Eugene F. Miller

Metaphor and Political Knowledge

Since the language of political inquiry seems to be inescapably metaphorical, the question necessarily arises as to how metaphors of various types, including models, enter into the composition and expression of political knowledge. The solutions that have been most influential in contemporary political science can be called the verificationist and constitutivist views of political metaphor. While both views contain important elements of truth, there are fundamental difficulties in each that require the search for a more satisfactory view. An alternative view of metaphor and political knowledge is developed by reference to four main problems: Why is political speech metaphorical? How do metaphors make political things manifest? How are political metaphors tested? and Are metaphors indispensable to political expression and political knowledge? Political inquiry has provided fertile soil for the growth of metaphors. For some who have cultivated this soil, metaphors are brambles to be cleared away, not plants that bear fruit in political knowledge. Yet even the critics of metaphors have not been able to avoid them. In the Leviathan, for example, Hobbes makes a strong case against the use of metaphors in science: The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt (1955, pp. 29-30).

Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry

The present controversy between “behavioral” and “postbehavioral” views of political inquiry reflects a larger dispute between two opposing theories of knowledge. Whereas the behavioral movement has its epistemological roots in positivism and, ultimately, in classical British empiricism, the most recent protest against behavioralism draws upon the theory of knowledge that has been the principal foe of empiricism over the past century. This theory of knowledge, which received the name “historicism” shortly after its emergence, had become the dominant epistemological position by the mid-twentieth century. This essay considers the general nature of historicism and its influence on the recent revolt against positivism in the philosophy of science. Finally, it examines the use that political scientists have made of historicist principles in opposing positivistic models of political inquiry. It argues that an epistemological relativism becomes unavoidable once certain premises of historicism are embraced.

Rhetorical status: A study of its origins, functions, and consequences

Rhetorical status is a feature of all communicative interaction. It is the relative standing or positioning of parties to communication or, defined cognitively, it is this standing as reflected in the identities that interacting parties assign to themselves and to others as communicators, as each takes account of salient qualities of self and others. Rhetorical statuses are mutable and context‐specific, yet quite often durable and consistent across time and place. The concept of rhetorical status is distinctive to communication studies, and it is vital for explaining the efficacy of communication—its power or persuasiveness. To show how rhetorical status enters into everyday communication, we examine a protracted set of interactions between two sisters and a small‐town mayor over disputed water bills.

Communicative interaction and rhetorical status in Harriet Ann Jacobs’ slave narrative

The potency of speech and nonverbal signs depends vitally on rhetorical status, or ones relative standing in communication with others. The record of dialogue in Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl demonstrates how persons of low social standing can achieve high rhetorical status through advantages of character and clever initiatives. Jacobs successfully resisted the coercive sexual advances of her master, Dr. James Norcom, and eventually gained her freedom by capitalizing on advantages that elevated her rhetorical status, relative to his, and by exploiting Norcoms rhetorical vulnerabilities.

Gap‐bridging, interaction and the province of mass communication

Communication is not made of gaps, as John Durham Peters has recently maintained, but of more or less successful attempts to bridge the spatio‐temporal and interpretive distances that attend our individuality as embodied beings. Starting from the idea that communication is an activity of sharing through the mediation of signs, we try to bring out its gap‐bridging potential and to indicate why all communication presses towards completeness of sharing through interaction. We pursue this important question through Peters essay: Can one embrace interaction models without depreciating or demeaning the various forms of mass communication?