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Rhetoric of inquiry: Projects and

prospects
a b
John S. Nelson & Allan Megill
a
Associate Professor of Political Science , University of
Iowa ,
b
Associate Professor of History , University of Iowa ,
Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: John S. Nelson & Allan Megill (1986) Rhetoric of inquiry: Projects and
prospects, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 72:1, 20-37, DOI: 10.1080/00335638609383756

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 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH,
72 (1986), 20-37

RHETORIC OF INQUIRY:
PROJECTS AND PROSPECTS
John S. Nelson and Allan Megill

Inquiry is nothing but serious communication.

Glenn Tinder

T HIS essay is an exercise in communication across disciplines. It is an attempt to

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explain and to advance a line of investigation we call rhetoric of inquiry. In

helping to organize the first interdisciplinary symposium on the topic, we learned
how vital is its emergence.1 Yet we also learned how separate is its origin from
mainstream traditions of rhetorical theory, how slim is its familiarity with recent
research on the epistemics of argument, and how scant is its interaction with
communication scholars.2 Rhetoric of inquiry needs more participation by communi-
cation scholars.
By reporting the concerns of the new field, we hope to encourage specialists in
rhetoric to address rhetoric of inquiry more than before. By summarizing its sources,
we hope to enable them to understand it better. And by noting its needs, we hope to
endow their contributions with greater success. Here we make no direct contribution
to debates about epistemics of persuasion or rhetorics of science, nor do we pretend to
tell the history of rhetoric to its main students. Rather, we sketch the development of
the field so far, focusing on how early contributors have regarded rhetoric and
inquiry. This is not the history of rhetoric, science, or philosophy widely familiar to
scholars of communication. It is instead an animating myth of the new field. If the
purpose is to know the audience, then it is a myth that scholars of communication
should study. Moreover, what begins as myth ends as history.

REDUCTION
Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms
and forms....
Robert M. Pirsig

In various ways, the story goes, thinkers in centuries prior to the seventeenth
regarded rhetoric as the prime domain of language and argument. Since then,
however, rhetoric has not played an important role in Western self-consciousness. It
has become at most a technology, indispensable for politicians or others who wish to
win friends and influence people, but trivial in its own right. Those who would act
within public spaces must cultivate rhetoric, along with the suspicions that it
engenders; those who remain within private realms of thought or affection can

Mr. Nelson is Associate Professor of Political Science and Mr. Megill is Associate Professor of History,
University of Iowa. The authors wish to thank Bruce E. Gronbeck, John Lyne, and Michael Calvin
McGeefor help in orienting their essay to communication scholars. They also want to thank University
House for an Interdisciplinary Research Grant that supported part of the work on the essay.
 21
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH NELSON AND MEGILL

usually afford to ignore or rise above it. This conviction has dominated the modern
age.
According to modern convictions, rhetoric in a well-tempered polity remains
subordinate to the true and the good. Only when temperance disappears do we really
need rhetoric. For rhetoric is dangerous, too easily serving evil rather than good. All
too often, it generates evil. When rhetoric as mere form is conjured into substance, it
fosters perversions. Scholars, especially, have come to regard rhetoric as foisting
falsehood and therefore evil onto the community at large (though not onto scholars,
who know better). Rhetoric lets lies masquerade as truth. It creates or at least abets
Hitlers and Stalins. Where it is not to be disdained, it is to be feared.
In no century has this contempt for rhetoric reached greater extremes than in our
own. This reflects our deep-seated fear of barbarism. A prominent worry since the
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Enlightenment is that the barbarians are at the gates. They may be fascists,
proletarians, student revolutionaries, or religious cultists. But always the image pits
those who know against those who do not want to know. While not unique to
professors, this image is especially beloved of those whose orientation is "theoreti-
cal," detached from the complexities of ordinary life.
Underlying this stand is an absolutized dichotomy between truth and opinion. The
unrhetorical mind elevates truth over opinion, despising opinion as truth's perverse
impostor. The essentialist opposition of truth to opinion is at least as old as Socrates
and Plato, but its modern versions are intensified by alliance with the seventeenth-
century dichotomy between subject and object. This first attained prominence in
Descartes. It was highlighted by Kant; it became an all-embracing problem for
Schiller, Hegel, and Schelling; it worries us still.
As modernists see it, humans live in the moral world of free and active subjects, not
the natural world of passive and determined objects. But subjects seem capable only
of opinion, while truth apparently pertains to the domain of objects. To move from
subjectivity to truth, Descartes proposed to doubt his way to clear and distinct ideas.
But how could we know them to be truly objective? Similarly, Kant postulated the
synthetic a priori. But how could we be certain that any form (let alone content)
ascribed to it truly transcends mere opinion?
In its radical separation of conviction from persuasion, the strict opposition of
objective truth to subjective opinion is supremely unrhetorical. Referring to their
Latin roots, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that to convince is to coerce belief
("to overcome, conquer, convict, demonstrate"), whereas to persuade is to induce
belief ("to bring over by talking . . . to advise, recommend, urge as desirable").
Aspiring to conviction, logic of inquiry reduces knowledge to finished and putatively
unimpeachable products. It attempts to transcend details of diverse investigations to
formulate ironclad rules of inference applicable to all. It omits the human processes
comprehended by rhetoric. Ultimately, it conceives knowers to benefit from privi-
leged (and often undiscussable) observations or intuitions that allow unassailable
conclusions to follow by sheer logic.
As a result, conclusions are simply imposed by authoritysupposedly grounded in
truth, but often without adequate argument and typically without attention to the
contextual and personal details that rhetoric recognizes as crucial for persuasion.
Thus the rhetorical dimensions of language and argumentwhich focus on the
actual criteria and dynamics of persuasioncome to be barred from processes of
knowing proper. Rhetoric may be used to persuade those who do not yet know how to
 22
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1986

