What is the office of impact analysis?

Hugh Blair, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Hugh Blair answers

Criticism begins where taste ends — taste receives the impression, and criticism asks why the impression was what it was.1 The office of what you call impact analysis is, in its essential nature, the same inquiry applied to any performance or policy that acts upon an audience: to distinguish what has succeeded from what has failed, to trace particular effects back to their causes, and from those causes to form principles that can guide future action.2

The rules by which such analysis proceeds cannot be drawn from abstract reasoning alone.3 No man, sitting in his closet and reasoning from first principles, can tell you what will move a legislative assembly or what will persuade a congregation — he must go to the instances, observe what has in fact moved men, and from that observation ascend to the general rule.

Aristotle did not invent the unity of action; he found it working in Homer and Sophocles, and named what was already there.4 Impact analysis, rightly conducted, is therefore an empirical art. Its first question is: what effect was produced, and upon whom? Its second is: by what means? And its third — the one that earns it the name of a discipline rather than mere accounting — is: what does this instance, added to the others, tell us about the constitution of the minds upon which we are acting? Without that third question, you have a record; with it, you have a science.

Sources

  1. True criticism is the application of taste and of good sense to the several fine arts. The object which it proposes is, to distinguish what is beautiful and what is faulty in every performance.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  2. from particular instances to ascend to general principles; and so to form rules or conclusions concerning the several kinds of beauty in works of genius.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  3. The rules of criticism are not formed by any induction a priori, as it is called; that is, they are not formed by a train of abstract reasoning, independent of facts and observations.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  4. Aristotle's rules concerning the unity of action in dramatic and epic composition, were not rules first discovered by logical reasoning, and then applied to poetry; but they were drawn from the practice of Homer and Sophocles.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres