The Nonsense Fight Over Scientific Method: A Plea for Peace

A notably unsystematic sample of professional opinion at the 1955 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, conducted in a perfectly haphazard (as distinguished from random) fashion, led the author to the qualitative conclusion — unsullied by a single statistic — that there is wide agreement in the Association with the view that attempts at methodological improvements are fruitless at best and pernicious imports from Schools of Education at worst. The reader has, I trust, noted that the observations (I avoid the use of the word “survey”) which underlie this conclusion are highly unsystematic, if not downright sloppy. Attention is explicitly directed to this desideratum, however, in order to avoid an early loss of the readers for whom these comments are offered. These readers constitute that significant portion of the profession who were found to endorse the general point of view of Jack in the dialogue reported below.