A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences.

For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, opinion. Developing the idea of a cognitive aesthetic, Brown shows how both science art as well as the human studies that stand between them depend on metaphoric thinking as their logic of discovery may be assessed in terms of such criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, form. By recognizing this aesthetic common ground between science art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge the scientific or positivist one the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically significantly humane.