Read an Excerpt
Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent
By David Cratis Williams, Michael David Hazen The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1990 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9062-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Argumentation Theory as Critical Practice
J. Robert Cox
The essays in this volume explore a new and exciting terrain in argumentation studies: the relation between "assent" and social practices. The authors, participants in the Wake Forest University conferences on argumentation, have tried to be sensitive to the implications of asking, "When, if ever, is assent justified?" In doing so, they urge us to understand assent as a function of argument's sociality or participation in the world of praxis. The Wake Forest essays thus serve — in their more provocative moments — as commentaries on Roland Barthes's observation, "Once uttered, speech enters the service of power" (1982, 461).
But is anything new in this? Traditionally, the study of argument has focused upon the formation of judgment toward the end of action. On this assumption, assent to a statement is acceptable if "it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end — universal peace ... [or] justice" (Lyotard 1984, xxiii–xxiv). The capacity to achieve such a consensus has been held by both traditional theorists and modernists as a humane mode for mediating power.
Yet, it is this very possibility that commentators have increasingly brought into question. We find an "eclipse" of the public by technical reason (Dewey 1927) as well as systematic distortions in the free converse of persons (Habermas 1970). We suspect media society or a "society of spectacle" (Guy Debord) may no longer be able to sustain the traditional project of rational consensus. For these reasons, Lyotard believes a postmodern culture is distinguished by its incredulity toward the meta-narratives of the culture, such as the possibility of an assent of rational minds (xxiv).
But incredulity cannot sustain res publica and it is "the public's thing" that a theory of argumentation seems to require. In abandoning the project of modernism — the attempt to integrate Reason and praxis — theory thereby breaks faith with the normative rationale for argument. It is appropriate, therefore, that the first Wake Forest University Conference on Argumentation returned to this question: "When, if ever, is assent justified?" And this, Professor Goodnight suggests, is to ask no less whether knowledge and action can be productively conjoined; whether people still have the words to say what they believe and act upon what they say.
In addressing such questions, the participants in the Wake Forest University conferences faced two problems that appear throughout contemporary argumentation studies: (1) the problem of developing a justification for the normative dimension of argumentation theory — that is, the set of criteria that allows us to answer the question, "When is assent justified?"; and (2) the necessity of providing an account of the relationship between normative theory and argument practices. The participants would immediately point out, of course, that these two problems may not be separable. Efforts to articulate a justification for normative theory are themselves implicated in the problem they seek to solve; and, to the extent such efforts are based in a description of argument practices, they raise questions about material conditions and consequences of discourse — about power. Thus we return to Barthes's observation.
Most of the Wake Forest essays address this central problematic — the relationship of rational assent to power — in some fashion. A few make clear that argumentation theory inevitably becomes a "critical" practice in which criticism is taken both as a mode of theory-construction and as the telos of theory itself. A theory of argumentation would be a normative rationale for a critical praxis, an effort to resist or to recover those conditions that either retard or sustain the production and authentication of truthful, just, and effective discourse.
Interest in the justification of the normative dimension of argumentation theory has, in a sense, become a "problem" as a consequence of the field's rejection of formalism. Taken as a focus of traditional theory, Barthes's caution would be unnecessary. Neo-Aristotelianism understood "argument" as speech that was guided by phronesis or practical wisdom; it sought agreement from members of a community and thus served as a humane agency for mediating power. In this view, rational assent, as a Will to Truth, implied a commitment to human betterment (the latter on the assumption and as the product of such "rational" assent). Thus (to misread Nietzsche), the Will to Truth and the Will to Power were unitary.
As a theoretical and practical domain, the traditional study of argumentation focused on appeals to "conviction," that discrete faculty of mind distinguished in some unaccounted-for way by its rational quality. Argument became an applied logic, differentiated from formal logic mostly by virtue of its applied status. In its objectives and methods, the field of argumentation studies, by mid-twentieth century, had become the "study of the logical forms underlying ordinary language claims, disputes, and debates" (Cox and Willard 1982, xxi).
The normative dimension of argumentation theory under the assumptions of such "applied formalism" was clear. Laws of logical form were supposed to guide the analysis of the manifest (rhetorical) content of thought. The task of the critic was plainly given — to uncover the underlying, "real" structure of an argument and to evaluate its form accordingly.