become convinced through intuition, observation, or demonstration. But it is a

troublesome and treacherous tool, more likely to lure listeners away from truth than
toward it.

REPRESSION
. . . we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A
little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being.
Thomas Pynchon

The modern myth puts the matter in philosophical terms, tracing much of the
recent denigration of rhetoric to the Cartesian bias of our culture. The subject/object
dichotomy is the bane of the human sciences. Significantly, Descartes was sharply
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divided against himself on matters of rhetoric. His Discourse on Method embodies a

masterful use of narrative for persuasive ends. Contrary to those who would restrict
rhetoric to superficial concerns of the moment, his writing has lasted so well partly
because of its rhetoric. Yet Descartes held in principle that rhetoric is merely
usedand inessentially at that. His theory is strikingly anti-rhetorical. Only
conviction counts; rhetoric may persuade but cannot convince. The primal idea or
given perception that is the sole basis for knowledge is unarguable, and therefore
extra-rhetorical. Establishing the standard for subsequent scholarship, Descartes
resolved to regard "almost as false" all that is "merely plausible." But, as Aristotle
observed, rhetoric concerns the plausible and the probable.
To compartmentalize truth and opinion, object and subject, substance and form,
and the like, rejects the mediation of rhetoric while depending on it. Incapable of
recognizing, let alone legitimating, their need for rhetoric, modern philosophers are
typically unable to account for their own philosophies. To offset this liability, the
modern project to displace or destroy rhetoric promises to lay the foundations for
order, peace, and prosperity. It proposes to exclude conflict by establishing spheres of
logically demonstrative (or at least politically stipulative) certainty. Either this would
eliminate disagreements altogether, and thereby remove the need for persuasion and
rhetoric, or at least it would prevent rhetoric from instigating conflict and perpetrat-
ing fraud. The dream of dispelling disagreement through demonstration was
promulgated not only by the "rationalist" Descartes, but also by his "empiricist"
counterpart John Locke. It was the grand dream of the eighteenth-century Enlight-
enment, and it has carried over into later efforts to construct sciences of society.
For Locke, as for Descartes, the model of conviction was mathematics. Of late, we
have come to recognize that the demonstrative proofs of mathematics are not so
rigorously unrhetorical as Descartes, Locke, and many others have thought.
Mathematicians disagree and must persuade one anotheras do historians, econo-
mists, and physicists. To sever conviction from persuasion makes no more sense of
relations among scholars than it does of relations between professors and wider
publics.
Still, modern philosophies pose tempting visions of absolute certitudes which
would allow us to control or withstand cultural change and political conflict. Plato
denigrated opinion and rhetoric so as to celebrate truth and order at a time of Greek
conflict and Athenian decline. Similarly, Aristotle subordinated mythos to logos and
rhetoric to dialectic. In an era when radical disagreements racked the peace of
Europe, Descartes wrote off rhetoric in favor of mathematical reason and Hobbes
 23
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH NELSON AND MEGILL

enslaved language to the sovereign. Later, Kant sought perpetual peace through pure
and practical reason. Craving certainty as a path to peace and order in our own
troubled times, many of us may be tempted by similar visions. But after more than
three centuries of such abstract Utopias, not to mention the programs for their
enforcement, we have every reason to resist their temptation and revise their
anti-rhetorical premises.
Intermittently since the ancient Sophists, important students of human affairs
have turned to rhetoric as a perspective on inquiry. After the Roman rhetoricians
came such scholars of rhetoric as Augustine and Ramus. The civic humanism of the
Renaissance could as well be called rhetorical humanism; and not even a brief list of
philosophical rhetoricians would be complete without Vico, C.S. Peirce, and
Nietzsche. Despite the widespread tendency to see rhetoric as unimportant or
perverse, the work of such scholars preserved the perspectives and principles which
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now inform rhetoric as a field of study.3

