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Maternal and Child Health Nursing Care of the
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1. Infant mortality, a standard measurement of the quality of health care in the country,
measures which of the following?
A) The number of babies who die at birth each year
B) The number of deaths per 10,000 live births every year
C) The number of deaths per 1000 live births yearly in children under age 12 months
D) The number of babies who die of communicable diseases each year

2. A program designed to decrease the infant mortality rate in the United States would
probably make the greatest impact if it focused on which of the following?
A) Changing genetic traits
B) Reducing the number of home births
C) Increasing the education level of parents
D) Increasing the number of women receiving prenatal care

3. Which of the following is a trend in child health care today?

A) Children are hospitalized for observation more than previously.
B) Health promotion rather than health restoration is stressed.
C) Child health care is moving out of regional centers.
D) Nursing roles are decreasing because of the increasing role of families.

4. An important change in maternal and child health care that nurses must often explain is
the new emphasis on ambulatory care. This change in emphasis is meant to achieve
which of the following?
A) Prevent the separation of children from parents
B) Reduce the number of hospitals needed
C) Decrease responsibility for parents
D) Reduce the number of drug interactions

Page 1
 5. You are going to provide an education program to early grade-school children. Which of
the following topics would address the number one cause of death for this age group?
A) The importance of crossing streets safely
B) The importance of immunizations
C) Prevention of infection and communicable disease
D) Exercise and good nutrition

6. Which of the following would be a current trend that is influencing child care?
A) Greater use of alternative treatment modalities
B) Decreased regionalization of care
C) Less interest in child care
D) More families living in apartments

7. Which of the following statements correctly defines the term “perinatal death rate”?
A) Number of deaths in utero of a fetus 500 g or more per 1000 live births
B) Number of deaths per 1000 live births occurring in the first 28 days of life
C) Number of deaths per 1000 live births occurring at birth or in the first 12 months of
life
D) Number of deaths per 1000 live births beginning when the fetus reaches 500 g and
ending 28 days after birth

8. Which of the following is the best definition of “maternal mortality”?

A) The number of deaths of women in childbirth per 1000 births
B) The number of deaths of women related to childbearing per 100,000 births
C) The number of near deaths of women of childbearing years per 1000 births
D) The number of deaths of women of childbearing years per 100,000 births.

9. Which of the following best describes the pattern of maternal mortality since World
War II?
A) It has steadily decreased.
B) It has remained constant.
C) It has steadily increased.
D) After decreasing until the 1960s, it has increased steadily.

10. The rate of fetal deaths in the United States has

A) remained at a stable rate for the last several decades with little change.
B) fallen in recent decades.
C) increased because of the growing number of pregnancies to teen mothers.
D) increased because of the increasing number of older mothers becoming pregnant.

Page 2
11. The neonatal death rate is defined as which of the following?
A) Death in the first year of life
B) Death in the first 28 days of life
C) Death in utero in the last 28 days of pregnancy
D) Death in the first 6 months of life

12. More nurses are stepping into the role of the advanced practice nurse. Which of the
following would be the nurse to provide care for children under the age of 18?
A) Women's health nurse practitioner
B) Case manager
C) Clinical nurse specialist
D) Pediatric nurse practitioner

13. What makes the area of maternal-child health nursing a more extensive area for
consideration of legal issues than other areas of nursing?
A) Age of the patients
B) Caring for a fetus, an unseen patient
C) Risk of labor and delivery
D) Lack of evidence-based information

14. What makes the area of family nursing a difficult arena to provide care at times?
A) The presence of family in the hospital rooms
B) Family members who might not agree on treatments and a plan of care
C) Family-centered care plans and use of community areas in acute care settings
D) Nurses having different values from families

15. Which of the following is essential to the contribution of the health of a woman and
fetus?
A) Social support
B) Prenatal care
C) Emotional support
D) All of the above

Page 3
Answer Key
1. C
2. D
3. B
4. A
5. A
6. A
7. D
8. B
9. A
10. B
11. B
12. D
13. B
14. B
15. D

