Political Science and the Uses of Functional Analysis

Political science, as an empirical enterprise, shares with the other behavioral or social sciences at least one characteristic feature: partial formalization. For a science to most reliably discharge its two principal functions, explanation and prediction, statements embodying acquired knowledge must be systematically organized in subsumptive or deductive relations. Minimally, a set of such systematically related propositions, which include among them some lawlike generalizations, and which can be assigned specific truth value via empirical tests, is spoken of as a theory. A theory, in a substantially formalized system, includes as constituents (1) an uninterpreted or formal calculus which provides for syntactical invariance in the system, (2) a set of semantic rules of interpretation which assign some determinate empirical meanings to the formal calculus thereby relating it to an evidential or empirical base, and (3) a model for the uninterpreted calculus, in terms of more or less familiar conceptual or visualizable materials, which illustrates the relationships between variables in structural form, an alternative interpretation of the same calculus of which the theory itself is an interpretation. The virtues of standard formalization need hardly be specified. For our purposes here it is sufficient to indicate that formalization seeks to satisfy the minimal requirements of any serious knowledge enterprise: to provide for syntactical and semantic invariance without which reliable knowledge is simply not conceivable. The language shift, exemplified in any cognitive effort, from ordinary to specialized language style is the consequence of attempting to reduce the vagueness, ambiguity and tense obscurity that afflicts common speech.