Booth, Wayne C., Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). University of Chicago edition.

Reading Notes (Adam Kissel)

epigraph: quote by Tom Paine-- "My own mind is my own church." Cf. Satan in Paradise Lost. [also cf. S. to dissenters on pp. 130-31]

Modernism, when taken for its reductive scientism, does not admit of persuasion but only scientific proof, which leaves people as robots unable to choose out of a free will. Rhetoric becomes a value only insofar as it is effective rather than wise [cf. Cicero who adds rhetoric on top of philosophy; same thing said in Booth p. 89], insofar as it is effective propaganda. So studies of rhetoric would become scientific, but even so they would encode hidden oughts about the supremacy of scientific method as the only reasonable way to knowledge. [These oughts come from the supreme ought, that we ought to act solely in accordance with what we know to be the truth. This ought leaves out the practical problem of having nothing sufficiently proven in order to live. But does Socrates have something here when he encourages us to sit on our butts thinking and philosophizing before we get too comfortable doing anything?]

Literary analysis picked up this modernist tendency of scientism, though its subject matter is full of passion and values and all kinds of non-scientific life.

Modernism collapsed all nonscientific discourse, with its varying degrees of credibility, into either one category of the irrational (scientism), or one arena of conflicting faiths with no way to determine winners (irrationalism). Even though modernism so quickly discounts the value and values of life, it sees no "argumentative force in disastrous consequences" but just goes about its business of rationality till the end. [Rather, the argumentative force is taken to be, 'So there, we're nothing special; don't try to make us something when we're not anything.']

It's way beyond the present discussion to disprove this modernist dogma (which would not admit of this book's kind of proof anyway). It's also too much to trace the history of those who have tried to disprove it, without getting into whole philosophies and theologies and epistemologies and logologies.

It has been unfair to put reason/knowledge on one side of a great divide, and "all the rest" on the other side. Rather, if we are to divide the mind, let's use three parts: reason, will, and feeling. Behaviorists seek to put all value (second and third parts) into reason. But very, very many others seek different harmonies "between nature and value."

For example, from one set of perspectives, if man's values are just conscious extensions of nature's values or God's values, then somehow the values are natural but also valuable. Such "expanding the natural" is to reincorporate the metaphysical into our ontology (see Whitehead on integrating emotions and ideas, p. 93--process philosophy). It is to recover final causes in nature. Value becomes part of reason. Romanticism, quoting Gillispie, p. 94, as "attempts to defend a qualitative science." [How do Bate and Engell treat the classic-romantic shift?] For another example, consider the meaning of "good reasons" (95). For another, much phenomenology.

From another set of perspectives, if the world is absurd but all will anyway (Schopenhauer; existentialism), then science gets incorporated into the will's world. If free will exists, and it experientially does, then science is stuck without it. But "these affirmings [of will] are logically ... indefensible" and don't seem to adequately challenge scientism.

Another set of perspectives, the pragmatist point [AHA!] (Pierce, Dewey, James), is that "scientific knowledge becomes a special case of fulfillment of [the] human purpose ... to know" (96). (Not just existence [material cause] but also purpose [final cause] of the will are known.) Logic becomes "the logic of inquiry" informed by values; values dictate which logic gets used, and when, and how.

Another set is the "reality as feeling" group, including the metaphysic of art/beauty--esthetics, beyond ethics--or a Platonic identity of truth, goodness, and beauty (Santayana). Ethics as taste. Esthetics of the individual and/or of the community.

All of these sets can be sources of "reasonable reasons" once a scale of reasons and probability is revived. There can be a plurality of reasons and kinds of reasons. And all of these abstractions, for normal people with common sense, fall back into (empirical) experience. Too much reliance on thinking forgets that we make dangerous, even fatal, errors in reasoning--so often we are no worse off to over-rely on feeling. Fanatics, e.g., lose the common sense of interacting with their reasonable dissenters. Scientists can be fanatics in this sense, too.

Common-sense notions probably ought to be assented to rather than dissented from, unless there are "specific and stronger reasons to disbelieve" (101). This is the "ancient and natural command." [But it is also the falseness of common-sense notions that we are least likely to spot, and therefore these are in most need of scrutiny. Could this statement really be made in 1000 BC before we really knew how much of anything worked?]

Popper on falsifiability: we know something is true if we know why it isn't false (that the conditions that would make it false are themselves false). This idea is common, and also makes its way into literary criticism, but it turns out not a thorough help--such a test "cannot be applied rigorously even in mathematics" (103n.). This criterion also cannot pass its own test, it turns out. Furthermore, there are all manner of things that simply have to be true if the whole fabric of life choices is to make sense: e.g., "when my wife suffers, I ought to try to help" (104) or "help thy neighbor." Much of these choices comes from conscience--but to what extent is that constructed vs. "real"? By the time any really important or big claim is tested adequately, it would be too late to go back and make all the decisions--so many decisions have to be made without all the evidence.