Page 4
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significance. Some things were fixed by universal enlightened
consensus; and they could be used as steps for getting at matters
which were less settled and hence were proper subjects for
deliberation. Deliberation is good only because it decreases the
number of things it is necessary to deliberate about.
Consequently when we wonder how he could use such
expressions without trace of compunction, we forget that the
expressions did not need apology. The speaker of the present who
used like terms would, on the contrary, meet a contest at every step
of the way. His audience would not swallow such clusters of related
meanings. But at that time a number of unities, including the unity of
past and present, the unity of moral sets and of causal sets,
furnished the ground for discourse in “uncontested terms.” Only such
substratum of agreement makes possible the panoramic treatment.
We can infer important conclusions about a civilization when we
know that its debates and controversies occur at outpost positions
rather than within the citadel itself. If these occur at a very
elementary level, we suspect that the culture has not defined itself,
or that it is decayed and threatened with dissolution. Where the chief
subject of debate is the relative validity of Homoiousianism and
Homoousianism, or the conventions of courtly love, we feel confident
that a great deal has been cached away in the form of settled
conclusions, and that such shaking as proceeds from controversies
of this kind, although they may agitate the superstructure, will hardly
be felt as far down as the foundations. I would say the same is
suggested by the great American debate over whether the
Constitution was a “constitution” or a “compact,” despite its
unfortunate sequel.
At this stage of cultural development the commonplaces of opinion
and conduct form a sort of textus receptus, and the emendations are
confined to minor matters. Conversely, when the disagreement is
over extremely elementary matters, survival itself may be at stake. It
seems to me that modern debates over the validity of the law of
contradiction may be a disagreement of this kind. The soundness of
a culture may well be measured by this ability to recognize what is
extraneous. One knows what to do with the extraneous, even if one
decides upon a policy of temporary accommodation. It is when the
line dividing us from the extraneous begins to fade that we are
assailed with destructive doubts. Disagreements over the most
fundamental subjects leave us puzzled as to “where we are” if not as
to “what we are.” The speaker whom we have been characterizing
felt sure of the demarcation. That gave him his freedom, and was the
source of his simplicity.
When we reflect further that the old oratory had a certain judicial
flavor about it, we are prompted to ask whether thinking as then
conceived did not have a different status from today’s thinking. One
is led to make this query by the suggestion that when the most
fundamental propositions of a culture are under attack, then it
becomes a duty to “think for one’s self.” Not that it is a bad thing to
think; yet when the whole emphasis is upon “thinking for one’s self,”
it is hard to avoid a feeling that certain postulates have broken down,
and the most courage we can muster is to ask people, not to “think in
a certain direction,” but to “think for themselves.” Where the primary
directive of thinking is known, the object of thinking will not be mere
cerebral motion (as some exponents of the policy of thinking for
one’s self leave us to infer), but rather the object of such thinking, or
knowledge. This is a very rudimentary proposition, but it deserves
attention because the modern tendency has reversed a previous
order. From the position that only propositions are interesting
because they alone make judgments, we are passing to a position in
which only evidence is interesting because it alone is
uncontaminated by propositions. In brief, interest has shifted from
inference to reportage, and this has had a demonstrable effect upon
the tone of oratory. The large resonant phrase is itself a kind of
condensed proposition; as propositions begin to sink with the
general sagging of the substructure, the phrases must do the same.
Obviously we are pointing here to a profound cultural change, and
the same shifts can be seen in literature; the poet or novelist may
feel that the content of his consciousness is more valid (and this will
be true even of those who have not formulated the belief) than the
formal arrangement which would be produced by selection,
abstraction, and arrangement. Or viewed in another respect,
experiential order has taken precedence over logical order.
 The object of an oration made on the conditions obtained a
hundred years ago was not so much to “make people think” as to
remind them of what they already thought (and again we are
speaking comparatively). The oratorical rostrum, like the church, was
less of a place for fresh instruction than for steady inculcation. And
the orator, like the minister, was one who spoke from an eminent
degree of conviction. Paradoxically, the speaker of this vanished
period had more freedom to maneuver than has his emancipated
successor. Man is free in proportion as his surroundings have a
determinate nature, and he can plan his course with perfect reliance
upon that determinateness. It is an admitted axiom that we have
rules in one place so that we can have liberty in another; we put
certain things in charge of habit so as to be free in areas where we
prize freedom. Manifestly one is not “free” when one has to battle for
one’s position at every moment of time. This interrelationship of
freedom and organization is one of the permanent conditions of
existence, so that it has been said even that perfect freedom is
perfect compliance (“one commands nature by obeying her”).
In the province we are considering, man is free to the extent that
he knows that nature is, what God expects, what he himself is
capable of. Freedom moves on a set of presuppositions just as a
machine moves on a set of ball bearings which themselves preserve
definite locus. It is when these presuppositions are tampered with
that men begin to grow concerned about their freedom. One can well
imagine that the tremendous self-consciousness about freedom
today, which we note in almost every utterance of public men, is
evidence that this crucial general belief is threatened. It is no mere
paradox to say that when they cry liberty, they mean belief—the
belief that sets one free from prior concerns. A corroborating
evidence is that fact that nearly all large pleas for liberty heard today
conclude with more or less direct appeals for unity.
We may now return to our more direct concern with rhetoric. Since
according to this demonstration oratory speaks from an eminence
and has a freedom of purview, its syllogism is the “rhetorical
syllogism” mentioned by Demetrius—the enthymeme.[149] It may not
hurt to state that this is the syllogism with one of the three
propositions missing. Such a syllogism can be used only when the
audience is willing to supply the missing proposition. The missing
proposition will be “in their hearts,” as it were; it will be their
agreement upon some fundamental aspect of the issue being
discussed. If it is there, the orator does not have to supply it; if it is
not there, he may not be able to get it in any way—at least not as
orator. Therefore the use of the rhetorical syllogism is good concrete
evidence that the old orator relied upon the existence of uncontested
terms or fixations of belief in the minds of his hearers. The orator
was logical, but he could dispense with being a pure logician
because that third proposition had been established for him.
These two related considerations, the accepted term and the
conception of oratory as a body of judicious conclusions upon
common evidence, go far toward explaining the quality of
spaciousness. Indeed, to say that oratory has “spaciousness” is to
risk redundancy once the nature of oratory is understood. Oratory is
“spacious” in the same way that liberal education is liberal; and a
correlation can be shown between the decline of liberal education
(the education of a freeman) and the decline of oratory. It was one of
Cicero’s observations that the orator performs at “the focal point at
which all human activity is ultimately reviewed”; and Cicero is, for
connected reasons, a chief source of our theory of liberal education.
[150]