In the nineteenth century, a few philosophers began to oppose objectivist notions of
logic, method, and science. In the twentieth century, Dewey and Wittgenstein
reconceived the relationship of scholarly criteria to judgment and action in everyday
life, while Heidegger attacked the subject/object dichotomy.4 These developments
provide a rationale for concentrating on actual practices, scholarly and otherwise.
Even though such thinkers do not always pursue a rhetorical path, they do suggest
the need for new rhetorics, conceived less as techniques than as intrinsic dimensions
of doing and knowing by human beings. In particular, at least three of these skeins of
scholarship contribute directly to rhetoric of inquiry.
First is the philosophical attack on foundationalism. Although seldom explicitly
rhetorical, it nonetheless strives toward the same principles of inquiry and communi-
cation that govern rhetoric. It shares the rhetorical drive to comprehend how
standards of criticism can be immanent within scholarly and other practices, so that
such practices can be reflective and responsible for themselves. Accordingly, it would
condemn or curtail the claims to authority that philosophy makes over substantive
disciplines and other human activities.
Second is the philosophical reconstruction of science. Modernist epistemology
recognizes only two main images of science, implied to be mutually opposed and
exhaustive: science as formally demonstrative and science as empirically compelling.
Part of the perplexity of modernist epistemology is that its sometime thesis of the
unity of science establishes a virtually self-defeating task of reconciling these opposed
images. Even beyond this dilemma, it relates poorly to actual practices in science that
historians, sociologists, psychologists, and (increasingly) rhetoriciansnot to men-
tion scientists themselveshave uncovered. The pictures of scientific investigation
and persuasion emerging from these converging domains of study provide rich
starting points for the rhetoric of inquiry.
Third is the rhetorical reconception of epistemology. For more than a decade,
specialists have examined how rhetoric is epistemic: how it can produce and shape as
well as communicate knowledge. Thus far, however, few of the epistemic inspira-
tions for rhetoric of inquiry come from communication theory. Partly they come
instead from reconsiderations of foundationalism in philosophy; partly they stem
from the practical rhetorics of research in diverse fields of the human sciences; but
mostly they spring from explorations of rhetorical theory by scholars outside
communication studies. A good way to evoke rhetoric of inquiry is to examine more
 24
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1986

fully the convergence of these trends in scholarship. Hence we devote a separate

section to each of the three.

REGENERATION
If I am rich in anything, it is in perplexities rather than in certainties.
Jorge Luis Borges

Twentieth-century thought includes several movements which challenge the

Cartesian foundations and Kantian principles of modern philosophy. In the
Anglo-American world, these remain minority tendencies; but their recent
momentum is impressive. More striking yet is their diversity, for these challenges
appear in radically different guises and contexts. Even the brief survey at hand spans
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Nietzsche and Heidegger, Dewey and Wittgenstein, Derrida and Foucault, Cavell
and Gadamer, Rorty and Habermas, Nozick and Maclntyre. In important if
disparate ways, these and other theorists set the stage for renewed appreciation of the
rhetorical dimensions of inquiry.
One implicitly rhetorical challenge to the sovereignty that modern philosophy
claims over scholarship actually begins with Nietzsche's assault on the subject/object
dichotomy. In his Nachlass, he suggested that "the objective is only a false concept of
a genus and an antithesis within the subjective."5 More specifically, he repudiated
the positivist view that "there are only facts." Instead he insisted that facts are
"precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact 'in
itself: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing."6
With Heidegger, Nietzsche's disconcertingly poetic attack became systematic.
Heidegger's Being and Time sets severe limits on subject/object oppositions. It
denigrates the notion of subjects as rational spectators, pristine in their isolation from
objects. It replaces this notion with Dasein, constituted "always already" by the
situation in which it finds itself. Thus Heidegger rejected the modern subject,
separate from the world of objects, in favor of a "Being-in-the-world" fully
embedded in history. Human identities are made within history and by the
interaction of human beings with one another.
Aside from a few provocative passages, however, Nietzsche and Heidegger
neglected the rhetorical implications of their assault on Descartes and his descen-
dants. In some respects, they repeated and even aggravated modern prejudices
against rhetoric. In the guise of Zarathustra, Nietzsche returned to the discredited
rhetoric of self-proclaimed sages who presume to promulgate new laws and forms of
life for the rest of us. As a German professor of philosophy, Heidegger pontificated
dangerously about politics.7 Still, some of the styles and much of the message of these
men can be construed to celebrate rhetoric, not only for the inquiry of scholars but
also for the diverse activities of ordinary people.
Both Nietzsche and Heidegger ridiculed the notion that facts could somehow
speak for themselves. Rhetoric of inquiry is needed not only because we cannot know
things in themselves but also because facts can never talk for themselves. Necessarily,
we are the ones who speak of, for, and against facts. In the past, insecurities
engendered by modern skepticism and its philosophical craving for certainty made
these rhetorical dimensions of inquiry seem risky. Fearing accusations of relativism,
conventionalism, or epistemological anarchism, many scholars turned away from
 25
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH NELSON AND MEGILL

