Reference:
Review Excerpts 'We seem to conduct much of our practical controversy on "modern"
assumptions that many recent theorists would repudiate. If the
assumptions are correct, controversy about values and commitments is
essentially nonrational, and rhetoric is simply the art of winning. If they are
at best questionable, if in fact the whole modernist edifice has been
undermined by its own rhetoric of systematic doubt, we may hope now to
construct rhetorics of a kind of assent that cannot be dismissed as
"mere faith". These lectures, originally given in the Ward-Phillips series
at the University of Notre Dame in April of 1971, are intended as an
introduction to one of many possible directions in which postmodernist
rhetoric about values can earn its legitimacy' (xi).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | construct |
correct |
introduction |
rhetoric |
'As soon as I ask "When should I change my mind?" or
"What is a good reason?" I become an intellectual imperialist, and I risk
becoming vacuous for the sake of covering the world' (xii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | mind | reason |
world |
'It is part of my point that modern philosophy - at least until the last
two decades - has saddled us with standards of truth under which no
man can live' (xii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | philosophy |
truth |
'If philosophy is defined as inquiry into certain truth, then what I
pursue here is not philosophy but rhetoric: the art of discovering
warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse. But
the differences are not sharply definable, and I of course think of the
inquiry as in a larger sense philosophical. To talk of improving beliefs
implies that we are seeking truth, since some beliefs are "truer" than
others. Besides, many philosophers from Cicero to the present have
defined what they do precisely as I would define rhetoric' (xiii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | discourse |
philosophy |
rhetoric |
truth |
'My business is largely with what they left out- with what might be
called the origin, likelihoods, and extent of human
convictions, together with the grounds and degrees of belief,
opinion, and assent- an argument for the intellectual validity of a subject
which, abandoned by philosophers, has too often fallen into the hands of
quacks: preachers of "plain style", of "winning friends and influencing
[other?] people", of "writing that sells", to say nothing of various
"scientific" modes of changing men's minds' (xiii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | argument |
style |
validity |
writing |
'The rhetoric that concerns us here will be the art of probing what
men believe they ought to believe, rather than proving what is true
according to abstract methods' (xiii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract |
rhetoric |
'One thing that we all believe, though many of us believe we have no
good grounds for the belief, is that there really is a difference between
good reasons and bad- which in my terms means a genuine difference
between good rhetoric and bad....I shall be pursuing here the art of
discovering good reasons, finding what really warrants assent because
any reasonable person ought to be persuaded by what has been said'
(xiv).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | difference |
rhetoric |
'You may even have been taught, as I was, that to be
reasonable in such a situation means taking an absolutely neutral
ground until solid proof is available- which in fact amounts to making the
negative decision, to deny credence. Since nothing has been proved, an
educated man will wait for real evidence. It is part of my point in these
lectures that we were taught wrong' (5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | evidence |
ground |
situation |
'I choose, then, to talk about the whole thing as in part a rhetorical
failure, but I should make clear that I don't mean by that simply what
people usually mean by a "failure of communication". That phrase seems
to suggest that if we could get our words right, all would be well. By using
the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how
men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of
truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before....
Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not
still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case:
making the word appear the better cause. But I am groping toward
something far more important, though obviously far too grandiose to be
achieved in four lectures: a view of rhetoric as the whole art of
discovering and sharing warrantable assertion' (10-1).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | agreement |
case |
communication |
discourse |
philosophy |
phrase |
rhetoric |
truth |
word |
'In these lectures, I am grappling with two very old and very hard
questions: Domains: Under construction |
'What is most interesting here is the automatic reliance on the
distinction between facts and values, and the quality of the reply one
often receives if he questions that distinction. If the word dogma is
applicable to any general notion that cannot, for the believer, be brought
into question, the belief that you cannot and indeed should not allow your
values to intrude upon your cognitive life- that thought and knowledge
and fact are on one side and affirmations of value on the other- has been
until recently a dogma for all right-thinking moderns' (13).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | distinction |
knowledge |
notion |
quality |
thought |
value |
word |
'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that
roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and
value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism
versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the
wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the
column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made
useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper
adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective
than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours
asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere
facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith'
(16-7).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | adjective |
construct |
knowledge |
mind |
objective |
reason |
value |
'There have been countless ... demonstrations that objective
scholarship is not and cannot be objective in the sense of being free of
value judgments.... Noam Chomsky's famous essay "Objectivity and
Liberal Scholarship" partially undermines itself with this failure. Chomsky
shows easily and conclusively that "liberal scholars", most notably
Gabriel Jackson in his study on study on Spain in the 30s, discover what
their value commitments allow them to discover, and they overlook what
their values lead them to overlook. But Chomsky them writes as of he
has earned, with this restoration of values into historical study, the right
to impose his own values on history -- and without even as much effort to
grapple with opposing views as was made by Jackson.... Chomsky often
talks as if all attempts to write honest history are really and always mere
disguises for value commitments and that therefore he has a right to
push his value button- "down with the 'liberal' defense of
capitalism"- and see what is churned out. His obligation, I would have
thought, was to give his readers good reasons why his version of the war
is in some historical sense better than Jackson's, and not just one more
passionate voice to be measured in decibels' (20-1).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | defense |
history |
objective |
study |
thought |
value |
'If one recognizes, as we all must, that in the social sciences and
humanities values are implicatied at every point, even in the assertion of
the simplest fact, then of course we are in trouble, because by definition
we are caught in whirlpools of Mere Assertion, knowledge being by
definition unobtainable about values' (21).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | definition |
knowledge |
'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing
each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview
of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five
kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for
producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the
mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of
"changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible
sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing
changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic
assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of
change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a
mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the
changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things,
whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic
principles, and the purpose of the change' (22).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | ground |
mind |
nature |
principles |
purpose |
scene |
soul |
truth |
word |
world |
worldview |
'Note the automatic assumption that the real reasons are not the
public reasons, that the real reasons have something to do with the
subconscious, or with class or racial affiliations that run far beneath the
surface. If we were to ask Mailer whether his choosing to study the
astronauts was itself defensible with good reasons, he might say- since
he tries harder than most authors to apply the same standards to himself
that he applies to other men- that his real reasons were also quite other
than his conscious reasonings. We have all learned to assume that what
determines minds and purposes must be not reasoning but deeper and
blinder causes' (26).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | assumption |
reasoning |
study |
'By now it has almost scriptural force: in the beginning was not the
word but the causal chain, and his name was sometimes Chemistry and
sometimes Drive or Desire, but never Lift or even Pull. And it came to
pass that Error was born, and his chosen name was Reason, but his real
name was Rationalization. And Rationalization and his wicked prophets
did undertake to undermine Push, claiming that reasoning about values,
about purposes, could alter Push's unalterable path. But the true
prophets were able to unmask the wicked prophets, showing that their
vaunted reasonings were themselves clearly dictated by Push. And, lo,
there was nothing that anyone could say about anything that could not be
unmasked and shown to be truly another manifestation of Push's eternal
power. And when men did engage in debate about their deepest
concerns, they found that each man could say unto his brother, Racca,
thou fool' (31).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | name | power |
reason |
reasoning |
word |
'Belief in the hypothesis leads one to look at other people in a
certain way and to find what one looks for' (32).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | hypothesis |
'Every idea -- unless of course it is "scientific" -- expresses a need
or a secret wish; nothing need be taken seriously as a possible
contribution to the truth. The very word truth has for many been
ruled out of court, and with it the notion that one determinant of what is
said can be a respect for reasons' (33).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | idea | notion |
truth |
word |
'Attacks on various forms of motivism have been many and forceful;
in my view they have often been convincing. And yet motivism thrives.
How can that be? Without pretending to have any final answers to such a
question, I would suggest that any intellectual habit survives as a
habit only so long as it is useful- which is to say, reversing the
position of motivists, only so long as it can point to "consequences",
whether intellectual or practical successes, that seem to provide good
reason for continuing in the habit, regardless of other consequences that
may be unpleasant. A given habit will seem useful provided it seems to
answer important questions more successfully than any rival habit. And
the fact is that though motivism is both internally inconsistent and
destructive of much that we cannot live without, it is buttressed by an
impressive chain of intellectual successes at what might be called the
local level' (37-8).
