Methodology Matter Research Articles

Perspectives on human communication research: Behaviorism, phenomenology, and an integrated view

The rift between behaviorists and phenomenologists is responsible for much of the misunderstanding about the subject matter of human communication and appropriate research methodology. A comparison and contrast of two perspectives on research suggests that an integrated perspective focuses on meaningful behavior, carefully considers the relation between the research problem and its methodology, and operationalizes subjective experiences by including reliable and valid means of measurement. Essentially, an integrated view allows diversity of methods and maximizes perspective to render meaningful judgments.

Theory and Practice of Treaty Interpretation*

Treaty interpretation is a matter of legal methodology, a comprehensive notion embracing a great variety of subjects. In the Diagram published together with this study, the present writer gives his own view of legal methodology as applied to international law. The “legal process” as shown therein is a complicated one, certain parts of which have been examined in earlier studies, viz., the principles of rational organization, the recognized manifestations of international law, and the existence of a hierarchy among them. Treaty interpretation as dealt with, here, belongs to the wide category of problems designated in the Diagram as those of the ascertainment of the content (meaning, message) of the recognized manifestations of international law. For reasons/which, it is hoped, will become clear in the following pages, it is important to place treaty interpretation and the whole of ascertainment of content in the context of methodology generally, not isolated from the other questions involved in the application of recognized manifestations or from the problems surrounding the latter, such as the doctrine of “sources”. As to the link between the present subject and that of the ascertainment of the content of recognized manifestations other than treaties, it is readily agreed that doctrinal treatment of the former would gain by a contrasting sketch of the latter, but since the present study already exceeds the limits of the habitual article, this writer has to forego what otherwise would be a legitimate pursuit.

Novel and Conventional Metaphors: A Matter of Methodology

A central methodological question that any theory of metaphor has to confront is what type of metaphor should serve as its paradigm case. Anyone familiar with the literature has noticed that in general literary critics and rhetoricians are concerned with the so-called 'novel,' 'imaginative' or 'poetic' metaphors, whereas linguists and philosophers of language typically deal with 'conventional,' 'frozen' or even 'dead' metaphors. Those disciplines, like cognitive psychology and anthropology, which have developed an interest in the subject fairly recently, tend to use both living and dead metaphors as their examples, but they rarely present any explicit motivation for having chosen one type rather than another. Actually, the number of authors within any discipline who address this problem at all is very small. One obvious explanation for this phenomenon, as well as for the differences among the disciplines in the type of metaphor they choose to consider, is this: each discipline has asked different questions about metaphor and has thus selected the paradigm cases that most naturally fit its interests, usually without being concerned with the adequacy of these cases for other points of view on metaphor. Since literary critics and rhetoricians concentrate on the poetic or persuasive function of metaphor, their examples tend to be drawn from original poetry and oratory and are thus closer to the 'novel' type; linguists and philosophers of language wish to understand the role of metaphor in the semantics of natural language, and their examples are therefore drawn from conventionalized modes of usage supplied by the lexicon of a native speaker; cognitive psychologists and anthropologists are interested in the way metaphor affects and/or reflects the cognitive and behavioral processes of an individual or a culture, and are therefore preoccupied with metaphor function rather than metaphor type.

Reply to Professor Sumner.

To begin, just a few preliminary rather unconnected remarks. First, I am delighted that at least some moral philosophers now feel that it is not only respectable, but professionally proper, to defend actual moral problems. I only hope that more of them will become so persuaded and, more importantly, that they will expand their range of vision to see actual moral problems which have so far escaped them. Problems arising out of the demand by women for equality certainly are actual moral problems and to have refused to acknowledge them as such must remain a glaring example of the one-dimensionality of most of those who practise the discipline. Abortion is, of course, one of these problems, but it is not the only one, and indeed it is my view that unless the whole problem of the equality of women is adequately dealt with, no systematic answer to any of the more specific problems arising out of it, including abortion, can be given. Second, a small but by no means minor grammatical correction. In his second paragraph Professor Sumner states that a woman's fertility is no small matter for her, affecting as it does her opportunity to plan the course of her own life. Her fertility was no small matter. A fundamental and essential point that must be grasped by all men, especially those who make the social and institutional policies which directly affect the lives of women, is that no woman need now be a prisoner, or even a casual victim, of her biology and of the process of social conditioning which transformed a periodic biological liability into a life-long social condition. Women will not continue to be governed by those attitudes and those policies, no matter who espouses them nor who enforces them. The time for change has arrived and while it may not as yet have reached all our sisters, it will surely come. Third, a matter of methodology. Professor Sumner is, of course, quite at