rhetoric. By now, however, such philosophers as Cavell and Rorty dispell some of
these worries. Despite differences on many important points, such "edifiers" show
how the usual candidates for a philosophical abyssskepticism, solipsism, nihil-
ismare more results of modern epistemology than reasons for clinging to it.
Accordingly, rhetoric of inquiry urges that scholars overcome insistence on
certainties needed or achieved. In scholarship, as in all activities, accepting uncer-
tainties can lead to a richer appreciation of questions and complexities. In inquiry, it
allows us to understand the diverse standards and strategies of science on their own
levels. Either it adds new sciences or it complicates old ones internallykeeping
them open to better positions than any established at present. Rhetoric of inquiry
insists on connecting the conduct of sciences not only to their logics and methods but
also to their aesthetics, economics, histories, and sociologies. Remembering that even
academic reason is practical reason, it situates research in uncertain but actual
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communities of human activity.8 Hence it reminds scholars that rhetoric was the
first, and, in some respects, remains the foremost science of human communities.
This idea suggests one of the ways in which Dewey and Wittgenstein turned
philosophy in the direction of rhetoric. Dewey renounced certainty as a modern aim,
while Wittgenstein sought a drastic reconception of it. Of the two, therefore, Dewey
came closer to Heidegger than did Wittgenstein. But Heidegger generally denigrated
politics and public affairs, whereas Dewey celebrated engagement in public life,
which he presented in prominentlyv rhetorical terms. He excoriated all who
proclaimed political certainties, declaring instead that democracy depends on
accepting uncertainty, risk, and change in the public's business. Moreover, his
recommendations for informing government with scholarship repeatedly portray
rhetoric as the very fabric of public affairs.
Less politically, but no less rhetorically, Wittgenstein shared Dewey's commit-
ment to saving scholarship from a modern philosophy that would exalt it over and
hence sunder it from practical forms of life. Wittgenstein worried about the
debasement of public language, a concern he shared with Carnap, Russell, and
related philosophers. In the manner of the time, he initially responded by attempting
to identify, in the formalist fashion of logic and mathematics, foundations of utter
certainty for language.9 Plumbing the limits of this project, however, he eventually
transformed or replaced ithis remarks are notoriously elusivediscovering the
pointedly rhetorical device of language games.
These games display not only languages and inquiries but also whole forms of life
as transactions among actors, speakers, and listeners. The metaphor of games gives
new significance to rhetorical aspects of argument, communication, and inquiry as
they occur in actual practices populated by real people. Denouncing the modern
craving for generality, Wittgenstein implied that human activities could be compre-
hended only by situating them in their concrete and detailed contexts of occurrence,
not by assimilating them to abstract and formal laws of behavior. The concept of
language games also led him to a rhetorical reconsideration of the modern notion of
philosophical criteria, especially in matters epistemological.
Cavell has elaborated Wittgenstein's remarks on criteria with a shrewd awareness
of their political and rhetorical significance. In The Claim of Reason, he shows that
our operative and reasonable standards of judgment develop within ordinary
practices of life.10 These criteria are created and used within the reflective worlds of
society and politics, not apart from them in some metalogic of philosophy. In
 26
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1986

American politics, for example, campaign practices stand largely distinct from
judicial practices. Judicial practices have different standards and histories of
decision, and neither set of practices depends on some overarching philosophy of
inference to dictate or evaluate its criteria for action and judgment.
To be sure, this diversity of human reason increases and complicates our standards
of decision. It also situates them in unreflective dynamics of choice, such as habit and
tradition. For rhetoric of inquiry, though, this has the positive effect of spotlighting
argument and persuasion as arenas for studying how human activities can thrive
under such complex conditions. It allows us to see how practices include and apply
reflective criteria of their own, and helps us to understand how these immanent
epistemologies remain open to learning from judgments, standards, and even
epistemologies originally external to their respective practices.
In this light, Hans-Georg Gadamer adds to the problematics of Nietzsche and
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Heidegger a rhetorical attention to dialogue and communication. Gadamer's empha-

sis on the communitarian aspects of interpretation is closely comparable to Cavell's
concern with the intimate ties of reason and community. This dialogic and
communitarian dimension makes their work unusually open to the social and
political sides of rhetoric of inquiry. But unlike Cavell, who treats epistemology as a
continuing (if changing) problematic of scholarship in general and of philosophy in
particular, Gadamer tries to resolve argument and epistemology into the science of
interpretation, hermeneutics. Even though his Truth and Method sometimes
mistakes a hermeneutical part for the rhetorical whole, it adds to a new rhetorical
consciousness, especially in the humanities.11
Another impressive contributor to rhetoric of inquiry, Richard Rorty, similarly
proposes to replace epistemology by hermeneutics. Sensitivity to rhetoric is suggested
by Rorty's earlier interest in the "linguistic turn" of twentieth-century philosophers,
but it is unmistakable in his recent condemnation of philosophy as a "mirror of
nature." Rorty argues that there is reason to seek a general, synoptic analysis of roles
allegedly played by knowledge in abstracted forms of practice. He declares that
"cultural anthropology (in a large sense which includes intellectual history) is all we
need."12 To the extent that Rorty details his notion of a cultural anthropology of
knowledge, it converges with rhetoric of inquiry. Accordingly, it is no surprise that
he promotes philosophies which "edify" (rather than systematize) by contributing
persuasively to "the conversation of mankind."13
Rorty maintains that the "mirror" epistemology of modern philosophy depends on
"seeing the attainment of truth as a matter of necessity" whether logical or
empirical.14 His turn away from certain truth and coercive argument is common to a
surprising range of current philosophers. For example, Robert Nozick's analytical
philosophy is poles apart from Rorty's edifying philosophy, yet Nozick shares
Rorty's quest for undermining authoritarian arguments. He would replace them
with libertarian kinds of community and persuasive styles of communication. Thus
Nozick's Philosophical Explanations begins by exploring how philosophical texts
persuade him. It leads to what he believes to be uncoercive principles for philosophi-
cal argument.15 The resulting style remains radically different from Rorty's, both in
communication and investigation. But the very ability of rhetorical consciousness to
encompass such diverse styles is one of its great strengths, especially for scholarship
in our time of intellectual and political pluralism.16
Just as Rorty attacks analytical philosophy, so he rejects theories of "universal
 27
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH NELSON AND MEGILL