Thus far we have rested our explanation on the utility of the

generalized style, but this is probably much too narrow an account.
There is also an aesthetic of the generalization, which we must now
proceed to explore. Let us pause here momentarily to re-define our
impression upon hearing the old orator. The feature which we have
been describing as spaciousness may be translated, with perhaps a
slight shift of viewpoint, as opacity. The passages we have
inspected, to recur to our examples, are opaque in that we cannot
see through them with any sharpness. And it was no doubt the
intention of the orator that we should not see through them in this
way. The “moral magnifying glass” of Craddock’s General Vayne
made objects larger, but it did not make them clearer. It rather had
the effect of blurring lines and obscuring details.
 We are now in position to suggest that another factor in the choice
of the generalized phrase was aesthetic distance. There is an
aesthetic, as well as a moral, limit to how close one may approach
an object; and the forensic artists of the epoch we describe seem to
have been guided by this principle of artistic decorum. Aesthetic
distance is, of course, an essential of aesthetic treatment. If one
sees an object from too close, one sees only its irregularities and
protuberances. To see an object rightly or to see it as a whole, one
has to have a proportioned distance from it. Then the parts fall into a
meaningful pattern, the dominant effect emerges, and one sees it “as
it really is.” A prurient interest in closeness and a great remoteness
will both spoil the view. To recall a famous example in literature,
neither Lilliputian nor Brobdingnagian is man as we think we know
him.
Thus it can be a sign not only of philosophical ignorance but also
of artistic bad taste to treat an object familiarly or from a near
proximity. At the risk of appearing fanciful we shall say that objects
have not only their natures but their rights, which the orator is bound
to respect, since he is in large measure the ethical teacher of
society. By maintaining this distance with regard to objects, art
manages to “idealize” them in a very special sense. One does not
mean by this that it necessarily elevates them or transfigures them,
but it certainly does keep out a kind of officious detail which would
only lower the general effect. What the artistic procedure tends to do,
then, is to give us a “generic” picture, and much the same can be
said about oratory. The true orator has little concern with singularity
—or, to recall again a famous instance, with the wart on Cromwell’s
face—because the singular is the impertinent. Only the generic
belongs, and by obvious connection the language of the generic is a
general language. In the old style, presentation kept distances which
had, as one of their purposes, the obscuring of details. It would then
have appeared the extreme of bad taste to particularize in the
manner which has since, especially in certain areas of journalism,
become a literary vogue. It would have been beyond the pale to
refer, in anything intended for the public view, to a certain cabinet
minister’s false teeth or a certain congressman’s shiny dome.
Aesthetically, this was not the angle of vision from which one takes in
the man, and there is even the question of epistemological
truthfulness. Portrait painters know that still, and journalists knew it a
hundred years ago.
It will be best to illustrate the effect of aesthetic distance. I have
chosen a passage from the address delivered by John C.
Breckinridge, Vice-President of the United States, on the occasion of
the removal of the Senate from the Old to the New Chamber,
January 4, 1859. The moment was regarded as solemn, and the
speaker expressed himself as follows:

