of the later pages in Dimensions of Society ( Dodd 1942 ) included translations into Brief-S , it remained an unfinished project at the time of his death in 1975 .
A computer program has been written by the author of this paper which generates S- formulae automatically after interrogating the user regarding the nature of the data in question . This obviates the need for specific expert knowledge of S-Theory and of course makes the conversion process very much quicker , in some cases by as much as 100 times , as there are 85 rules in the list given by Dodd for writing S-formulae ( Dodd 1942 , 903-913 ), and unless these have been memorised the complete set will need to be laboriously applied in the case of manual translation . It is a trivial task for even the most basic computer to undertake , however , and having generated the standard S-formulae , it is a relatively simple addition to the software to also output the equivalent formula in Brief-S . The only problem regarding this extra step of translation is that , as Brief-S is an incompletely specified augmentation to the fully documented process for creating S-formula , there are inevitably situations in which Dodd ’ s intended Brief-S equivalent can only be guessed at , although hopefully intelligently . This in turn raises the possibility that approaches resulting in still more concise forms of S-formulae ( for which the appropriately brief name Š is suggested ) may be easily realisable by further extensions to the existing software . Certain concepts from Iverson notation , for example , which led to the ultra-terse computer programming language APL ( created by Kenneth E . Iverson while at Harvard University ) may be of application ( Iverson 1962 ).
Unlike a complex computer programming language , which is translated into a much longer set of the often individually very simple instructions directly ‘ understood ’ by a computer , here we have a simple yet clumsy input – the answers to a series of questions – and wish to produce a complex yet much shorter set of symbols .
Summary and conclusions
Stuart Dodd ’ s ‘ S-Theory ’ is an example of how a largely forgotten positivistic alternative to the contemporary approach within the social sciences , previously rejected as unworkable , becomes worthy of reconsideration as a result of technological advances . This paper has examined the concepts of Dodd ’ s magnum opus , and has sought to present an outline of his quasi-mathematical ‘ language ’, beginning the task of reintroducing S-Theory and making suggestions for its possible further development in the computer era . Although a very sophisticated system , the ingenuity and power of S-theory was not fully appreciated by academics of the era , but in this century its reception deserves to be more positive .