contexts of practical life."17 Especially in the work of Jiirgen Habermas, these

comprise still another movement to return attention to rhetoric. Rather than
transforming philosophy into hermeneutics, Habermas tries to endow philosophy
with the problematics of rhetoric. His critique of distorted communication combines
with his background in Marxism to produce the most directly political version of the
rhetoric of inquiry to be surveyed here. His is also among the more specifically and
self-consciously rhetorical treatments of inquiry yet produced. But perhaps the most
interesting feature of his work is its attempt to harmonize many projects in social
theory with communication and rhetoric. This is especially evident in his two
volumes on The Theory of Communicative Action.
If Habermas seeks to rejoin philosophy and rhetoric, Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida have been inclined to take them even farther from the mainstreams
of modern analysis. Indeed, to confine either writer strictly to philosophy, history,
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criticism, or any other compartment of modern intellectual life is to obscure more

than clarify his contributions. Fortunately for present purposes, their inspirations
are less controversial than any labels for their work, for they are offspring of
Nietzsche and Heidegger.19
Radical deconstructions of modernism in scholarship have led both Foucault and
Derrida to the significance of language in human life. In this respect, Derrida's
infamous declaration that "there is nothing outside of the text" is mostly a
recognition that reality is rhetorically constructed. Similarly, the twisting reasons
and rhetorics of Derrida's deconstructions teach us to study the assumptions and
interests which lie beneath purported proofs and demonstrations of social fact. Both
Foucault and Derrida have shown a flair for excavating and illuminating the
underground dimensions of rhetoric in politics and inquiry. Of the two, Foucault has
been the more overtly rhetorical in his focus. He drove relentlessly toward
discovering the devices of language and argument which defend modern power as
neutral, objective, scientific, and technicalrather than as interested, mythic,
political, and rhetorical.
Deliberately outrageous, Foucault and Derrida have presented us with one
objectionable passage after another. Nonetheless, we must credit them with impor-
tant insights into our conventions and institutions, especially those of scholarship.
Over and over, their writings portray our truths as reincarnations of old, partly
repressed, but still dictatorial rhetorics and beliefs. Continually, they challenge us to
explore the rhetorical structures of our reality and to produce better rhetorics and
stories about ourselves and our studies.
Trying to restore to Anglo-American philosophy a similar appreciation of these
needs, Alasdair Maclntyre argues that storytelling is a central feature of good living,
as of good inquiry. In After Virtue, he argues against the anti-rhetorical aim of a
unified science of society that would talk only in terms of logical methods, general
laws, and the systematic data required for testing their truth.20 Unified science is
neither desirable nor possible, he contends, and pursuit of it is destroying our sense of
moral virtuenot to mention our social science and public philosophy.
Opposing the claims of modernism in science and morality, Maclntyre maintains
that social inquiry is inseparable from ethics. In turn, ethics depends on storied
descriptions of social "roles," on the "characters" who play them, and on the scenes
in which they appear. Such ethics requires that we revitalize our sense of virtue in
everyday life. To do this, we must comprehend how reason is dramaturgical,
 28
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1986

practical, and rhetoricalinstead of merely formal, instrumental, or technical. This

is precisely the interest of many rhetoricians of inquiry.
Maclntyre recognizes that to criticize generalization and to accept the narrativity
or practicality of judgment is to invite accusations of relativism. In the fashion of
Cavell and Rorty, Maclntyre provides his own, explicit stories of modern emotivism,
empiricism, logicism, and the liketo expose and contest the old, implicit tales with
which modern philosophy glorifies itself. Maclntyre's new tales portray relativ-
ism as the product of modern philosophy, politics, and everyday existencerather
than as the abyss which they avoid. Hence Maclntyre both identifies our need
for enhanced awareness of rhetoric and dispells our fear of increased vulnerability
to relativism.

RECONSTRUCTION
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Somewhere in science, especially the human ones, we have to commit ourself to objectivity.
And, especially in the human ones, objectivity cannot be the same as disinterest.
Samuel R. Delany

