Psychological dispositions and political attitudes
Abstract
'The subtlety of Nature,' said Bacon, 'is a great
many times more subtle than the subtlety of Logic.’ The
complexity of the actual social world demands, not
merely invites, empirical methods of investigation, which
are indispensable for a proper understanding. In humane
studies, deduction from first principles is a path that
leads directly to error. An intuitive anticipation of
what kind of things may be found, on the other hand, is
likely to be an aid to scholarly investigation of human
activity, since our ordinary understanding of social
processes is often a useful short-cut: there is no need
to behave like the blind men trying to discern the shape
of the elephant, if we are, in fact, sighted. This thesis
is primarily a statistical investigation, sometimes with
an aim of defining structures not previously known; but
where structures are already identified, or common
knowledge can be adduced, then it is addressed to a better
description of the structure and an investigation of its
correlations.