyes of some students an impossible one,
even if it were desirable. We are all like Emerson’s scholar in that the
ordinary affairs of life come to us business and go from us poetry—at
least as soon as we start expressing them in speech. Many words which
we think of as prosaic literalisms can be shown to have their origin in
long-forgotten comparisons. The word “depend” analogizes the action
of hanging from; “contact” analogizes a relationship. “Discoverer” and
“detect” stand for the literal operation of taking off a covering,
hence exposing to view. A “profound study” apparently goes back to our
perception of physical depth. In this way the meaning which we attach
to these words is transferred from their analogues; and, of course,
the process is more obvious in language that is more consciously
metaphorical. It thus becomes plain that somewhere one has to come to
terms with metaphor anyhow, and there is a way to turn the necessity into
a victory.
V
_Is the expression of social science affected by a caste spirit?_ The
fact that social scientists are, in general, dedicated to the removal of
caste, or at least to a refutation of caste presumptions, unfortunately
does not prevent their becoming a caste. Circumstances exist all the
while to make them an _élite_. For one thing, the scientific method of
procedure sets them off pretty severely from the average man, with his
common-sense approach to social problems. Not only is he likely to be
nonplussed by techniques and terminologies; he is also likely to be
repelled by what scientists consider one of their greatest virtues—their
detachment. Finally, it has to be admitted that social scientists’
extensive patronage by universities, foundations, and governments serves
to give them a protected status while they work. Every other group
so situated has tended to create a jargon, and thus far the social
scientists have not been an exception. Their jargon is a product partly
of imitation and partly of defense-mindedness.
Naturally one of the first steps in entering a profession is to master
the professional language. A display of familiarity with the language is
popularly taken as a sign of orthodoxy and acceptance; and thus there
arises a temptation to use the special nomenclature freely even when one
has doubts about its aptness. This condition affects especially the young
ones who are seeking recognition and establishment—the graduate students
and the instructors—in general, the probationers in the field. Departure
from orthodoxy can be interpreted as a sign of ignorance or as a sign of
independence, and, in the case of those who have not passed probation,
we usually interpret it as the former. Accordingly, there is a degree
of risk involved in changing the pattern of speech laid down by one’s
colleagues. So the problem of what one has to do to show that one belongs
can be a problem of style. It is entirely possible that many young social
scientists do not write so well as they could because of this inhibition.
They are in the position of having to satisfy teachers and critics, and
they produce what is expected or what they think is expected. In this
way a natural gift for the direct phrase and the lucid arrangement can
be swallowed up in tortuosities. The pattern can be broken only by some
gifted revolutionary or by someone invested with all the honors of the
guild.
It is, moreover, true, as Harold Laski has pointed out, that every
profession builds up a distrust of innovation, and especially of
innovation from the outside.[173] It requires an unusual degree of
humility to see that the solution to our problem may have to come
from someone outside our number, perhaps from some naïve person
whose advantage is that he can see the matter only in broad outline.
Professions and bureaucracies are on guard against this sort of person,
and one of the barriers they unconsciously set up is just this one of
jargon. If certain government policies were announced in the language of
the barbershop, their absurdity might become overwhelmingly apparent.
If certain projects in social science research (or in language and
literature research, for that matter) were explained in the language
of the daily news report, their futility might become embarrassingly
clear. One can only surmise how an experienced political reporter
would phrase the findings in Beyle’s _Identification and Analysis of
Attribute-Cluster-Blocs_, but one has a notion that his account would
sound very little like the original. Would it be unfair? The reply that
such language would destroy essential meanings in the original would
have to be weighed along with the alternative possibility that the
language was used in the first place because it was euphemistic, in
the sense we have outlined, or protective. A user of such language may
feel safe because the definition of terms is, in a way, his possession.
And so technical language, as sometimes employed, may be Pickwickian,
inasmuch as it serves not just scientifically but also pragmatically. The
average citizen, faced with sociological explanations and bureaucratic
communiques, may feel as poor culprits used to feel when confronted with
law Latin.
VI
The rhetorical obligation of the scientists has been aptly expressed by
T. Swann Harding in a discussion of the general character of scientific
writing. “Scientists,” he says, “gain nothing by showing off, and the
simpler they can make their reports the better. Even their technical
reports can be made very much simpler without loss of accuracy or
precision. Nor is there really any valid substitute for a good working
knowledge of English composition and rhetoric.”[174] The last statement
is true with certain qualifications, which ought to be made explicit.
In a final estimate of the problem it has to be recognized that social
science writing cannot be judged altogether by literary standards. It
is expression with a definite assignment of duty; and those who have
made a comparative study of methods and styles know that every formula
of expression incurs its penalty. It is a rule in the realm of writing
that one pays for the choice one makes. The payment is exacted when the
form of expression becomes too exclusively what it is. In course of use
a defined style becomes its own enemy. If one’s writing is abstract,
it will accommodate ideas, but it will fatigue the reader. If it is
concrete, it will divert and relieve; but it may become cloying, and it
will have difficulty in encompassing ideas. If it is spare, it will come
to seem abrupt; if it practices a degree of circumlocution, it will first
seem elegant but will come to seem inflated. The lucid style is suspected
of oversimplifying. And so the dilemma goes.
Now the social scientist has to write about a kind of thing, and,
notwithstanding his uncertain allocation of facts and concepts, he may
as well accept his penalty at the beginning. He can never make it a
primary goal to be “pleasing,” and for this reason the purely literary
performance is not for him. Dramatistic presentation, a leading source
of interest in all literary production, is largely, if not entirely,
out of his reach. The only kind of writing that gets people emotionally
involved contains some form of dramatic conflict, which requires a
dichotomy of opposites. Yet the only dichotomy that social science (as a
science) contemplates is that of the norm and the deviate, and these two
are supposed to exist in an empirical rather than in a moral context,
and the injunction is implicit that all we shall do is observe. The
work, then, is going to be either purely descriptive, or critical with
reference to the norm-deviate opposition. Not many people are going to
develop a sense of poignant concern over such presentations. To a certain
extent _Middletown_ did catch the popular imagination, but the contrast
developed here was between what the American observably was through the
eyes of detached social scientists and his picture of himself, with its
compound of self-esteem, aspiration, and social mythology. The community
empirically found was put on the stage to challenge the community
sentimentally and otherwise conceived. The same will hardly hold for the
typical case of scientific norm and empirically discovered deviate, for
no such ideas are involved in the contrast. _Recent Social Trends in the
United States_,[175] for example, the monumental report of President
Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, could not look to this
kind of interest for its appeal. Unless, therefore, we regard metaphor as
a means of dramatistic presentation, this resource is not ordinarily open
to social science.
Yet within the purpose which the social scientist sets himself there
is a considerable range of rhetorical possibility, which he ignores
at needless expense. Rhetoric is, among other things, a process of
coordination and subordination which is very close to the essential
thought process. That is to say, in any coherent piece of discourse there
occur promotion and demotion of thoughts, and this is accomplished not
solely through logical outlining and subsumation. It involves matters
of sequence, of quantity, and some understanding of the rhetorical
aspects of grammatical categories. These are means to clear and effective
expression, and the failure to see and use them as means can produce
a condition in which means and ends seem not discriminated, or even a
subversion in which means seem to manipulate ends. That condition is
one which social science, along with every other instrumentality of
education, should be combating in the interest of a reasonable world.