And now the strifes and uncertainties of the past are

finished. We see around us on every side the proofs of
stability and improvement. This Capitol is worthy of the
Republic. Noble public buildings meet the view on every
hand. Treasures of science and the arts begin to accumulate.
As this flourishing city enlarges, it testifies to the wisdom and
forecast that dictated the plan of it. Future generations will not
be disturbed with questions concerning the center of
population or of territory, since the steamboat, the railroad
and the telegraph have made communication almost
instantaneous. The spot is sacred by a thousand memories,
which are so many pledges that the city of Washington,
founded by him and bearing his revered name, with its
beautiful site, bounded by picturesque eminences, and the
broad Potomac, and lying within view of his home and his
tomb, shall remain forever the political capital of the United
States.

At the close of the address, he said:

And now, Senators, we leave this memorable chamber,

bearing with us, unimpaired, the Constitution received from
our forefathers. Let us cherish it with grateful
acknowledgments of the Divine Power who controls the
destinies of empires and whose goodness we adore. The
structures reared by man yield to the corroding tooth of time.
 These marble walls must molder into ruin; but the principles of
constitutional liberty, guarded by wisdom and virtue, unlike
material elements, do not decay. Let us devoutly trust that
another Senate in another age shall bear to a new and larger
Chamber, the Constitution vigorous and inviolate, and that the
last generations of posterity shall witness the deliberations of
the Representatives of American States still united,
prosperous, and free.[151]

We shall hardly help noting the prominence of “opaque” phrases.

