They see straight away the greater utility of the superior formulation. They thus arrive earlier at rational consensus, resolving their controversies. So, if model building and analyzing promote the advancement of empirical theory and if much of politics is textually expressed, it follows that any science of politics should develop and apply techniques for modeling texts. I consider it a profound embarrassment of our discipline that it does little of this. Mostly, when it encounters language from a scientific attitude, political science tries to reduce it inappropriately to some quantitative representation, because that's what it thinks science does.
Political science has physics envy.
Fortunately, there are exceptions, and we will examine some of them this semester. This course seeks to engage students in research efforts that examine directly the primary data of politics. To that end, it introduces the basic conceptual tools of language analysis, particularly at the linguistic level of pragmatics. Thus pragmatics operates on the practical plane that universally concerns students of politics and society. As a class project, each student will deliver an analysis of some substantive text.