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The Use and Abuse of Imagination: A Reply to Samuel A. Bleicher

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Michael D. Wallace  and
J. David Singer
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Extract

It has often been observed that recent converts to any belief system tend to be among its most zealous adherents, and science (despite its emphasis on objectivity and detachment) has proved no exception. As the canons of scientific inquiry begin to take hold in each field of human knowledge, there have appeared those who seem, as it were, more royalist than the king. For these scholars the rules of scientific inference are not guidelines to be used with care but dogmas to be pursued unswervingly; to them science is not, as someone once expressed it, “attenuated common sense” but a totally different and rather severe regimen of thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , fall 1971 , pp. 953 - 957
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1971

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References

1 Kaplan, Abraham, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science (San Francisco, Calif: Chandler Publishing Co., 1964), p. 25Google Scholar.

2 Bleicher, Samuel A., “Intergovernmental Organization and the Preservation of Peace: A Comment on the Abuse of Methodology,” International Organization, Spring 1971 (Vol. 25, No. 2), pp. 298–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Singer, J. David and Wallace, Michael, “Intergovernmental Organization and the Preservation of Peace, 1816–1964: Some Bivariate Relationships,” International Organization, Summer 1970 (Vol. 24, No. 3), pp. 520–547CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a revealing “inside look” at the steps in the discovery of the structure of DNA see Watson, James D., The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1968)Google Scholar.

5 Singer, and Wallace, , International Organization, Vol. 24, No. 3, p. 540Google Scholar. Italics added.

6 See J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey, “Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1816–1965,” and Wallace, Michael D., “Status, Formal Organization, and Arms Levels as Factors Leading to the Onset of War, 1820–1964,” both to be published in Peace, War, and Numbers, ed. Russett, Bruce M. (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, forthcoming)Google Scholar; and Wallace, Michael D., “Power, Status, and International War,” Journal of Peace Research, 1971 (Vol. 8, No. 1), pp. 23–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.