“Proofs of stability and improvement”; “noble public buildings”;
“treasures of science and the arts”; “this flourishing city”; “a thousand
memories”; “this beautiful site”; and “structures reared by man” seem
outstanding examples. These all express objects which can be seen
only at a distance of time or space. In three instances, it is true, the
speaker mentions things of which his hearers might have been
immediately and physically conscious, but they receive an
appropriately generalized reference. The passage admits not a
single intrusive detail, nor is anything there supposed to have a
superior validity or probativeness because it is present visibly or
tangibly. The speech is addressed to the mind, and correspondingly
to the memory.[152] The fact that the inclusiveness was temporal as
well as spatial has perhaps special significance for us. This
“continuity of the past with the present” gave a dimension which our
world seems largely to have lost; and this dimension made possible
a different pattern of selection. It is not experiential data which
creates a sense of the oneness of experience. It is rather an act of
mind; and the practice of periodically bringing the past into a
meditative relationship with the present betokens an attitude toward
history. In the chapter on Lincoln we have shown that an even
greater degree of remoteness is discernible in the First and Second
Inaugural Addresses, delivered at a time when war was an ugly
present reality. And furthermore, at Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke in
terms so “generic” that it is almost impossible to show that the
speech is not a eulogy of the men in gray as well as the men in blue,
inasmuch as both made up “those who struggled here.” Lincoln’s
faculty of transcending an occasion is in fact only this ability to view it
from the right distance, or to be wisely generic about it.
We are talking here about things capable of extremes, and there is
a degree of abstraction which results in imperception; but barring
those cases which everyone recognizes as beyond bounds, we
should reconsider the idea that such generalization is a sign of
impotence. The distinction does not lie between those who are near
life and those who are remote from it, but between pertinence and
impertinence. The intrusive detail so prized by modern realists does
not belong in a picture which is a picture of something. One of the
senses of “seeing” is metaphorical, and if one gets too close to the
object, one can no longer in this sense “see.” It is the theoria of the
mind as well as the work of the senses which creates the final
picture.
One can show this through an instructive contrast with modern
journalism, particularly that of the Time magazine variety. A
considerable part of its material, and nearly all of its captions, are
made up of what we have defined as “impertinences.” What our
forensic artist of a century ago would have regarded as lacking
significance is in these media presented as the pertinent because it
is very near the physical manifestation of the event. And the reversal
has been complete, because what for this artist would have been
pertinent is there treated as impertinent since it involves matter
which the average man does not care to reflect upon, especially
under the conditions of newspaper reading. Thus even the
epistemology which made the old oratory possible is being
relegated.
We must take notice in this connection that the lavish use of detail
is sometimes defended on the ground that it is illustration. The
argument runs that illustration is a visual aid to education, and
therefore an increased use of illustration contributes to that informing
of the public which journals acknowledge as their duty. But a little
reflection about the nature of illustration will show where this idea is
treacherous. Illustration, as already indicated, implies that something
is being illustrated, so that in the true illustration we will have a
conjunction of mind and pictorial manifestation. But now, with brilliant
technological means, the tendency is for manifestation to outrun the
idea, so that the illustrations are vivid rather than meaningful or
communicative. Thus, whereas today the illustration is looking for an
idea to express, formerly the idea was the original; and it was
looking, often rather fastidiously, for some palpable means of
representation. The idea condescended, one might say, from an
empyrean, to suffer illustrative embodiment.
To make this difference more real, let us study an example of the
older method of illustration. The passage below examined is from an
address by Rufus Choate on “The Position and Function of the
American Bar as an Element of Conservatism in the State,” delivered
before the Law School in Cambridge, July 3, 1845.

But with us the age of this mode and degree of reform is

over; its work is done. The passage of the sea; the occupation
and culture of a new world, the conquest of independence—
these were our eras, these our agency of reform. In our
jurisprudence of liberty, which guards our person from
violence and our goods from plunder, and which forbids the
whole power of the state itself to take the ewe lamb, or to
trample on a blade of grass of the humblest citizen without
adequate remuneration: which makes every dwelling large
enough to shelter a human life its owner’s castle which winds
and rain may enter, but which the government cannot,—in our
written constitution, whereby the people, exercising an act of
sublime self-restraint, have intended to put it out of their
power forever to be passionate, tumultuous, unwise, unjust,
whereby they have intended, by means of a system of
representation, by means of the distribution of government
into departments independent, coordinate for checks and
balances; by a double chamber of legislation, by the
establishment of a fundamental and permanent organic law;
by the organization of a judiciary whose function, whose
loftiest function it is to test the legislation of the day by the
standard of all time,—constitutions, whereby all these means
they have intended to secure a government of laws, not of
 men, of reason, not of will; of justice, not of fraud,—in that
grand dogma of equality,—equality of right, of burthens, of
duty, of privileges, and of chances, which is the very mystery
of our social being—to the Jews a stumbling block; to the
Greeks foolishness,—our strength, our glory,—in that liberty
which we value not solely because it is a natural right of man;
not solely because it is a principle of individual energy and a
guaranty of national renown; not at all because it attracts a
procession and lights a bonfire, but because, when blended
with order, attended by law, tempered by virtue, graced by
culture, it is a great practical good; because in her right hand
are riches and honor and peace, because she has come
down from her golden and purple cloud to walk in brightness
by the weary ploughman’s side, and whisper in his ear as he
casts his seed with tears, that the harvest which frost and
mildew and cankerworm shall spare, the government shall
spare also; in our distribution into separate and kindred
states, not wholly independent, not quite identical, in “the wide
arch of ranged empire” above—these are they in which the
fruits of our age and our agency of reform are embodied; and
these are they by which, if we are wise,—if we understand the
things that belong to our peace—they may be perpetuated.
[153]

