ABSTRACT
In his analysis of the development of European sociology, Wolf LaPenies argued that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century sociology might well have gone in the direction of literature rather than science. In one of his many essays, Kenneth Burke makes a distinction between semantic and poetic meaning (Burke, 1957). Semantic meanings are the language of technical research and analysis in which an act or object has one and only one clear and unambiguous meaning. The existence and persistence of imagery, analogy, and metaphor is more than an admission of rhetorical skill. Metaphor expresses one thing in terms of another but it also enables us to expand the potential meaning by seeing them in another setting. In the model of science there is a clear distinction between the subject and the object. Rhetoric has been given a bad name in modern intellectual discussion, equated to propaganda and advertising.
