_Is social science writing marred by “pedantic empiricism”?_ The natural desire of everyone to carry away something from his reading encounters in this literature curious obstacles. Its authors often seem unduly coy about their conclusions. After the reader has been escorted on an extensive tour of facts and definitions, he is likely to be told that little can be affirmed at this stage of the inquiry. So it is that, however much we read, we are made to feel that what we are reading is preliminary. We come almost to look for a formula at the close of a social science monograph which takes an excessively modest view of its achievement while expressing the hope that someone else may come along and do something with the data there offered. Burgess and Cottrell’s _Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage_ provides an illustration. After presenting their case, the authors say: “In this study, as in many others, the most significant contribution is not to be found in any one finding but in the degree to which the study opens up a new field to further research.”[157] Again, from an article appearing in _Social Forces_: “The findings here mentioned are merely suggestive; and they are offered in no sense as proof of our hypothesis of folk-urban personality differences. The implementation of the analysis given here would demand a field project incorporating the type of methodological consciousness advocated above. Thus we need to utilize standard projective devices, but must be prepared to develop, in terms of situational demands, additional analytic instruments.”[158] And Herman C. Beyle in a chapter on the data and method of political science, which constitute the underpinning of his whole study, can only say that “the foregoing comments on the data and technology of political science have been offered as most tentative statements intended to provide a background for the testing and application of the technique here proposed, that of attribute-cluster-bloc identification and analysis.”[159] “Most tentative” becomes a sort of leitmotiv. Everything sounds like a prolegomenon to the real thing. Exclamations that social scientists are taking in one another’s washing or are only trying to make work for themselves are inspired by this kind of performance.