We note in passing the now familiar panorama. One must view

matters from a height to speak without pause of such things as
“occupation and culture of a new world,” “conquest of
independence,” and “fundamental and permanent organic law.” Then
we note that when the orator feels that he must illustrate, the
illustration is not through the impertinent concrete case, but through
the poeticized figment. At the close of the passage, where the
personification of liberty is encountered, we see in clearest form the
conventionalized image which is the traditional illustration. Liberty,
sitting up in her golden and purple cloud, descends “to walk in
brightness by the weary ploughman’s side.” In this flatulent utterance
there is something so typical of method (as well as indicative of the
philosophy of the method) that one can scarcely avoid recalling that
this is how the gods of classical mythology came down to hold
discourse with mortals; it is how the god of the Christian religion
came into the world for the redemption of mankind; it is how the
logos is made incarnate. In other words, this kind of manifestation
from above is, in our Western tradition, an archetypal process, which
the orators of that tradition are likely to follow implicitly. The idea is
supernal; it may be brought down for representation; but casual,
fortuitous, individual representations are an affront to it.
Consequently the representations are conventionalized images, and
work with general efficacy.
This thought carries us back to our original point, which is that
standards of pertinence and impertinence have very deep
foundations, and that one may reveal one’s whole system of
philosophy by the stand one takes on what is pertinent. We have
observed that a powerful trend today is toward the unique detail and
the illustration of photographic realism, and this tendency claims to
be more knowledgeable about reality. In the older tradition which we
set out to examine, the abstracted truth and the illustration which is
essentially a construct held a like favor. It was not said, because
there was no contrary style to make the saying necessary, but it was
certainly felt that these came as near the truth as one gets, if one
admits the existence of non-factual kinds of truth. The two sides do
not speak to one another very well across the gulf, but it is certainly
possible to find, and it would seem to be incumbent upon scholars to
find, a conception broad enough to define the difference.
One further clue we have as to how the orator thought and how he
saw himself. There will be observed in most speeches of this era a
stylization of utterance. It is this stylization which largely produces
their declamatory quality. At the same time, as we begin to infer
causes, we discover the source of its propriety; the orator felt that he
was speaking for corporate humanity. He had a sense of
stewardship which would today appear one of the presumptions
earlier referred to. The individual orator was not, except perhaps in
certain postures, offering an individual testimonial. He was the
mouthpiece for a collective brand of wisdom which was not to be
delivered in individual accents. We may suppose that the people did
not resent the stylizations of the orator any more than now they
resent the stylizations of the Bible. “That is the way God talks.” The
deity should be above mere novelties of expression, transparent
devices of rhetoric, or importunate appeals for attention. It is enough
for him to be earnest and truthful; we will rise to whatever patterns of
expression it has pleased him to use. Stylization indicates an attitude
which will not concede too much, or certainly will not concede weakly
or complacently. As in point of historical sequence the language of
political discourse succeeded that of the sermon, some of the latter’s
dignity and self-confidence persisted in the way of formalization.
Thus when the orator made gestures toward the occasion, they were
likely to be ceremonious rather than personal or spontaneous, the
oration itself being an occasion of “style.” The modern listener is very
quick to detect a pattern of locution, but he is prone to ascribe it to
situations of weakness rather than of strength.
Of course oratory of the broadly ruminative kind is acceptable only
when we accredit someone with the ability to review our conduct, our
destiny, and the causes of things in general. If we reach a condition
in which no man is believed to have this power, we will accordingly
be impatient with that kind of discourse. It should not be overlooked
that although the masses in any society are comparatively ill-trained
and ignorant, they are very quick to sense attitudes, through their
native capacity as human beings. When attitudes change at the top
of society, they are able to see that change long before they are able
to describe it in any language of their own, and in fact they can see it
without ever doing that. The masses thus follow intellectual styles,
and more quickly than is often supposed, so that, in this particular
case, when a general skepticism of predication sets in among the
leaders of thought, the lower ranks are soon infected with the same
thing (though one must make allowance here for certain barriers to
cultural transmission constituted by geography and language). This
principle will explain why there is no more appetite for the broadly
reflective discourse among the general public of today than among
the élite. The stewardship of man has been hurt rather than helped
by the attacks upon natural right, and at present nobody knows who
the custodians (in the old sense of “watchers”) are. Consequently it