The Enlightenment dream of a single, certain, natural, and rational order

authoritative for everyone is still with usand may never disappear entirely. But
rhetoricians of inquiry are sensitive to how it has begun to fade in our everyday
practices, even in academia. Indeed, a major project of twentieth-century scholarship
has been to escape Western rationalism and its paradox of authoritarian liberation.
This is how so many significant scholars have become part of a renewal of rhetorical
consciousness, and this is why their contributions have started to sketch the contours
and reasons for rhetoric of inquiry.
Since the Second World War, as old aspirations to purge human communications
and sciences of rhetoric have waned, the study of rhetoric has gradually revived along
with studies of language, law, literature, politics, speech acts, and action generally.
Now rhetoric is returning to the center of the humanities. It is starting to figure more
importantly in the social sciences. Even mathematicians and natural scientists are
talking more about their rhetorics, and the same is true of the learned professions.
Initially, the transformation of logic of inquiry into rhetoric of inquiry was
spurred by the work of Chai'm Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, and Thomas Kuhn.
With the exception of Kuhn, their work was noticed early and more extensively in
communication studies than in other disciplines. Therefore, we shall be brief in
evoking their importance for rhetoric of inquiry.
In 1958, The New Rhetoric by Perelman (with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca) and The
Uses of Argument by Toulmin called attention to actual principles and processes of
argumentation. Although Perelman and Toulmin are philosophers, much of their
inspiration and most of their impact so far lie outside professional philosophy. They
derive many of their ideas about argument from law, and the first major audience for
these two books was in communication studies. Their view of persuasion as a
practical and informal activity has inspired a multitude of further studies in scholarly
and ordinary communication. More recently, their books have begun to influence
scholars in most of the human sciences.
It is significant that none of these theorists began in rhetoric. A philosopher of law,
Perelman recognized the importance of rhetoric when he started to study justice.
Impressed by parallels between reasoning about values and casemaking in law, he
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began to question the logicist accounts of moral reasoning then prevalent. He came to
believe that a new rhetoric, capable of comprehending reasoned persuasion, was
needed.
Toulmin came to rhetoric by way of ethics. In An Examination of the Place of
Reason in Ethics, he studied the actual occurrence of moral reasoning, rather than
aping those philosophers who deduce moral principles from a stipulated set of initial
intuitions. This piqued his interest in differences between "practical" and "theoreti-
cal" reasoning. Like Perelman, he found in law a paradigm of practical reasoning
within a discrete community of inquiry. In The Uses of Argument, he maintained
that logic itself ought to be regarded as practical rather than as theoretical inference.
Logic, he held, is really a "generalized jurisprudence" concerned with "the sort of
case we present in defense of our claims."21 Theoretical reasoning just is practical
reasoning. It is as rhetorical as the rest of what we think and do. In his later Human
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Understanding, Toulmin presented law as a prime example of the communal use

and evolution of "concept populations." They constitute distinct fields of inquiry,
limiting how general logic can be; and they imply that we might better talk in terms
of logics, as plural as their fields of practice. Toulmin argues that, like the law, all
fields function as practices.
Where European inspirations to rhetoric of inquiry center in law, American
sources tend more toward politics. Since its emergence early in this century, the field
of speech communication has concentrated more of its attention on political speech
than on any other domain of rhetoric. Indeed, the field derives centrally from
traditions of political rhetoric that flourished in the nineteenth century, when
American democracy was establishing itself.
The distinctively American interest in politics is also evident in Thomas Kuhn's
immensely influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962.
Kuhn argues that the history of science follows lines strikingly different from those
projected by logic of inquiry. As a historian of science, he challenges philosophers to
address how scientific disciplines have actually organized their inquiries. As a
sociologist of science, he calls attention to how sciences are professions, with special
modes of communication and socialization. As a political epistemologist, he contrasts
the "dogmas" of ordinary researchers with the "revolutions" wrought by extraordi-
nary scientists. And as a rhetorician of science, he explores the reliance of research on
exemplars, aesthetics, paradigms, and persuasions.
Perelman and Toulmin seem attracted to law because it comprises an intentional
tradition of argument. As a tradition or community of discourse, law has standards of
inference that possess the inertia and potential for change of any historical entity.
Kuhn invokes the vocabulary of politics because it, too, expresses the interaction of
authority, change, communication, and order. Law and politics alike are predicated
on time and story. They situate the timeless logic of universal rules within specific
contexts of occurrence and culture. They comprehend the interests and reasons that
inform human conduct as practical action in particular settings. And they emphasize
the importance of persuasion in such settings, where judgments require conclusions
from incomplete and uncertain evidence. The new rhetoricians tend, in these
respects, to treat inquiry as action. Since they regard rhetoric as crucial for practices
of law, politics, and the like, they see it as crucial for studies of these affairs as well. It
is in its consideration of audiences that rhetoric of inquiry is to be distinguished from
logic of inquiry.
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Further overtures toward rhetoric of inquiry can be recognized in the work of

other dissidents in the philosophy of science. Norwood Russell Hanson, Imre
Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend (among others) have reinforced Toulmin and Kuhn
in decrying the historical and rhetorical naivete that characterizes pure logic of
inquiry. Their work stimulated historians of science. Simultaneously, sociology of
science crystallized in work by Bernard Barber, Robert Merton, Joseph Ben-David,
and many others. With the publication in 1966 of The Social Construction of Reality,
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann reestablished Karl Mannheim's project of
sociology of knowledge. Since then, the Edinburgh School has been trying to meld
these projects into a "strong programme" in sociology of science.
All these endeavors share a budding interest in the diverse dynamics of ideology
and rhetoric which figure our inquiries. Such philosophers as Max Black, Mary
Hesse, and Earl MacCormac have begun to turn epistemology and philosophy of
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science toward a concern with models, metaphors, and other rhetorical phenomena.
Such literary theorists as Stanley Fish, Paul de Man, and Edward Said have begun
to use strategies of textual analysis on arguments in other fields of scholarship. But
most importantly, scholars throughout the sciences, humanities, and professions have
begun to question how well formal rhetorics of research describelet alone
directthe actual conduct of inquiry in their own disciplines.

