Now here is where the social scientist crosses a divide that he seldom acknowledges and often seems unaware of. One cannot use the dialectical term in the same manner as one uses the positive term because the dialectical term always leaves one committed to something. It is a truth easily seen that all dialectical terms make presumptions from the plain fact that they are “positional” terms. A writer no sooner employs one than he is engaged in an argument. To say that the universe is purposeless is to join in argument with all who say it is purposeful. To say that a certain social condition is inequitable is to ally oneself with the reformers and against the standpatters. In all such cases the presumption has to do with the scope of the term and with its relationship to its opposite, and these can be worked out only through the dialectical method we have analyzed in other chapters. When the reader of social science comes to such terms, he is baffled because he has not been warned of the presumptions on which they rest. Or, to be more exact, he has not been prepared for presumptions at all. He finds himself reading at a level where the facts have been subsumed, and where the exposition is a process of adjusting categories. The writer has passed with indifference from what is objectively true to what is morally or imaginatively true. The reader’s uneasiness comes from a feeling that the categories themselves are the things which should have been examined. Just here, however, may lie the crux of the difficulty.