is not easy for a man to assume the ground requisite for such a
discourse. Speeches today either are made for entertainment, or
they are political speeches for political ends. And the chief
characteristic of the speech for political ends is that it is made for
immediate effect, with the smallest regard for what is politically true.
Whereas formerly its burden was what the people believed or had
experienced, the burden now tends to be what they wish to hear.
The increased reliance upon slogans and catchwords, and the
increased use of the argument from contraries (e.g., “the thing my
opponent is doing will be welcomed by the Russians”) are prominent
evidences of the trend.[154]
Lastly, the old style may be called, in comparison with what has
succeeded, a polite style. Its very diffuseness conceals a respect for
the powers and limitations of the audience. Bishop Whatley has
observed that highly concentrated expression may be ill suited to
persuasion because the majority of the people are not capable of
assimilating concentrated thought. The principle can be shown
through an analogy with nutrition. It is known that diet must contain a
certain amount of roughage. This roughage is not food in the sense
of nutriment; its function is to dilute or distend the real food in such a
way that it can be most readily assimilated. A concentrate of food is,
therefore, not enough, for there has to be a certain amount of inert
matter to furnish bulk. Something of a very similar nature operates in
discourse. When a piece of oratory intended for a public occasion
impresses us as distended, which is to say, filled up with repetition,
periphrasis, long grammatical forms, and other impediments to
directness, we should recall that the diffuseness all this produces
may have a purpose. The orator may have made a close calculation
of the receptive powers of his audience and have ordered his style to
meet that, while continuing to “sound good” at every point. This
represents a form of consideration for the audience. There exists
quite commonly today, at the opposite pole, a syncopated style. This
style, with its suppression of beats and its consequent effect of
hurrying over things, does not show that type of consideration. It
does not give the listener the roughage of verbiage to chew on while
meditating the progress of the thought. Here again “spaciousness”
has a quite rational function in enforcing a measure, so that the mind
and the sentiments too can keep up with the orator in his course.
Perhaps this is as far as we can go in explaining the one age to
another. We are now in position to realize that the archaic formalism
of the old orator was a structure imparted to his speech by a logic,
an aesthetic, and an epistemology. As a logician he believed in the
deduced term, or the term whose empirical support is not at the
moment visible. As an aesthetician he believed in distance, and that
not merely to soften outline but also to evoke the true picture, which
could be obscured by an injudicious and prying nearness. As an
epistemologist he believed, in addition to the foregoing, that true
knowledge somehow had its source in the mind of minds, for which
we are on occasion permitted to speak a part. All this gave him a
peculiar sense of stature. He always talked like a big man. Our
resentment comes from a feeling that with all his air of confidence he
could not have known half as much as we know. But everything
depends on what we mean by knowing; and the age or the man who
has the true conception of that will have, as the terms of the case
make apparent, the key to every other question.
 Chapter VIII
THE RHETORIC OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
One of the serious problems of our age is the question of how
scientific information, which is largely the product of special tools of
investigation, shall be communicated to the non-specialist world. A
few sciences operate in fields of theory so abstract that they can
create their own symbology, and most of what they transmit to the
public will be in the form of highly generalized translation. But there
are other sciences whose very success depends upon some public
understanding of what they are trying to solve, and these are faced
with peculiar problems of communication. None are in so difficult a
position as social science. The social sciences have been, since
their institution, jealous of their status as science, and that is perhaps
understandable. But their data is the everyday life of man in society,
and naturally if there is an area of scientific discovery upon which the
general public should be posted, it is just this one of the laws of
social phenomena. Caught between this desire to remain scientific
and the necessity of public expression, most social scientists are in a
dilemma. They have not devised (and possibly they cannot devise)
their own symbology to rival that of the mathematician and physicist.
On the other hand, they have not set themselves to learn the
principles of sound rhetorical exposition. The result is that the
publications of social scientists contain a large amount of
conspicuously poor writing, which is now under growing attack.[155]
Some of these attacks have been perceptive as well as witty; but I
feel that no one has yet made the point which most needs making,
which is that the social scientists will never write much better until
they make terms with some of the traditional rules of rhetoric.
I propose in the study which follows to ignore the isolated small
faults and instead to analyze the sources of pervasive vices. I shall
put the inquiry in the form of a series of questions, which lead to
cardinal principles of conception and of choice.

