Carolina QuotesMany of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword “scientific objectivity” and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” p. 139.
- work
- Language is Sermonic (1970)
- year
- 1970
- locator
- p. 139
Cite this record
“Many of us who read the literature of social science as laym…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B5A92CCDB1. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b5a92ccdb1
More from Richard M. Weaver
From the viewpoint of my general purpose, I had come to believe that one way to achieve the education which leads to understanding and compassion is to take some period of the past and to immerse oneself in it so thoroughly that one could think its thoughts and speak its language. The object would be to take this chapter of vanished experience and learn to know it in three if not four dimensions. That would mean coming to understand why certain actions which in the light of retrospect appear madly irrational appeared at that time the indisputable mandate of reason; why things which had been created with pain and care were cast quickly on the gaming table of war; why men who had sat in the senate chamber and debated with syllogism and enthymeme stepped out of it to buckle on the sword against one another. Almost any book of history will give you the form of such a time, but what will give you the pressure of it? That is what I particularly wished to discover.
The semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others’ experiences.
Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.