By agreeing to live in the world and use a language/custom/culture, we together accept a lot of responsibilities given by common sense. Though we quickly find the gray areas, very many duties are seldom caught in the gray. And just to talk about gray areas assumes assent to the general proposition of normative discourse.

Why not assent to "what we believe together" first, until there is just as good reason to doubt as to assent? This does not open the floodgates of assent, but maintains a respect for varying degrees of plausibility. Assent tends to be tentative [which is scarcely less than what science gives anyway]. These assents tend to map back to experience, usually collective experience. Trash need not be assented to--and this is fine (in this system) because there is no required disproof in order to doubt trash, just as there is no required proof of assent.

Collective experience comes to bear, usually, as the experience of trusted experts and authorities. The idea is that anyone "thoroughly informed and rational" would be able to agree. [Murderers give up the right of authority because of a predefined irrational act; non-scientists give up the right of authority in science because of an inability to be thoroughly informed--we trust the scientists. But how do we protect against false authorities? By remembering our ability to dissent when something seems fishy about the implications for other aspects of life. But who gets to say who "counts" as a person and potential authority? Hitler asks, is a Jew a person? If not, there's no problem--it doesn't help to go back to Kant's imperative to treat all persons as ends: who is a person is still not defined. Also remember Hume, p. 124--"the whole problem is reduced ... to determining who are the qualified judges"--need you be fully qualified already to judge this? And problems continue until pragmatism returns.]

But since there is a scale of plausibility, we often find that assented values will conflict. Also, because experience is pluralistic, all rational people will not "always finally agree" (111). Yet we must, because there is enough overlap and enough shared experience, explore together our differences in knowledge (always remembering varying degrees of certainty).

We all use symbols and especially (but not only [p. 125n.]) language (cf. Burke) as modes of shared understanding. "We know other minds, sometimes, to some degree" (114). We all understand ourselves mostly through a building-up of thoughts based on experiences, which, in terms of self-understanding, are primarily the experiences of getting to know other people. We also try to influence the process of others' self-building through our interactions (primarily if not completely through symbols). We infer the intangible parts of the self that we call intentions, and we often can do this correctly. Furthermore, we often understand intention in terms of values. Finally, we all often disagree, too, on even the most important things (and what these are).

Though we also often infer intentions incorrectly, this is no worse than reasoning incorrectly or doing wrong science. That intentions are subjective does not disqualify them. Here "we not only have good reason to repudiate the hard distinction between objective and subjective worlds, but we also have a major step in the discovery of how facts and values are combined."

Even when there are multiple intentions, we often are able to correctly identify at least part of the whole. Art expresses multiple intentions, yet we still recognize, e.g., irony as meant ironically. Helps include: strength of personal conviction, agreement with other people (though democracy is scarcely a help because of the "thoroughly informed" qualification), agreement with similar knowledge, and "teachability or corrigibility." This last means that the ease with which a person can be persuaded by good reasons to change his mind, informs the knowledge of the thing.

Although mind (and self) is not only rhetorical, and it exists outside rhetoric in its broadest sense (though inaccessibly), "it is essentially rhetorical" for all purposes we can think of. As people in culture, we cannot escape it [though we do in the sense of having individual experiences]. We are always stuck in a context of experience if nothing else, while alive.

But modernists (1) in scientism, care less for the structure of life (formal cause) than for physical laws (efficient cause); (2) in irrationalism, find self-alienation in so much efficient cause, and so form a self-being of dissent--but paradoxically, one that seeks social sanction for the dissent. [cf. Tom Frank, Baffler] Exemptions in life, morals, aesthetics, all are part of this "possessive individualism" (131n.). Yet (2) so often turns out to seek society that it undercuts itself. We tend to want individualism and community at the same time [this is the big problem for poli sci; Booth cites Hobbes]. Self is too sadly solitary. Without God in the ontology, so commonly thus nowadays, the self is thoroughly alone. But Booth believes "that rhetorical questions pursued honestly will finally lead to a God-term" (136) [Booth's God-term comes from the question, What made a symbolically-understood universe? So the God-term is a Creator.] In any case, values do turn out to exist as real and must be dealt with by us symbol-using people.

Since people live in context, there is fundamental, vital reason to use rhetoric to help change people's minds (even literally), and it is good to use good rhetoric, using good reasons (and v.v.). The best rhetoric seems to be an engagement "in mutual inquiry or exploration" [cf. Socrates]. The process of mutual inquiry itself effects mental change when done well, even if one's mind is not changed about the main point. [like this book?]