Admittedly, some scholars held that such a normative structure revealed a tragic element of human argumentation. Arguers inevitably fail to fulfill the demands of rational decision-making. The material world intrudes too much: issues are ambiguous and value-laden; furthermore, arguers often must arrive at judgments under severe constraints of time and the availability of data. "Rational" assent is, therefore, an ideal and seldom a material trait of human argument. In our best moments, we seek but can never fulfill the criteria for justified assent.
For the most part, however, those working in the tradition of applied formalism showed little interest either in personal or social conditions that sustain reasoned discourse or in the material consequences of discourse. On an assumption of isomorphism of rational form and the psychology of judgment, critics devoted themselves to an explication of this "applied" form in discourse.
In the last two decades, however, argument has become less of an a priori subject. Critics have seemed increasingly to follow Toulmin's (1958) call for study of argument-in-use. Initially, scholars found much to value in their own rhetorical heritage. Karl R. Wallace (1963), Donald C. Bryant (1973), and Carroll Arnold (1970), for example, proposed that rhetorical practices constituted (or could constitute) "good reasons" for rational assent. And, in the newly translated The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation by Belgian philosophers Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), argumentation theorists appeared to discover a basis for such interests: the variable agreement or "adherence" of audiences offered a rationale for the normative dimension of argumentation theory.
An audience-centered view of argument, along with the allied "rhetoric-as-epistemic" movement (Scott 1967, 1976; Brummet 1976, 1981, 1982), seemed to offer a liberating basis for argumentation theory. Such perspectives fit nicely the ideological temper of American scholarship: Arguers compete for assent in the social marketplace, and audiences — as social referees — provide a way to discriminate among claims.
But it may not be immediately clear that the problem of providing a justification for the normative dimension of theory has been solved. Such a solution would have to assume that consensus, on the whole, provides a sufficient ground for assent. Does it? Wayne C. Booth, for one, would ask, "Am I not now forced to accept any piece of silliness that any fanatic wants to advance provided only that he can get somebody to assent to it?" (1974, 106).
In turning from applied formalism, then, have theorists settled for an uneasy truce between subjectivism and a consensus theory of truth? In comparison we might consider a related controversy in the realm of literary theory. Critics such as Graff and Lasch have charged that, in abandoning "form," certain avant-garde art has no firm locus for its claims. Their complaint illustrates a familiar contradiction in the subjectivist position: In exposing dominant reason as illusory, a work leaves "no means of legitimizing [its] own critique of injustice and exploitation" (Graff 1978, 21). Such abandonment of form is peculiarly susceptible to charges of resignation. Signs (stripped of their significations) become the basis of a social integration in which "even guardians of 'reality' admit that existence is an illusion, that distinctions between truth and falsehood have lost their meaning, and that it is futile to try to change the world or even to try to understand it" (Lasch 1978, 46–47).
Does a theory of argumentation, modeled on the same epistemological assumptions, run a similar risk of perpetuating a "society of spectacle?" A good number of the Wake Forest participants apparently think so. Yet most of these essays also acknowledge Rorty's cautions regarding an illusory quest for "foundations" of theory: The attempt of metaphysicians from the Greeks to Descartes, Russell, and Husserl to "break out into an apxn beyond discourse is rooted in the urge to see social practices of justification as more than just such practices" (1979, 390). In their essays for this volume, McKerrow, Croasmun, and Willard, for example, raise disturbing questions about both consensus theory and idealist criteria for justified assent.
It is within this context that McKerrow approaches the problem of justification in the first essay for this volume. Following Booth's (1974) discussion of "systematic assent," McKerrow examines the theoretical grounds for the concept of what he terms "pragmatic justification," a condition in which a listener has been given reasons sufficient to grant his or her adherence to the claim. His reliance upon the concept of adherence departs, however, from Perelman's use; McKerrow seeks to ground the "warranted assertability" of claims in the principle of coherence and in broader concerns of cultural norms and assumptions. This approach anticipates a fuller discussion of social formation which Aune and Goodnight address at the end of this volume.
Croasmun also addresses the "consensus" justification of argumentation theory in his incisive essay in this volume. Particularly troubling is his suggestion that the norm of consensus erodes the efficacy of dissent and perhaps the very possibility of persuasion. To avoid this possibility, he believes, the normative dimension of theory must be grounded in some criterion beyond the beliefs of "society," "community," or "others." Croasmun wants to argue for a "realist view of rhetorical epistemology," one that values inquiry into "the one world that is shared in some way by all living beings."