I
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.
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.
It begins to look as though the social scientist working with his
regular habits is actually a dialectician without a dialectical basis. His
dilemma is that he can neither use his terms with the simple
directness of the natural scientist pointing to physical factors, nor
with the assurance of a philosopher who has some source for their
meaning in the system from which he begins his deduction. Or, the
social scientist is trying to characterize the world positively in terms
which can be made good only dialectically. He can never make them
good dialectically as long as he is by theory entirely committed to
empiricism. This explains why to the ordinary beholder there seem to
be so many smuggled assumptions in the literature of social science.
It will explain, moreover, why so much of its expression is
characterized by diffuseness and by that verbosity which is certain to
afflict a dialectic without a metaphysic or an ontology. This
uncertainty of the social scientist about the nature of his datum often
leads him to treat empirical situations as if they carried moral
sanction, and then to turn around and treat some point of
contemporary mores—which is by definition a “moral” question—as if
it had only empirical aspects. In direct consequence, when the social
scientist should be writing “positively,” like a crack newspaper
reporter, one finds him writing like Hegel, and, when the stage of his
exposition might warrant his writing more or less like Hegel, one
finds him employing dialectical terms as if they had positive
designations.
Paradoxically, his very reverence for facts may tend to make him
sound like Hegel or some other master of categorical thinking.
Anyone sampling the literature of social science cannot fail to be
impressed with the proportion of space given to definition. Indeed,
one of the most convincing claims of the science is that our present-
day knowledge of man is defective because our definitions are
simplistic. His behavior is much more varied than the unscientific
suppose; and therefore a central objective of social study is
definition, which will take this variety into account and supplant our
present “prejudiced” definitions. With this in mind, the social scientist
toils in library or office to prepare the best definitions he can of
human nature, of society, and of psychosocial environment.
The danger for him in this laudable endeavor seems twofold. First,
one must remark that the language of definition is inevitably the
language of generality because only the generalizable is definable.
Singulars and individuals can be described but not defined; e.g., one
can define man, but one can only describe Abraham Lincoln. The
greater, then, his solicitude for the factual and the concrete, the more
irresistibly is he borne in the direction of abstract language, which
alone will encompass his collected facts. His dissertations on human
society begin with obeisance to facts, but the logic of his being a
scientist condemns him to abstraction. He is forced toward the
position of the proverbial revolutionary, who loves mankind but has
little charity for those particular specimens of it with whom he must
associate.
In the second place and more importantly, the definition of non-
empirical terms is itself a dialectical process. All such definition takes
the form of an argument which must prove that the definiendum is
one thing and not another thing. The limits of the definition are thus
the boundary between the things and the not-thing. Someone might
inquire at this stage of our account whether the natural scientists,
who must also define, are not equally liable under this point of the
argument. The distinction is that definitions in natural science have a
different ontological basis. The properties about which they
generalize exist not in logical connection but in empirical conjunction,
as when “mammal,” “vertebrate,” and “quadruped” are used to
distinguish the genus Felis. The doctrine of “natural kinds” thus
remains an empirical classification, as does the traditional
classification of elements.[156] Consequently the genus Felis has a
reality in the form of compresent positive attributes which “slum”
cannot have. The establishment of the genus is not a matter of
negating or depriving other classes, but of naming what is there. On
the other hand one could never arrive positivistically at a definition of
“slum” because its meaning is contingent upon judgment (and
theoretically our standard of living might move up to where
Westchester, Grosse Point, and Winnetka are regarded as slums).
Thus “slum” no more exists objectively than does “bad weather.”
There are collections of sticks and stones which the dialectician may
call “slums,” just as there are processions of the elements which he
may call “bad.” But these are positive things only in a reductionist
equation. Of course, the natural scientist works always with
reductionist equations; but the social scientist, unless he is an
extreme materialist, must work with the full equation.
 It is a grave imputation, but at the heart of the social scientist’s
unsatisfactory expression lies this equivocation. Remedy here can
come only with a clearer defining of province and of responsibility.

II
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