REFLECTION
[T]he signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.
Umberto Eco

Hence Perelman, Toulmin, and Kuhn have anticipated rhetoric of inquiry. In

this, their principal target has been the logic of inquiry developed by philosophers
working within the twentieth-century "ideal language" tradition, which sought an
epistemology separate from and superior to the spheres of substantive inquiry. This
tradition also tried to draw a sharp distinction between what is scientific and what is
not. Through formal logic, it pursued a single methodology for all scientific (i.e.,
respectable) fields. The methodology would specify a single (if complex) standard for
all knowledge, demarcating science from nonscience. The resulting logic of inquiry
was justified as an idealization of physics (importantly misconceived), for physics
was regarded as the epitome of rigor and technological potency in science.
Even within the logic of inquiry, however, the attempt to achieve a neutral
language of observation and communication not only failed but produced evidence of
its impossibility in principle. Disconnected from real scholarly practices, the logic of
inquiry is often ignoredor mouthed without any attempt to practice it. Carl
Hempel's account of historical explanation in terms of so-called "covering laws" is a
good case in point, for most historians have found it irrelevant to the conduct of their
inquiries and unpersuasive as a presentation of them.
To be sure, fields lacking self-confidence in the validity of their own judgments in
research have often pledged themselves to observe idealized methods of science and to
apply a priori rules of inference borrowed from philosophy or statistics. This is the
sort of situation that gives rhetoric a bad name, for these official rhetorics rapidly
prove impractical. They receive only lip service, while everyday research proceeds
apart from them. Or at least, this is what happens when disciplines are lucky. When
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they succeed in imposing prior rhetoric on substantive research, they encourage

misconceptions of the work to be done; and insofar as the prior rhetoric ceases to be
irrelevant, it often becomes perverse. Many projects in social science have gone astray
by trying to understand and direct themselves as philosophical rhetorics that have no
real bearing on the issues studied.22
Of course, logic of inquiry provides powerful rhetoric for defending its positions.
Thus the logical anomalies of the social sciences are shrugged off as marks of
scientific immaturity, and the arts and humanities (save philosophy) are dismissed as
sideshows in the history of knowledge. Relatedly, logicists distinguish "perfect" from
"imperfect" knowledge and "reconstructed logic" from "logics in use" to explain
away the obvious disparities between idolized methods and actual practices.23 Logic
of inquiry ignores the messy world of real researches in favor of an updated
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Platonism of pure forms compatible with a streamlined logic.

In contrast, the rhetoric of inquiry turns toward details of argumentation in
substantive fields of research. At first glance, it may seem to substitute templates
from law and politics for touchstones from mathematics and physics. But in fact,
logic of inquiry fails to account for actual argumentation in even the hardest and
most certain of sciences. Furthermore, rhetoric of inquiry regards law, politics, and
the like less as inspirations for an abstract model of all argumentation than as
suggestive starting points for contextual and comparative studies of inquiry within a
wide variety of academic and other practices.
Later books by Perelman, Toulmin, and Kuhn lead further toward rhetoric of
inquiry.24 Many kindred projects in the last few decades also contribute to the
nascent field. Rhetoric of inquiry studies research as continuing argument within
disciplines. It explores inquiries as networks of cases, stories, metaphors, measure-
ments, experiments, seminars, and publications. On one side, it means more subtle
and sympathetic attention by philosophers of science to aspects of discovery,
meaning, persuasion, and sociology that were earlier scorned as nonlogical. On
another side, it includes psychological studies of human inference in both ordinary
and scientific settings. On still another, it embraces communication studies of
dialogue in scholarly and other contexts. Finally, it encompasses anthropological
studies of the institutions and symbols of inquiry within and across practices of all
kinds. Eventually, logic of inquiry is almost eclipsed by something on the order of
Rorty's "cultural anthropology" of knowledge.

REVOLUTION
A measure of the quality of a new text is the quality of the texts it arouses.
Stanley Cavell

Many impressive projects converge on rhetoric of inquiry because there is

increased recognition of rhetoric as the main domain for pursuing and parsing
arguments. For rhetoricians of inquiry, even logic is constituted as rhetoric. In
addition to the philosophical sources just surveyed, renewed concern for rhetoric
derives from the field of literary theory. The rhetorical turn in recent criticisms and
theories of literature can be traced to the work of Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth,
exceptionally familiar to specialists in rhetoric. Along with Clifford Geertz in
anthropology and Hayden White in history, Burke and Booth have also pioneered
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efforts to enhance consciousness of rhetoric outside strictly literary studies. Their

work merges with the interest of communication studies in exploring the relation-
ships of rhetoric and epistemology in diverse practices of action and inquiry.
Part of the revival of rhetoric results from its reconnection with poetics. Led by
Burke and others, this movement has increased greatly the resources of rhetoric for
addressing symbolic action of all sorts. It increases the sensitivity of rhetoric to the
figures of thought and language which either structure or emerge from scholarship.
Moreover, Burke's own work plumbs some of the intricate ways in which these
poetic dimensions of rhetoric relate to the more familiar dimensions that we usually
associate with communication or politics. In regarding Language as Symbolic Action,
Burke has pursued The Philosophy of Literary Form into such areas as Attitudes
Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of
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Religion, and Terms for Order.

