_Does the writing of social scientists suffer from a primary equivocation?_ The charge against social science writing which would be most widely granted is that it fails to convince us that it deals clearly with realities. This impression may lead to the question of whether the social scientist knows what he is talking about. Now this is a serious, not a frivolous, question, involving matters of logic and epistemology; it is a question, furthermore, that one finds the social scientists constantly putting to themselves and answering in a variety of ways. Any field of study is liable to a similar interrogation; in this instance it merely asks whether those who interpret social behavior in scientific terms are aware of the kind of data they are handling. Are they dealing with facts, or concepts, or evaluations, or all three? The answer given to this question will have a definite bearing upon their problem of expression, and let us see how this can happen in a concrete instance. We have had much to say in preceding chapters about the distinction between positive and dialectical terms; and nowhere has the ignoring of this distinction had worse results than in the literature of social science. We have seen, to review briefly, that the positive term designates something existing simply in the objective world: the chair, the tree, the farm. Arguments over positive terms are not arguments in the true sense, since the point at issue is capable of immediate and public settlement, just as one might settle an “argument” over the width of a room by bringing in a publicly-agreed-upon yardstick. Consequently a rhetoric of positive terms is a rhetoric of simple description, which requires only powers of accurate observation and reporting. It is otherwise with dialectical terms. These are terms standing for concepts, which are defined by their negatives or their privations. “Justice” is a dialectical term which is defined by “injustice”; “social improvement” is made meaningful by the use of “privation of social improvement.” To say that a family has an income of $800.00 a year is positive; to say that the same family is underprivileged is dialectical. It can be underprivileged only with reference to families which have more privileges. So it goes with the whole range of terms which reflect judgments of value; “unjust,” “poor,” “underpaid,” “undesirable” are all terms which depend on something more than the external world for their significance.