The passage which will be used is fairly representative of the ordinary social science prose to be encountered in articles and reports. The subject is expressed in the title “Social Nearness among Welfare Institutions”: It was noticed in the preceding sections that the social welfare organizational milieu presents an interdependence, a formal solidarity, a coerced feeling of unity. However divergent the specific objectives of each organization, theoretically they all have a common purpose, the care of the so-called underprivileged. Whether they execute what they profess or not is a different question and one which does not fall within the confines of these pages.[162] There occur in this short excerpt about a dozen words of Latin origin for which equivalents of Anglo-Saxon (or old English, if the name is preferred) origin are available, and this without giving up presumably operational terms like “organizational” and “milieu.”[163] In place of “noticed,” why not “seen”? In place of “divergent,” why not “unlike”? In place of “objective,” why not “goal”? Instead of “execute what they profess,” why not “do what they say”? Did these terms not suggest themselves to the writer, or were they deliberately passed by? It might be arbitrary to insist that any one of these substitutes is better than the original, but the piling-up of such terms causes language to take on a special aspect. There are, of course, margins within which preference in terminology means little, but a preference for Latinate terms as marked as this must be, to employ one of their customary expressions, “significant.” That significance lies in the kind of attitude that social scientists must have in order to practice social science. It seems beyond dispute that all social science rests upon the assumption that man and society are improvable. That is its origin and its guiding impulse. The man who does not feel that social behavior and social institutions can be bettered through the application of scientific laws, or through some philosophy finding its basic support in them, is surely out of place in sociology. There would really be nothing for him to do. He could only sit on the sidelines and speculate dourly, like Nietzsche, or ironically, like Santayana. The very profession which the true social scientist adopts compels him to be a kind of a priori optimist. This is why a large part of social science writing displays a _melioristic bias_. It is under compulsion, often unconsciously felt, I am sure, to picture things a little better than they are. Such expression provides a kind of proof that its theories are “working.”