Rhetorical Rationality

The sense of "rational" argument put forward here is normative, context-sensitive and non-reductive. In terms of Wenzel's well known distinction among logical, dialectical and rhetorical conceptions of rational argument (Wenzel, 1990), it is rhetorical. (1)  The Gore-Perot debate was by no means a model of clear and cogent argument addressed exclusively to the merits of NAFTA. Indeed, many of the disputants arguments would have been considered as fallacious ad hominem by logicians or as in other ways irrelevant (Sperber & Wison, 1986; Wenzel, 1990).

Nor would the debate have satisfied the dialecticians of whom Wenzel spoke. In a recent presentation of their perspective, van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson and Jacobs (1993) insisted that all argumentative discourse, public debates included, be judged b y standards (or at least their standards) of cooperative exchange. The Gore-Perot debate was hardly a model of cooperative exchange.

I endorse Wenzel's sense of the rhetorical as tied to persuasion but not merely as an accounting of what persuades. Rather, the speaker's personal motive "is conditioned by the larger purposes of the society--to make decisions for the common good." Rhetor ic's purpose is to provide instruction in marshalling all the available means of persuasion so as "to help people in social groups make wise decisions" (Wenzel, 1990:6). Rhetoric, then, sets as its standard of rationality wise decision-making in service o f the common good.

Furthermore, rhetoric is context-sensitive in the sense of being ineliminably tied to the contingencies of audience and situation--to what audiences know and believe and have come to expect in particular circumstances, rather than to overarching standards of independent judgment based on assumptions of perfect knowledge or even expert knowledge. (2)  From a rhetorical perspective, audiences may rationally be influenced by the apparent authoritativeness of advocates (Aristotle, 1991; Farrell (1993), or those persons cited by the advocate in the argument's support (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969:30 6). (3)  And it may even be rational in some circumstances to lean on what psychologists call cognitive shorthands, such as the apparent sincerity of the speaker. To cite a textbook example of cognitive shorthands, the busy newcomer to the United States who decide s to try Budweiser because she has heard it is the most popular beer in America has not made an irrational decision, unless of course she had better information at her disposal (Cialdini, 1993). Walton (1992:243) provides a similar example:

[If] you are going to a football game in a foreign city where you can't read the signs at the railway station, it may be a good idea to follow the crowds that are all heading to one end of the station. If you have no other information, it may be prudent to follow the crowd, on the assumption that many of them are going to the game. Of course, so to proceed would be on the basis of a weak (defeasible) argument that could be wrong. But in the circumstances, based on considerations of burden of proof and the practical need for action, the argument could have a reasonable basis.

Rhetoric is nonreductive in the sense that how something is said counts for at least as much as what is said. From a rhetorical perspective, for example, eloquent expression matters, however much the logician may wish to compress the Gettysburg address in to a syllogism (Wills, 1992). So too is the rhetorician more likely to attend to what the logician or dialectician regards as superficial features of form and presentation (van Eemeren, et al., 1993) such as a speaker's use of dramatic narrative (Jamieson , 1988).

The foregoing characterization of rhetorical rationality as context- and language-sensitive exposes rhetoric's minimalist normative ambitions. Yet the rhetorician responds that a great many issues simply do not admit of logical formalisms (Billig, 1987; B urke, 1969; Jonsen and Toulmin, 1990; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). This raises the question whether the rhetorician can adhere to any overarching standards at all. In company with other anti-foundationalist rhetoricians and philosophers (e.g., Mc Closkey, 1985; Rorty, 1979; 1989), Stanley Fish (1994) would reject all transcendent standards of argumentative exchange, preferring, for example, to evaluate performances in debates on an ad hoc basis, in terms of the capacity of the respective debaters to establish their authoritativeness. (4)  Thus, van Eemeren et al.'s (1993) single norm for argumentative exchange would be found too far removed from contingencies of difference in audiences and situations to be sufficient as a normative guide.

As I shall attempt to make clear in the ensuing pages, I share with Fish a general suspicion of transcendent standards of argumentative exchange. This does not mean, however, that the search for guiding argumentative standards of any kind must be abandoned, even as applied to value and policy matters. In the concluding section, I make a case for subjecting a culture's norms of judgment to critical scrutiny, both for purposes of testing the norms in light of actual cases and also of clarifying them. Such a n approach might proceed in the same spirit as that of the medieval casuists who, while reluctant to declare a commitment to moral absolutes, were willing to entertain moral principles as paradigmatic, and then to allow considerations of circumstances to override them, as need be, in judgments of complex or unusual cases (Jonsen and Toulmin, 1990).

