Invention, Persuasion, and Judgment

What then of rhetoric's role in relation to divergent rationalities? Can training in rhetoric help scholars or other investigators choose more intelligently between rival theories, or methods of data collection, or seemingly incommensurate values, perspectives, or interpretations? Can rhetoric, properly conceived, serve as a bridge between realism and relativism, as Margolis suggests in his essay for this volume? Can it help us choose the best from among the concepts and precepts of the romantic and positivist traditions, as Brown seems to allege in his essay on symbolic realism? Or is rhetoric effectively foreclosed from playing any adjudicative role by dint of its rejection of all foundationalist presuppositions?

This general question is raised in a variety of forms in this book, both in essays on the rhetoric of scholarly inquiry and in those that bear upon issues in the civic arena. (76) The great boast of the ancients was that knowledge of the principles of rhetoric together with experience in its craft could improve the quality of one's judgments and might even yield wisdom (phronesis) on those issues that did not admit of right or wrong answers. Yet is there any evidence in support of this view, or even of Wayne Booth's much more modest ambition for rhetoric as a vehicle for the "careful weighing of more-or-less good reasons" to arrive at "more-or-less probable conclusions--none too secure but better than would we arrived at by chance or unthinking impulse?" (77) Indeed, what evidence could there possibly be, given rhetoric's own desconstructions of fact and logic, the real and the rational?

In his essay for this book, Gergen speaks of "The Checkmate of Rhetoric" in reference to rhetoric's undermining of the pretensions of objectivism. But does not that same critique undercut rhetoric's own credibility? By some (deconstructive) readings, does it not undermine the rhetorician's own agency if, for example, it is seen as entirely self-referential, or language-determined, or constituted by its readers? It could be argued that this tendency of rhetoric to shoot itself in the foot as it were--to checkmate itself--is a problem for all post-modern discourse-analytic traditions. All are vulnerable to the criticism that they shift attention from ideas to words; in so doing, that they end up in endless quibbling, or in verbal seductions leading to false consciousness, or in aesthetic preoccupations. (78)

But rhetoric confronts the distinctive problem of being first and foremost an art of persuasion and only secondarily an instrument of discovery and sound judgment. How can a science of "proving opposites" function also as a science of reconciling opposites or of choosing between them? This in essence was the question that Plato had Socrates ask in his dialogues on the sophists. The problem with sophistic rhetorical theory, he suggested, was not its presumption that there may be opposing opinions on a subject, but that it encouraged thinkers to go no further. Beyond the realm of everyday experience--of shifting opinions and contradictory arguments--was a realm of fixed essences, eternal verities, which it was the job of the philosopher to discover. (79) The sophists in general exhibited an apparent indifference to Truth, reflected in unabashedly contrived category schemes; in field-dependent, situation-dependent logics of justification; in their insistence on the inherent variability of human tastes and judgments; and, most lamentably, in their preoccupation with winning at all costs.

As Leff maintains, the sophistic model "seems to undermine the boundary conditions of knowledge and argument that define conventional notions of intellectual inquiry. This problem weighs heavily on even the most ardent enthusiasts of rhetoric." (80)

I don't know that rhetoricians will ever be able to respond to Plato's criticisms compellingly. The new movement's rejection of foundationalism effectively denies it the grounds upon which to mount such a response. Yet I am convinced that this very apparent weakness conceals reserves of considerable strength. Rhetoric's relativising impulse, its tendency to counter every argument with another, equally plausible, may be just the right ticket to what wisdom we can achieve at a time when, as Margolis puts it, "the most comprehensive conceptual schemes we can imagine are all partial, fragmented, contingent, historically bounded, ultimately blind, and radically ungrounded...."

Margolis reminds us that all foundationalisms--Plato's included--are themselves rhetorically constructed. They are embedded, as he puts it, "in the shifting saliencies of our shared experience." These are the accepted truths, beliefs, practices of inquiry, hopes, fears, superstitions, and the like, "that form the core of what the apt members of an historical society are convergently inclined to view as requiring a considerable counterforce to upset or replace or dismantle."

What Margolis is here suggesting--and what other contributors here affirm--is that there is no escape from rhetoric. The most pressing need, then, is for a reconstructive rhetoric of inquiry, one which advances consideration of questions, and suggests their interconnections, even if it does not resolve them.

Such a rhetoric will of necessity be unstable, self-questioning, reflexive--always in process of reconstituting itself in light of new historical saliencies and new habits of conviction. Its "truths," if there be any, will be situated, contextual, contingent--true for particular purposes; true under a given set of circumstances; true assuming the validity of taken-for-granted premises. And it will continually be engaged in a politics of competing pluralisms, a parliament of voices about which voices to privilege, and about how to construct, array, compare, and assess the objects of its scrutiny, including the multiple and competing rationalities about rationality with which it must contend.

But despite these uncertainties and circularities, and perhaps because of them, the new rhetoric of inquiry should be able to prepare the way for wiser, more judicious judgments by scholars and others engaged in the conduct of inquiry. However open-ended such a rhetoric may be, it need not be unreasonable or unempirical. However capable it may be of proving opposites, it need not leave us in a state of indecision. If it cannot lay claim to fixed and immutable standards of judgment, or to formal devices by which to compel assent, it can nevertheless suggest ways of engaging one's hearers, of clarifying ideas and also of rendering them plausible or probable.