Rhetoric of Inquiry
as an Intellectual Movement

Draft. Not for Publication.
Not for Quotation. All Rights Reserved.

The Rhetorical Turn is one among a number of recent works to counterpose rhetorical perspectives on inquiry against the dominant objectivist presuppositions of our age. (1) The book arises at a time of widespread dissatisfaction with objectivism, and out of a conviction that the practice of inquiry in fields as diverse as politics and paleoanthropology might more usefully be understood in rhetorical terms. (2) This chapter is designed to place the essays of this volume within the context of the larger intellectual movement of which it is a part. It seeks to explain why it is that sophisticated theorists and critics in dozens of fields have elected to rally around a term that is so often preceded by the words "mere," "only," or "just."

That rhetoric should these days be allowed on center stage on matters "where truth and seriousness" are concerned may be a reflection of our times. Typically it has been accorded such attention only as a foil for philosophy or where philosophy was a bit down in the dumps and in need of an understudy. (3) We live in an age, however, in which the philosophical moorings of inquiry have been found none too secure. Enlightenment philosophy's proclamation of the triumph of scientific knowledge (episteme) over mere belief (doxa) now seems at least a bit premature. (4) No longer do philosophers speak with great confidence about the epistemological foundations of knowledge. Such demarcation criteria as verification and falsification, used to distinguish science from non-science, have been called into question. (5) Nor is there as much talk these days of encompassing physics or biology or anthropology or history--let alone all of scholarly inquiry--within some grand, idealized methodological scheme. There appears to be increased recognition that the human sciences, (6) especially, need to develop on their own terms. (7)

Out of these developments in the philosophy of science have come some of the most important seeds of the rhetoric of inquiry movement. And there have been others. Indeed, it is now argued that the entire process of inquiry, far from being a fully rule-bound process as the positivists had hoped or supposed, is, at all stages, underdetermined by rules; dependent, therefore, on individual and communal judgments. (8) Correspondingly, it is now clearer than ever before that good scholarship involves much more than hard fact and cold logic; moreover that what what gets called fact or logic is symbolically mediated if not symbolically (i.e.,socially) constructed. (9) In place of Method there is talk of methods: variable, creative, nonalgorithmic. (10) In place of covering laws there is talk of contingent, historically situated truths, reflective of values and interests, and found more or less useful by cultures and communities which are themselves symbolically constituted. (11) And there are faint suspicions that scholarly communities are no less influenced by "fuzzy" logics than by formal, deductive, "closed-fisted" logics: by arguments from sign and analogy, by anecdotes and exemplars; and even by appeals to authority, tradition, convention, intuition and aesthetic goodness-of-fit. (12)

The critique of objectivism has also sparked new interest in the language and style of scholarly inquiry. Few scholars still assume that the language of the philosopher, historian, or scientist can be a clear windowpane upon the world, or that scientists can somehow be "saved" from rhetoric by writing in what Gusfield has called "a style of non-style." (13) Some critics have attended to the norms and conventions guiding the production of scholarly texts. (14)

Others have sought to "de-center" or "de-familiarize" scholarly texts, the better to discern the rhetorical devices by which the illusion of objective representation--of science untouched by human hands--is maintained. (15)

They have attended as well to the influence of discursive forms on thought and expression--to the role of metaphors, for example, as ineliminable building blocks of philosophical argument and scientific theory. (16) Under the impress of Continental critical theory, the image of the autonomous language-user has given way in some circles to the image of language as autonomous agent, a return to the Coleridgean dictum that "language, as it were, does our thinking for us." (17) Deconstructionists have delighted at the apparent ubiquity of metaphor and other such rhetorical figures and tropes even in the writings of philosophers such as Locke who so sharply condemned their use. (18)

Clifford Geertz has noted in this connection an infusion of metaphors about inquiry from the humanities into the social sciences. (19) As part of this "sea-change" in "the way we think about how we think," it is now quite common to "read" behaviors, cultures, or entire historical epochs as though they were texts, or to treat scientific data as symbolic constructions, scientific research reports and theories as narratives, mathematical proofs as rhetorical tropes, the ongoing discursive activities of scholarly communities as conversations. (20)

In rhetorical analyses of scholarly writings, the critic is also apt to explore likenesses with the discourse of such prototypical persuaders as editorialists, advertisers, political campaigners, ministers, lawyers, courtiers, and seducers. (21) Analyses of this kind are inherently ironic insofar as science, history, philosophy, and the like, have traditionally enjoyed privileged positions outside the provinces of rhetoric and literature. Moreover, the critiques are liable to extend beyond the discursive practices of individual scholars to entire schools, disciplines and professions, in some cases challenging their most vaunted self-images. For example, Thomas Gieryn and Anne Figert scrutinized not just the scandalous fabrications and misrepresentations of intelligence test findings by Sir Cyril Burt, but also the extensive "public relations" efforts of psychologists to maintain the perceived legitimacy of their science in the wake of that scandal. (22)

One common thread in the rhetoric of inquiry movement is its rejection of the conventional split between inquiry and advocacy. That scientific inquiry is a communal enterprise, dependent on argument and counterargument in the testing of claims, is, after Kuhn, no longer in dispute. But the dominant image of the individual scholar distinguishes sharply between stages of private inquiry and public advocacy. Jaegar and Rosnow characterize the self-image of most of their colleagues as Talmudic in the conduct of inquiry ("On the one hand, on the other hand...") but highly positivistic at the point at which they go public with their arguments. (23) They dub the pattern: "Think Yiddish, speak British!" Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca argue to the contrary that scholars are already anticipating objections and formulating possible responses to those objections at the very earliest stages of inquiry. (24) Campbell (this volume) offers evidence in support of this claim from his examination of Darwin's notebooks. Billig goes further in suggesting that our internal dialogues display much the same patterns of argument and counterargument as our public discourse. (25) He goes so far as to suggest that cognitive psychologists ought to study public speeches and conversations for clues to internal patterns of thought and cognition. He notes, however, one important difference between internal dialogue and public discourse: as ideas are readied for public presentation, doubts, anxieties, shadings of opinion, and acknowledgments of the truth of opposing positions tend to be repressed or inhibited. If scholars and others were more forthcoming, he suggests, they would not only think Yiddish but speak Yiddish! (26)

The foregoing sketch offers some sense of the animating impulse of the rhetoric of inquiry movement and of its common assumptions, but says little about its variations in approach or points of division. The assault on objectivism has provided an opening for rhetoric "where truth and knowledge are concerned," but just how big an opening and what kind of opening are matters that continue to be debated. Among philosophers of inquiry there continue to be those who suggest new groundings for knowledge; not all have abandoned the quest for an epistemological court of last resort. Similarly, while some philosophers speak of worlds brought into being by language, others cling to theories of representation. Even those who call themselves relativists or anti-realists have had to confront the paradoxical character of their own claims upon the world and their own insistence upon being taken seriously

These differences in philosophical perspective are mirrored in conceptions of the rhetoric of inquiry. (27) For example, William M. Keith and Richard Cherwitz have argued that have proposed a managerial role for rhetoric, consistent with a commitment to objectivism, rather than endorsing the counter-objectivist position which they identify with the "Iowa School." Locke's reduction of rhetoric to the artificial and figurative application of words and White's expanded sense of rhetoric as master discipline are but two of a number of conceptions which have entered as contending voices in the post-modern conversation about the conduct of inquiry currently taking place within and among the various disciplines.