Academic Ideology and the Study of Adjudication

This paper proposes a theory about the differences in perspective that political scientists bring to bear upon their teaching, research, and writing. It also suggests a method which can be used to study such differences. The particular empirical example discussed relates to only one of the subfields of political science, but this report may encourage parallel investigations into the structure of professional academic values in other component areas of the discipline. Such a result would not merely confirm or refute the applicability of the theory as a generalization about political science; it also would enhance our present meager and unsystematized understanding of the extent to which our professional knowledge is affected by our quasi-professional (personal) biases. The development of such understanding evidently ought to be assigned a high priority in any normative schedule of goals relating to the social ecology of scientific inquiry.The phenomenon of analyst value predisposition is by no means peculiar to social science, and most certainly it is not idiosyncratic among political scientists. Psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins recently has called attention to the universality of the problem of academic ideology in all scientific work:At the growing edge of the frontier of all sciences there necessarily is a maximum of uncertainty, and what is lacking in evidence is filled by passion and faith, and hatred and scorn for the disbelievers. Science will never be free of ideology, though yesterday's ideology is today's fact or fiction.