The Scholar and the Inarticulate Premise

• Published date: 01 September 1949
• Date: 01 September 1949
• DOI: 10.1177/106591294900200302
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE SCHOLAR AND THE INARTICULATE PREMISE*
FRANCIS G. WILSON
University of Illinois
I
T
OFTEN OCCURS in the more formal of academic meetings that,
just as fundamental or basic assumptions become involved in the dis-
cussion, the session comes to an end. The argument is dropped just as
it is becoming interesting, and where the participants could not avoid
denying some of the propositions offered by their colleagues. It seems
that one of the common characteristics of academic discussion is the avoid-
ance of the conflicting fundamental premises on which much argument
is built. In other words, one might say that a scholar’s life with his col-
leagues is made peaceful in measure because the context of discourse
avoids the essentials, and because scholars tend to keep their major
premises as inarticulate as possible. It can hardly be argued that such a
procedure is of any benefit to scholarship, and it leaves teaching less
marked by insight than it might be.
During the time when the recent Political Theory Panel was in oper-
ation,~ the political theorists agreed that one of their tasks is to try to un-
derstand fundamentals and to state them so that they may be understood.
The nature of a &dquo;fundamental&dquo; in social thought can be the subject of
much elusive argument. But it amounts to an assumption about the cause,
the significance, or the final purpose of a set of experiences, physical or
mental. Very often, the interpretation of historical movement will force us
to state what we believe to be cause in history, but even here we usually
evade any serious commitment while we indulge in our implicit philoso-
phies of history. Obviously, assumptions about the nature of man, the
issue of a material or spiritual interpretation of the universe, the justfica-
tion of significant historical events, and the evaluation of patterns of cul-
tural thought are likely to force us down to bed-rock in social or political
discussion. One reason for the buried premise, one reason for burying
it and making it inarticulate, is the fact that ultimate assumptions touch
us so deeply that we cannot talk about them in a dispassionate manner.
Perhaps they appear to us very much as individual poetic experiences
which we feel incapable of sharing intelligibly with our fellowmen. Per-
haps we feel that it is not respectable to have such deep-seated convictions
* This paper is a revision and condensation of an address given at the Pacific Northwest Political Science
Association meeting in Walla Walla, Washington, April 23, 1949.
1
The work of the Research Committee of the American Political Science Association and its several
panels has been published by Ernest S. Griffith (editor), Research in Political Science (Durham,
N. C.: Duke University Press, 1948).
317

---

318
and thus resort to a kind of habitual evasiveness in the examination of our
ideas. But whatever the explanation, it is clear that such inarticulateness
does exist, and that it explains much of the colorlessness of American
political science.
Now it has been said that the social scientist, and the political
scientist in particular, is philosophically illiterate, and that his efforts to
be philosophical are quite inept. Political scientists are not commonly
skilled in the historical evolution of metaphysical doctrine, but we do
know some philosophy, more, it is certain, than we are given credit for.
Perhaps our reluctance to discuss central issues arises because we know
the issues too well. Or, it probably is often true that we have been so
schooled in the orthodoxy of science that we do not really know what the
premises of the other side, or of the man from another cultural division
of the human race, might be. By preserving the inarticulate premise we
avoid an intellectual wrestling that would tax our energies to the utmost.
However, it is possible to be conscious of such premises, to explain them
dispassionately and thus to arrive at a much clearer understanding of the
nature of our intellectual life.
’
II
One of the broadest issues we face is the nature of human intelligence.
Shall we assume, genetically speaking, that human reason is simply and
solely a product of organic evolution, and that it has its vestigial remains
like the physical body of man? Shall we assume that cultural anthropology
can tell us what we want to know about the reason of man, provided we
spike it a little with psychology and physiology? Or shall we assume that
reason is a characteristic of order in the universe, and that, whether we
are theists or deists, reason is a work of the Creator? H. W. Schneider
has suggested the importance of the development in American thought
of the secular theory of intelligence. We might trace it from the publica-
tion of William James’ Psychology through the work today of John
Dewey.2 We have in such a conflict the ultimate social difference between
a secular and a religious approach to intelligence. While we may use
only the secular theory in our individual classroom, we can hardly pre-
tend that we are canvassing the forces at work in the intellectual world.
Yet we move head-on into immediate applications. Professor Charles
E. Merriam has long been one of the outstanding advocates of the scientific
method in the social sciences. He has urged the application of all of the
emergent phases of social science to the study of politics. Perhaps here
we can say that we have the twentieth-century application of the meta-
physical idea of the eighteenth century that man is perfectible, though
2 H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946),
pp. 362 ff, 513 ff.

---

319
not perfect, and, like that century, that the way to attain this end is
through science.’ Might we not say that since that time, so remote from
the world in which we live today, we have waited for the fruition of this
idea? In 1945 Professor Merriam published his Systematic Politics, in which
the same theme is found, for it is argued that with the knowledge we
have obtained from the various social sciences we ought to be able to
plan a happy society. Yet it is difficult to find in such discussions a state-
ment of just what we have learned from any social science about the
nature of man. This, we can say, is the acid test: just what has an-
thropology taught us? What, economics, sociology, psychology, or any
other phase of social study? If one does not come down to earth, it is still
the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers, to use Professor
Becker’s phrase, and still it is laid up in heaven, like Plato’s city, and has
little relevance to the war and chaos of the time in which we struggle now
for the good life.
About the same time, Professor Hans J....