The interesting symposium, “Shaking Things Up? Thoughts about the Future of Political Science,” that appeared in the June 2002 issue shows a division among political scientists regarding the extent to which political science should be considered a “hard” or “soft” science. Those who believe that political science can and/or must become a hard science insist that we attempt to quantify political words, separate independent from dependent variables, isolate variables, develop testable hypotheses, and make predictions that can be verified. In dismissing the possibility of political science ever being a hard science, Welden (l953) long ago showed that political words are by their nature imprecise, subjective, and appraisive (ascriptive as well as descriptive). For example, we can describe President Clinton as being “tall” and “liberal.” While his tallness can be easily quantified, his liberalness, much less so. Therefore, as we attempt to quantify how liberal he was as president, we inevitable end up trivializing the subject (see Werlin 2001).