The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue

If the realist tradition has underappreciated the formalizable quality of Thucydides' scientific investigations, neorealist teachers and writers have generally failed to see the normative and dramatical features of Thucydides' political science, each an expression of his dialectical epistemology and ontology. Nicholas Rescher's partial formalization of dialectics as a controversy-oriented approach to knowledge cumulation and Kenneth Burkes dramaturgical approach to textual understanding are both shown to fit Thucydides' argumentation in the Melian dialogue. Thus argumentation produces new knowledge about the inner determinants of Athenian imperialism; simultaneously it dramatically reveals the constituting practical rationale of Athenian actions to be unjust. Once Thucydides' determining essences of power politics are properly uncovered, their false “eternal, mathematical necessity” can be appropriately criticized. A case is thus suggested for a “neoclassical polimetrics” more fundamentally grounded in “political argumentation” about practical choices in particular contexts than in ahistorical laws, inductive statistics or deductive mathematics.

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.