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Of Gods, Devils, Monsters, and One-Eyed Variables*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

J.A. Laponce
J.A. Laponce
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 199 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1974

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References

1 The one-eyed judge is in Shchedrin's fable “the unsleeping eye.”

2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962Google Scholar); Osgood, Charles E., “Exploration in Semantic Space: a Personal Dairy,” Journal of Social Issues, 27, 4 (1971), 5–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Osgood, Charles, Suci, Georges, and Tannenbaum, Percy, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana, Ill., 1957Google Scholar).

4 Rokeach, Milton, The Open and the Closed Mind (New York, 1960Google Scholar). The Doodlebug Game used by Rokeach and his associates favours the open minded; it would be interesting to test one's subjects on two games, one favouring open mindedness, the other favouring closed mindedness.

5 The dominant focus on integration of “unions” leads Etzioni to give too little attention to the processes of either integration or disintegration occuring at the level of the “units.” Integration at one level may be, but need not be, accompanied by disintegration at the other. Under de Gaulle, for example, the increased identification of Frenchmen with Europe did not preclude an increase in “local” French nationalism. To chart the evolution of a union in relation to the evolution of the units one needs a balance score of integration-disintegration at both the level of the union and of the units. See Etzioni, A., Political Unification (New York, 1965Google Scholar).

6 At least in his Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965).

7 David Singer's remarkable compilation of the wages of war – where wars are characterized by their negative features (especially cost in life and time) – can lead to a cost-benefit analysis of the kind envisaged by Quincy Wright. Most difficult to assess and most upsetting to acknowledge are the cultural benefits of war such as myths, legends, poems, and paintings. The theme of culture feeding on violence is central to Gary's, Romain sarcastic, La danse de Genghis Cohn (Paris, 1967Google Scholar).

8 Of the 60 articles in the sample, 18 were so titled that a dependent and an independent variable could be identified in the title. Each of these variables was coded as either positive, negative, or neutral. The sign was given after comparing the variable in the title to its opposite in the literature (for example voting compared to non-voting) and by determining whether the variable suggested functionality or disfunctionality. Of the 16 articles to which I assigned signs other than equal (++, −−or a combination of + and −), 12 (75 per cent) were consonant (either ++,−− or). A one-in-two sample of the titles of papers listed in the program of the International Political Science Association Congress of 1973 (N = 195) gave me only 31 titles where a dependent and an independent variable could be identified in a given title and coded as either + or −. Of those, 61 per cent were consonant (+ + or −−). How-ever a graduate student, Harry Lieber, coding the English titles of the ipsa program obtained consonance in only 54 per cent of the cases (N = 34), while my coding indicated consonance in 62 per cent of the cases (N = 32).

9 The same coding technique as that described in footnote 8 gave the following distribution of key variables in the titles studied (a key variable was defined as a dependent, an independent, or a focus factor, to the exclusion of control or context factors such as “In India,” “after World War ii,” etc.):

In all cases the distribution is the result of my own coding. The graduate student asked to code the ipsa titles obtained the following distribution: positive 28 per cent, negative 16 per cent, neutral 56 per cent.

10 The type of laboratory experiments conducted by political scientists is an indication of this inclination. Studies of conflicts such as those of Guetzkow or Mushakoji, when compared to the obedience experiments of Milgram for example, are much closer to the social game than to the warfare setting. For a general discussion of the intellectual constraints on political science experiments see: “Experimenting: a two person game between man and nature” in Experimentation and Simulation in Political Science, ed. Laponce, J.A. and Smoker, Paul (Toronto, 1971Google Scholar).

11 The hypothesis that violence is more likely to be studied as it is perceived as more legitimate is proposed by Bienen, H. in Violence and Social Change (Chicago, 1968), 8.Google Scholar

12 Similarly, when a generation or two ago, the question was raised whether medicine was giving too exclusive an attention to the understanding of disease, the answer could not be in terms of how much; but the question helped in directing research toward the study of health and toward preventive medicine.

13 As translated and quoted in Ogden, C.K. and Richards, I.A., The Meaning of Meaning (New York, 1923), 33.Google Scholar The question of whether to “name” opposites and negatives is at the centre of the dialogues in Plato's Parmenides and The Sophist.