Yet, it is unclear how Croasmun would accomplish such a "realist" justification of normative theory. Much of his argument consists of familiar disclosures of the inconsistencies in the subjectivist or consensus position. His dispute with Brummett (1976, 1981, 1982) and Scott (1967, 1976), however, may be interesting for another reason. In shunning both relativism and foundationalism, Croasmun illustrates a type of argument practice that moves toward "criticism and inquiry."
Is our question, then, properly put by framing the problem of justification in epistemological terms, for example, "Should we ground assent upon the agreement of an audience or on a realist view of the world?" Here, Croasmun merely points in the general direction he would go: "To strive for standards of persuasion, to believe knowledge claims can be compared and evaluated, to have a rhetoric that is more than merely self-referential." Yet, this clearly differs from McKerrow who urges us to proceed from some sense of a pragmatic justification (as opposed to "epistemic justification"). The difference, McKerrow proposes, is that the former makes no assertion guaranteeing the truth of the claim. Pragmatic justification merely asserts that "within the particular context in which the claim is appraised, the belief in the claim, or the adoption of the action, is warranted" (1986b).
Would the problem of developing a justification of the normative dimension of theory be better defined by distinguishing rhetorical practices from epistemology? If so, we would ask, "What do arguers evoke as commonplaces of reasoning in particular settings, and how are these perceived to be guarantors of judgment?" The objective of such an orientation would be (after Toulmin) to investigate how socially situated persons argue, change, or arrive at judgments, and what these persons articulate as rationalizations for their assent.
Such concern for "pragmatic justification" fundamentally alters the project of argumentation theory. Among other things, it brackets the question of formal epistemology. And it provides, in principle, an account of not only arguers' grounds but also the nature of argumentation theory as also a kind of practice (a "critical" practice, as I shall argue).
Two related research programs arise out of this turn: (1) A description of the social bases of validity claims. For the most part, this has been conducted out of what Swanson (1977) terms the "critical stance" in the "mundane" world, that is, argument practices of the parties in dispute are taken as an explanandum of justification for assent. And (2) an extension of this interest to a reflection upon the social assumptions and conditions for the occurrence of argument practices as such. It is this "reflective stance" (Swanson 1977) that is the focus of many of the essays from the Wake Forest University conferences.
Argument scholars generally have viewed the normative dimension of assent from the first perspective: Argumentation is a study of "justified" assent, but the normative basis of this assumption is located in argument practices. Justified assent is located in praxis in the larger sense of what Von Wright calls "form of life." "The [set of presuppositions of argument] is not propositional knowledge ...," he suggests. "Giving grounds, ... justifying evidence, comes to an end; — but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting ..." (1972, 57). On the further assumption that these social bases for arguers' judgments can be identified, the theoretical task is given: It is, as Toulmin (1958) originally proposed, the study of "the ways of arguing which have established themselves in any sphere, accepting them as historical facts ..." (257).
Two organizing perspectives have guided this effort: (1) the study of arguing as a communicative practice; and (2) the acceptance of argument practices as the epistemic procedures of rational enterprises or "fields." Studies derived from both perspectives are now quite commonplace. Our understanding of the symbolic form and function of arguing in conversation and in fields such as law has grown as a consequence. The focus on practices, nevertheless, raises other questions — questions about the social assumptions and conditions for the occurrence of argument — that cannot be answered from within the first research program. The remaining essays in this volume have, therefore, tried to approach the problem of normative theory from a more reflective stance, by asking about the possibility of "justified" assent as such.
Among other things, the focus from this "reflective" perspective reveals that arguers engage in an effort toward change, not merely an effort to align themselves with a prior consensus. An implication of many of the Wake Forest essays is that argument is an agency of transformation as much as a mode for certifying truth. This is certainly the perspective that Jasinski believes argument scholars should bring to their study of assent: We must attend to "the ways symbolic action produces transformations (change, assent ...) in assumptions, beliefs, practices, and affiliations." Jasinski tries to account for this by describing form as a process of "inferencing." Here, he draws on Burke's view of form as the structuring of audience consciousness, as a process of anticipation. The force of an argument is realized "when the inferential form articulated in the symbolic practices of a social actor enters the concrete historical world populated by rhetorical audiences, marked by problems and exigencies (themselves constituted, to some degree, by discourse) and structured by institutions, traditional practices and other constraints." Argument becomes an agency for change precisely as audiences participate in symbolic form — when they "anticipate" or are "moved along" through the potential of form and are thereby transformed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent by David Cratis Williams, Michael David Hazen. Copyright © 1990 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
