JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Since the language of political inquiry seems to be inescapably metaphorical, the question necessarily arises as to how metaphors of various types, including models, enter into the composition and expression of political knowledge. The solutions that have been most influential in contemporary political science can be called the verificationist and constitutivist views of political metaphor. While both views contain important elements of truth, there are fundamental difficulties in each that require the search for a more satisfactory view. An alternative view of metaphor and political knowledge is developed by reference to four main problems: Why is political speech metaphorical? How do metaphors make political things manifest? How are political metaphors tested? and Are metaphors indispensable to political expression and political knowledge?Political inquiry has provided fertile soil for the growth of metaphors. For some who have cultivated this soil, metaphors are brambles to be cleared away, not plants that bear fruit in political knowledge. Yet even the critics of metaphors have not been able to avoid them. In the Leviathan, for example, Hobbes makes a strong case against the use of metaphors in science:The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt (1955, pp. 29-30). Despite these harsh words, Hobbes does not hesitate to embody a metaphor in the title of Leviathan. His introduction draws an extended comparison between the commonwealth and a natural man, and metaphors abound in the work itself. Most striking of all is the fact that in the very passage where he deprecates meta-*These reflections on metaphor grow out of lectures delivered in 1974 at Loyola University of Chicago on "The Problem of Political Knowledge." I am grateful to Professor Richard S. Hartigan, Director of the Loyola Lectures in Political Analysis, for his help and encouragement. My continuing investigation of the problem of political knowledge has been supported at various stages by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation as well as by my own department. It has received encouragement also from many colleagues and friends, and I wish to dedicate this essay to the memory of two of them-Martin Diamond and Herbert Storing.phorical reasoning in contrast to science, Hobbes makes use of a fine metaphor-that of traveling a path. M...
The present controversy between “behavioral” and “postbehavioral” views of political inquiry reflects a larger dispute between two opposing theories of knowledge. Whereas the behavioral movement has its epistemological roots in positivism and, ultimately, in classical British empiricism, the most recent protest against behavioralism draws upon the theory of knowledge that has been the principal foe of empiricism over the past century. This theory of knowledge, which received the name “historicism” shortly after its emergence, had become the dominant epistemological position by the mid-twentieth century. This essay considers the general nature of historicism and its influence on the recent revolt against positivism in the philosophy of science. Finally, it examines the use that political scientists have made of historicist principles in opposing positivistic models of political inquiry. It argues that an epistemological relativism becomes unavoidable once certain premises of historicism are embraced.
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