14 The concept of a homo duplex which is so prominent in Durkheim, Bergson, and Freud, the notion of a political man caught between opposite pulls, is far from central to political analysis. The idea of cross pressure is a much weakened version of it since cross pressure does not presuppose links and tensions between opposites. It might be fruitful for example to analyse inputs and outputs of political systems in terms of the contradictory demand for privacy and sociability; very likely the equation of man's demands as both a private and a social animal is unsoluble; probably equally unsoluble are his demands for both autonomy and dependence. In this discussion, I have purposely avoided using the terms “dialectic” and “dialectic logic”; first of all because these terms are used in too great a variety of unclear meanings and secondly because I am not prepared to theorize that any “thesis” has an “antithesis” leading to a “synthesis.” A critical discussion of the use of the term dialectic is in Gregor, James, An Introduction to Metapolitics (New York, 1971), 350ff.Google Scholar

15 For example, when applying a biological rather than a mechanistic model to the study of a system evolving over time we are led to see such a system as both maintaining and destroying itself through both innovation and conformism. Easton points in that direction by distinguishing between “persistence” (which I prefer to call survival) and “self-maintenance,” but his approach, as already pointed out, is oriented to studying survival. Generally, a biological model leads us to study four sets of opposite functions: assimilation and rejection, growth and decline, expansion and contraction, reproduction and death, and in the case of reproduction we have to distinguish what is reproduced through duplication (stability) from what is produced through innovation.

16 The Use of Lateral Thinking (London, 1967).

17 Mackcy, W.F., La distance interlinguistique (cirb, Université Laval, Quebec, 1971), 47.Google Scholar

18 Peter Bachrach and Baratz, Morton S., “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review, 56, 4 (December, 1962) 947–52Google Scholar; Dupuis, Georges, “Ne plus décider,” Le Monde, 29 October 1972, 13Google Scholar; Crenson, Matthews A., The Un-politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non Decision Making in the Cities (Baltimore, 1971Google Scholar). A debate (unfortunately caught in the quarrel between “elitists” and “pluralists”) which centres on Bachrach and Baratz's suggestions is in Wolfinger, R. “Non decisions and the Study of Local Politics,” American Political Science Review, 65 (December, 1971), 1063–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in F.W. Frey, “Comment: on Issues and Non Issues in the Study of Power,” Ibid., 1081–1101. See also Kariel, H.S., Open Systems (Itasca, Ill., 1969), 130ff.Google Scholar

19 See for example the scale I used to obtain a ranking of party leaders in Laponce, J.A., People vs Politics (Toronto, 1969), 112.Google Scholar

20 Here is, for example, the case of two Liberal respondents. On a 0 to 10 continuum (where 0 meant dislike, 1 meant like a little, and 10 meant like very much) both ranked the Conservatives at 2. When asked to rank the same party in two continuums, one for like (1 = like a little; 10 = like very much) the other for dislike (1 = dislike a little; 10 = dislike very much), they gave the following scores: Respondent A: like, 2; dislike 2; respondent b: like, 2; dislike, 6.

21 Symbols of Internationalism, Hoover Institute Studies (Stanford, 1951).

22 The equivalence is not perfect. Conservatism (Vishnu) is in the neighbourhood, but only in the neighbourhood of neutrality.

23 The Christian ideology offers also the idea of a trinity but, notwithstanding theoretical equality among its terms, the symbolism is clearly hierarchical.

24 Psychology has in effect excluded free will from its concerns, treating it as a residual not subject to scientific enquiry. I prefer to keep the factor in the equation. Excluding it might lead too systematically to the study of situations where freedom of choice is not an important factor. If we conceive of man as wanting to maintain always a certain minimum freedom to choose, we say that freedom will always seek to escape the determinism of knowledge and that free will is a factor to be considered not only by the moralist but also by the student of decision-making.

25 A side benefit of the systematic use of a variety of factors is that such use leads to the habit of formulating more than one possible explanation of the phenomenon studied, each such explanation being found, eventually, to either exclude or reinforce the others. See Platt, John, “Strong Inference,” Science (16 October 1964), 347–53.Google Scholar

26 See C. Osgood, op. cit.; Segall, M.H., Campbell, D.T. and Herskovits, M.H., The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.Google Scholar

27 A review of the literature on biopolitics is in Somit, Albert, “Biopolitics,” British Journal of Political Science, II (April, 1972), 209–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 J.P. Scott suggests that the study of animal behaviour should be made at five levels of organization – ecological, societal, organismic, physiological, and genetic – and should involve the following disciplines: ecology, sociobiology, psychology, physiology, biochemistry, and genetics. See J.P. Scott, “Biological Basis of Human Warfare: An Interdisciplinary Problem” in Sherif, M. and Sherif, C.W., Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1969), 134.Google Scholar

29 The footnotes of 60 (15 × 4) articles taken at random from the 1972 issues of the A merican Political Science Review, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Political Studies, and the Revue Française de Science Politique indicated the following:

Number of articles (out of 15) quoting at least one journal in a field other than political science.

Counting the interdisciplinary journals (not included in the above tabulation) does not affect markedly the observed pattern, as indicated by the following distribution: N of articles (out of 15) quoting at least one interdisciplinary journal:

30 Campbell proposes that the traditional conglomerates known as disciplines, each with greatly overlapping subfields but separated from the other disciplines by much uncharted space, be so changed that the overlap among subfields be reduced and the whole space covered as by scales on a fish. See Campbell, D.T., “Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the fish-scale model of Omniscience,” in Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Science, ed. Sherif, M. and Sherif, Carolyn W. (Chicago, 1969), 328–48.Google Scholar