Needed in our own day, I believe, are studies of different genres (public policy debates being one of them) aimed at defining by example the situated, locally contingent sense of rhetorical rationality generally favored in this essay. Studies of this kind should move dialectically between analyses of texts and of audiences, and between cultural norms of rational discourse and actual rhetorical practices. Such an approach has already been anticipated in the policy realm by the essays collected in Schiappa (1995). It does not, we should note, rule out the possibility of generalization across cases.

However, the more general the norm, the more likely it is to contain vague or ambiguous terms, the meanings of which will once again be locally contingent. Consider for example the quite laudable principle of equal justice, a rule of "interchangeability o f persons" so far as morality and law are concerned (Perelman, 1979:118). Perelman quotes ethicist Henry Sidgwick for a clarification of the rule.

...it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground that they are two different individuals, and without there being any difference between the natures or circumstances of the two which can be stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment (in Perelman, 1979:119).

Sidgwick's is indeed a clarification, but it leaves unanswered the question of how one determines the degree of similarity between persons warranting similar or identical treatment.

The difficulties in applying formal rules or norms to issues of law have been acknowledged by legal theorist Richard Posner (1990) in The Problems of Jurisprudence. Here Posner surveys proposed "impersonal" or "formal" methods by which judges might objectively resolve legal disputes and finds each of them wanting. Rules, he says, that are invoked as formal and universal, are almost always employed "in the service of ad hoc exceptions and adjustments" (Posner, 1990:46). Most often, Posner laments, judges are left with "objectivity" in the sense of "merely reasonable--that is, not willful, not personal, not (narrowly) political, not utterly indeterminate though not determinate in the ontological or scientific sense, but as amenable to and accompanied by persuasive though not necessarily convincing explanation" (Posner, 1990:7). This form of objectivity, which Posner calls "conversational," cannot be generated by a mechanical procedure. Indeed, as Stanley Fish argues, "it is the antithesis of objectivity as many understand it, a state of certitude that attends the identification and embrace of bedrock and abiding fact and/or principle. To those for whom objectivity can only come in this (hard) form, the temporary outcomes of an indeterminate and messy institutional `conversation' hardly meet the test" (Fish, 1994:201).

Key to conversational objectivity is "practical reason," a grab bag "that includes anecdote, introspection, imagination, common sense, empathy, imputation of motives, speaker's authority, metaphor, analogy, precedent, custom, memory, 'experience'" (Posner : 1990:73). This, says Fish approvingly, is a "rhetorical rather than logical" mode of calculation (204). Rather than keeping personal preference or prejudice at bay, in the realm of practical reasoning, intuitions "that lie so deep that we don't know how to question them" (Posner, 1990:73) serve as the premises of all reasoning. In the NAFTA debate, for example, Gore adopts a stance of "banal nationalism," the assumption that the common good in question is his nation's good rather than, say, the global good (Billig, 1995). Prior beliefs also influence the way evidence is marshaled and even seen, so that what is regarded by one judge as topic relevant may appear totally irrelevant to another.

But the judge cannot decide in any direction he or she wishes. As Fish puts it, "the routes of choice, indeed the alternative forms in which choice can even appear, are constrained by the present shape of practical reasoning, by what arguments will work, what categories are firmly in place, what distinctions can be confidently invoked" (Fish, 1994:204). Thus the judge must determine or sense

where the lines of authority are--what previous holdings will strike one as settling a question, what rules can be invoked without challenge or qualification, what maxims ("no one should be permitted to profit from his own wrong") will close down discuss ion, what analogies have stood the test of time, "what politically accredited source" has issued what citable pronouncements, what goals now go virtually unquestioned in the realm of "rational" deliberation--and then of "working" these "authoritative" materials in the direction of one's purposes, one's inclinations, one's intuitions, one's beliefs (Fish, 1994:204).

What now of public policy debates, conducted not before a trained judge, but before television audiences, and on issues that are often emotionally involving or highly technical? What can we expect of such debates in the way of practical reason? And what, in particular, should be the role of the debaters' ethos? If it is a fair certainty that debates of this kind will fail by the standards of cooperative exchange suggested by van Eemeren, et al., neither, in most instances, can they rise to the level of judicial debates, played out before experienced judges. But saying that does not teach us much because it merely recites the obvious. How much more useful it would be to judge televised public policy debates between politicians on their own terms?

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