Argument in Composition. John Ramage
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shared by most members our own community. The most important of those assumptions is the belief that argument has heuristic power, that through the dialogues we carry on with ourselves or with other people, doing what Aristotle called “proving opposites,” we do not just defend truth and vanquish error, we actually modify accepted truths and discover new ones. Implicit in this view is the belief that truth cannot be, as Leo appears to assume it is, independent of human judgment or the language we use in forming those judgments. If truth truly is absolute, independent of us and incorrigible by us, and if language is merely a transparent medium of expression not what Burke calls a “terministic screen” that shapes what it reveals, rhetoric is a trivial business deserving of the sort of scorn that the early absolutist Plato heaped on the first of our breed, the Sophists.
While our position here, a position consistent with if not identical to that held by most members of our community, may look suspiciously like the position Leo characterizes as “moral relativism,” we do not believe it is. Describing us or Fish as moral relativists is more a caricature of our position than a representation of same. Just because we accept the inevitability of multiple positions on any given issue of significance is not to say we accept—like Leo’s hapless student who “dislikes” Nazis but cannot bring himself to denounce them—the moral or cognitive equivalence of all positions on an issue. As rhetoricians we cannot claim membership in the “I’m Ok, You’re OK,” school of human relations; indeed if such a view prevailed, rhetoricians would be out of work. Rhetoric and argument have no place in either of the two worlds that for Leo represent the sum of all possibilities: his world of One Truth, or the world he imagines us inhabiting where there are countless equivalent truths. In the world of One Truth, rhetoric and argument might serve either to propagandize for the one true faith or to seduce people away from that faith, but it could have no legitimate effect on the truths that form the faith’s foundation. In a world of multiple equivalent truths, not only would we be powerless to alter each other’s position, there would be no reason to try absent good reasons to prefer one position over another.
Our position, thus, is neither absolutist nor relativist; we prefer to think of it as “realist” in the sense that Kenneth Burke uses that term. In a realist world, rhetoric and argument are essential activities precisely because it is a world that recognizes the significant, though not limitless, role that human agency plays in resolving the world’s problems and the important part that language plays in enabling human agency to realize its ends. In particular, language has the realistic capacity to “induce cooperation” among human beings even while it lacks the magical power to “induce motion in things” (Grammar 42). While Burke recognizes the enormous power of language to effect change, his realism also requires belief in a world independent of language’s shaping power. Our knowledge of this extra-verbal realm comes to us negatively, through the power of things, events and bodies to resist our assertions and claims and thwart our designs. This power of “recalcitrance” in the world encourages an attitude of humility like that which Burke finds in the pragmatist William James, whom he refers to admiringly as “an expert in the comparative degree of adjectives of value.” James rejected “absolutism (which is really the superlative, identifying the One as the Best)” and preferred to think “in terms of more rather all. . . . To optimism or pessimism, he preferred ‘meliorism’” (Attitudes 12). While absolutists like Leo sometimes allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good, deeming anything less than all insufficient and corrupt, realists look to make things better by degree by inducing cooperation among people and working toward collectively defined ends that are themselves constantly being redefined. In such a world, rhetoric and the arts of persuasion are not trifling tools for distracting the masses, they are “equipment for living.”
In the world we describe, justice and truth are important, albeit lower case, terms in our vocabulary. What the words mean to a given group of people at one moment in time may not be precisely the same as the meaning they possess at a different time under different circumstances, or to a different group of people in the same time and place. But every group in every circumstance imagines itself pursuing justice and truth. Or as Fish puts it more strikingly: “No one declares himself to be an apostle of injustice,” even those whose methods may strike us as heinous. Different groups may use different means to arrive at different meanings for important terms like truth and justice, but these differences are not “subjective” any more than Leo’s meanings are “objective.” Only Leo’s failure to articulate a specific meaning for his notion of truth can preserve its aura of universality. Leo’s community, like Fish’s, has worked out a definition of the term that is consistent with the principles of that community. But unlike Fish, Leo and the members of his community appear to disown the process that produced their version of truth in the first place. Upon arrival in the realm of Absolutes, they pull up their ladders after them and denounce ladder-users. Like the Platonic world of Pure Forms, Leo’s Truth appears to exist apart from the world, unaffected by the interactions of mortals. Exceptional souls may occasionally glimpse an essence amid the accidents of life, and after experiencing such epiphanies may attempt to share them with others, but beyond this, humans have no role in constructing truth. The difference between the two positions has been neatly captured by philosopher Richard Rorty:
If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by our current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood. Our focus shifts from the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry to the relation between alternative standards of justification, and from there to the actual changes in those standards which make up intellectual history. (Philosophy 389-90)
In Rorty’s terms, the debate between Leo and Fish may be framed as a debate between those who represent knowledge as an accurate description of essences versus those who understand it as “a right by our current standards to believe.” Those who subscribe to the first position relegate rhetoric and persuasion to a decidedly secondary status. The discovery of knowledge is to be left to scientists and philosophers expert in “the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry.” Those who subscribe to the second position place rhetoric and persuasion at the center of knowledge-making. Through “conversation” they work out “the relation between alternative standards of justification.” Which is, more or less, what rhetoricians have been doing for more than two millennia.
Discussion of Leo and Fish Part II: Getting from Duality to Commitment
In this second part of our discussion of the Fish and Leo essays, we want to return our focus to the classroom and how as teachers we might use these essays to work out a tentative definition of argument for ourselves and apply the lessons of the debate to our teaching. From a teaching perspective, what is especially interesting about Leo’s argument is how neatly his position and the position he assigns his opposition mimic the mindsets of two problematic groups of students we encounter frequently our classes. Borrowing from William Perry’s schema of cognitive and moral development, we term these two positions “duality and multiplicity.” They represent two of the earliest stages in Perry’s developmental schema and pose markedly different challenges in the classroom. A student in duality assumes there are clear cut right and wrong answers to every question and that the job of the teacher is to present those answers clearly and then test students on their recall of the correct answer. Problems arise when: a) we challenge them to come up with their own answers and/or, b) they believe we are offering them answers that conflict with answers they have previously assimilated from other authorities. If we are doing our jobs, we will do both of these things, which in turn will cause them either to retreat into their old truisms or to risk placing their faith—religious, political, or ideological—into doubt. Students in duality may well see us as threats to their very identity, as shadowy an unknowable as Leo’s terrorists in our attempts to unsettle their world view. It is important, thus, to keep in mind how high the stakes and great the risks may be for such students when we ask them to “prove opposites” and truly listen to opposing arguments.
Those in multiplicity, meanwhile, adopt a laissez faire, live-and-let-live approach to intellectual differences very much like the one Leo attributes to “multiculturalists.” Like those in duality, they too subvert the dialectic process, but by different means. Those in duality subvert