Domains: Under construction |
'We cannot answer motivism, then, with a polemic that simply
reverses the attack. Instead, we should seek a way of cutting through the
destructive split on which the depredations of motivism are based:
instead of trying to prove that men change their minds or should change
their minds only on the basis of abstract ideas and logical proofs- a
position easily refuted by even a tenth-rate motivist- we should look for a
philosophy of good reasons, a way of discovering how motives become
reasons and a way of showing how what we call ideas sometimes can
and should affect our choices and sometimes can only fail to do so'
(38-9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract |
basis |
philosophy |
'None of us in this room really believes that all of his own
commitments are equally indefensible in the eyes of other men.
Everyone, no matter how thoroughly committed to motivism he may
claim to be, always exempts at least a part of himself and his values from
the dogmas. For the motivist, for example, the commitment to motivism
and the command to respect its conclusions as truth are found and
supported "rationally", not simply by following blind drives. One "ought" to
conduct one's mental life in their light, even though to say so is to assert
a value. There seems something fishy about this one exemption, surely.
What if the whole edifice were plainly, destructively, and tragically wrong-
not wrong in the sense that there are no good reasons for respecting it
on some occasions for some purposes, but in the snesen that it is totally
misleading when applied indiscriminately to the whole of life'
(39-40).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | claim | truth |
value |
'But I ask you to think a bit, as I turn now from motivism to the
remaining four dogmas, about what would happen to your intellectual and
moral life if you reversed that formula, cultivating a benign acceptance-
perhaps temporary and tentative, but real- of every belief that can pass
two tests: you have no particular, concrete grounds to doubt it (as distinct
from the abstract principle to doubt what cannot be proved); and you
have good reason to think all men who understand the problem share
your belief' (40).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract |
concrete |
formula |
problem |
reason |
'The view of man, the puny, neaningless insect, prevailed, then-
except of course whenever Russell felt impelled to defend values to
which he was himself deeply committed, values like that of scientific
inquiry or of integrity in its pursuit. Then we meet the two other Russells,
the vital, idealistic, even Utopian prophet of reason and the passionate
mystic and man of action who became famous among nonprofessionals.
Russell I still dominated in the sense of setting the definitions,
distinctions, and terms in which argument and action take place. But
Russell II, the courageous partisan of truth, and Russell III, the savior of
the world, never allowed themselves to be silenced by the cold logician
for long. They knew that man's life could not be lived without values, and
they feared that the scientific world picture which Russell I preached
would, when popularized, produce impoverished dehumanized man'
(52).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | argument |
integrity |
reason |
truth |
world |
'Then this clever, subtle, sensitive but divided man does an amazing
thing. Russell I has said he ought to be a behaviorust but can't quite
make it. Russell II has worried about the effects of popular behaviorism
on mass man. Now Russell III, the man of action, retreats from the whole
problem by recommending as his practical solution that ordinary men
(whose misreading of the ethical consequences of behaviorism he
fears) should be "taught logic": they should be taught logic so that they
will learn not to reason. "For, if they reason, they will almost
certainly reason wrongly" (p.98)- that is, they will conclude that if man is a
machine, certain ethical consequences follow!' (53).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | logic |
misreading |
problem |
reason |
'The notion that we have reason to believe only what has been
proved, in the sense of withstanding all possible doubts, cannot be lived
with by most of us for even a moment. There is nothing shameful in this,
unless logic, mathematics, and physical science, which are also based
on "unprovable" assumptions, are shameful. Life would be impossible if
it were not so' (66).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | logic | notion |
reason |
science |
Last Modified:
July-11-96 16:51:50
Reply to randy_radney@sil.org
'1. How should men work when they try to change
each other's minds, especially about value questions?
'2. When
should you and I change our minds? - that is, how do we know a
good reason when we see one?' (12).
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