Electron-density variations in the magnetosphere deduced from whistler data

Electron-density variations in the magnetosphere at a geocentric distance of 2 to 4 earth radii are deduced from whistler observations made, primarily, at Stanford, California, and Seattle, Washington. The whistler quantities scaled are frequency and group delay at the whistler nose and group delay at 5 kc. Depressions in electron density are found to be associated with severe magnetic storms (Kp≥6) in both 1958 and 1961. Typical depressions exhibit density levels about 15 to 20 per cent below average levels. The annual variation, with a minimum near the June solstice, is observed in every year from 1958 to 1961. The ratio of June to January density levels is about 0.66 in 1958 and 0.81 in 1961. This variation is discussed as a possible indicator of a systematic variation in the physical environment of the earth along its orbit. The secular variation shows a 20 to 25 percent reduction in electron density from early 1958 to early 1961. There is some evidence that the larger part of the observed reduction occurs near the December solstice, when the annual variation shows a maximum. Secular and annual variations are found in the latitude of the field-line-path endpoint of typical Stanford whistlers. From 1958 to 1961 the average latitude moves slowly equatorward through about 1° while remaining several degrees on the poleward side of Stanford. The annual variation shows an equatorward movement from January to June through 4° or 5°. As a matter of methodology, it is found that a limited quantity of data on frequency and group delay at the whistler nose can be used to remove path ambiguities from more easily obtained single-frequency group-delay data (which include whistler-mode echoes from pulse transmissions). When this is done, important information can be obtained on whistler propagation, and the group-delay data can then be used directly in the study of magnetospheric density variations.

The Social Areas of Rome: A Comparative Analysis

dence supports the generalization that at least in some American communities, some individuals have more than a limited scope of influence. The differences between the findings of Wolfinger, Polsby, Dahl, and those reported here and elsewhere by Miller and others, may be a matter of methodology, or of the structural variables mentioned above or of the differences in the theoretical assumptions concerning the phenomenon of influence itself. The question seems to us to be not whether to abandon this technique in favor of some alternative (or to abandon the alternatives), but rather as Rossi suggests, to find out under what conditions each technique provides the most fruitful approach to the study of community decision-making, and eventually how to assimilate these techniques into a broader methodological scheme.35

A Reconsideration of the Theory of Value. Part I

THE pure theory of exchange value, after a period of intensive study by economists of the generation of Jevons and Marshall, has received comparatively little attention from their successors in the twentieth century. Apart from some very interesting inquiries into what may be called the dynamics of the subject, due to contemporary writers of the school of Vienna,1 there has been only one major achievement in this field since I 900. That achievement was the work of Pareto, whose Manuel (and particularly its mathematical appendix) contains the most complete static theory of value which economic science has hitherto been able to produce. Of all Pareto's contributions there is probably none that exceeds in importance his demonstration of the immeasurability of utility. To most earlier writers, to Marshall, to Walras, to Edgeworth, utility had been a quantity theoretically measurable; that is to say, a quantity which would be measurable if we had enough facts. Pareto definitely abandoned this, and replaced the concept of utility by the concept of a scale of preferences. It is not always observed that this change in concepts was not merely a change of view, a pure matter of methodology; it rested on a positive demonstration that the facts of observable conduct make a scale of preferences capable of theoretical construction (in the same sense as above) but they do not enable us to proceed from the scale of preference to a particular utility function. The first signs of a break-dowrn of the old conception of