To study the unstudyable

A sneaking suspicion was beginning to creep up behind me. Whenever I would dig into a text on intelligence, a textbook or a journal article from "Intelligence and National Security" it would seep out between the lines that there really isn't any unified theory on intelligence.

And alas, Mike Smith , one of my lecturers on the subject recently pinpointed the suspicion with one precision blow when he ascertained that the study of intelligence is in itself the study of knowledge - and therefore it is in a way academia incarnated.

What just strikes me as odd then is that I haven't come across more people applying the thoughts of the philosophy of science on intelligence. So far the field seems to exist most of anecdotal historiography, organizational theory and some IR theory.

If I thought that the study of Intelligence would save me from the complex methodological speculations of Rhetoric I probably would be disappointed. But on the other hand, my years of dabbling in unsolvable humanistic dilemmas probably has prepared me in another way than the studies of Social Sciences would have.

And all in all: in this academic wild-west borderland all roads are still open it seems. And a single rhetorical ranger probably can't set things straight, but perhaps he can still fire from the hip as a happy madman.