Geertz is best known for introducing anthropology in particular and cross-cultural
studies in general to methods of "thick description." These develop sensitivity to the
grammar and rhetoric of symbols in different forms of life. Of late, Geertz has
contributed to an anthropology of inquiry which argues that all knowledge is
importantly localby now a claim with readily recognizable overtones of rhetoric.
Currently, he is writing on different rhetorics in the work of anthropologists. In all
these endeavors, he has moved scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities
toward greater awareness of their symbols and other aspects of rhetoric.25
Hayden White's work suggests a way to develop the rhetorical ties of politics to
poetics within domains of historical and social inquiry. In Metahistory and other
writings, he examines the diverse patterns of consciousness and communication that
"prefigure the phenomenal fields" of the human sciences.26 Thus he writes about
rhetorical relationships among tropes, ideologies, genres, and arguments. These
aspects of rhetoric of inquiry provide ways to explore all aspects of scholarship, from
its deep structures to its details of expression.
Booth's general concerns are similar to White's. Both show how periods display
distinctive rhetoricscarrying across art, literature, music, politics, and psychology.
For rhetoricians of inquiry, however, Booth's great achievement is to revitalize
interest in traditional rhetorics of argument. From these, he draws a rhetoric of
"good reasons" to combat modern dogmatisms and relativisms.27 This rhetoric
provides contextual principles for inference and decision. It allows us to retain useful
standards of judgment, without abdicating our powers of choice to absolutist criteria
irrelevant to our actual situations. In literary theory, Booth has helped to generate a
debate over "critical pluralism" through Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
and Now Don't Try to Reason with Me. Within communication studies, of course,
his work has contributed not only to the analysis of "good reasons" but also to the
study of "rhetoric as epistemic."

REVISION
Truth cannot be held by one person alone but is in its essence a shared reality. It is entered
into through dialogue, and effective dialogue must be ironic and inconclusive.
Glenn Tinder

Although rhetoric of inquiry is becoming an interdisciplinary field in the sense of a

continuing pattern of communication among scholars from diverse parts of the
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academy, its greater goal is to become a regular part of scholarship in all fields. This
ambition has been impeded by three barriers to better appreciation and practice of
rhetoric. The first is a prejudice stemming from modern epistemology: a general urge
to contrast rhetoric with rationality. When this is done, rhetoric in any serious sense
comes to seem like relativism. On the contrary, the need is to recognize that rhetoric is
reasonable and reason is rhetorical. The second barrier is a recurrent disinclination
to consider rhetoric as it is actually practiced. As a result, rhetoric within inquiry
slides into philosophical or otherwise official cliches which neither report nor
improve the real conduct of research. Similarly, rhetoric about inquiry slips into
repeating the philosophical ignorance of details and ethos which encourages empty
rules and authoritarian stipulations. By contrast, we must insist that rhetoric is
contextual and context is rhetorical.
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The single best strategy to unseat both prejudices is simply to do rhetoric of

inquiry as much and as well as possible. This is how to learn and teach the ways in
which creative inquiry arises apart from (and even in defiance of) cookbook methods
and a priori logics. The recognition that rhetoric is a necessary and valuable aspect of
already legitimate inquires will dispell the specter of relativism. It will discourage
abstract conceptions of method. It will also help scholars to improve the rhetoric
and therefore the content, as well as the receptionof their research.
The third barrier is poor communication between specialists in rhetoric and
practitioners of other disciplines. Even among would-be rhetoricians of inquiry,
ignorance of the specific resources provided by major traditions of rhetorical theory is
widespread. In too many cases, disciplinary researchers attuned to rhetoric now
struggle to reinvent the sledgelet alone the wheelin their talk of tropes and
topics, audiences and authorities. Thus analysis of the rhetoric of historians,
physicists, and physicians needs to be generated by scholars of communication as well
as scholars within those fields. Especially for biology, these contributions have
already begun; and in decades to come, they can become a key part of the impact of
communication studies on the rest of the academy.
But specialists in rhetoric should beware the temptation to preach from afar. All
rhetoricians of inquiry must play down generalized methodologies and play up
particular situations of scholarship. In Toulmin's language, rhetoric of inquiry must
resist supposedly universal rules of inference in order to make room for the warrants
and backings of particular arguments. Accordingly, scholars of communication need
to work closely with the texts and practitioners of other disciplines to take into
account the roles of various audiences for research: exploring how backings are
shared, the extent to which warrants are accepted, and why. They should also attend
to the figurative and mythic dimensions of inquiry: examining how tropes are
deployed, where stories are implicit, and to what effect. Thus they should study the
many shared but often unarticulated features of human communication and
community which contribute to scholarship.28
In return, communication studies can expect the stimulation of new problems,
perspectives, and even practitionersin the form of people who address coordinate
occurrences in their distinct disciplines. Beyond expertise in their disparate fields,
these scholars can stimulate new issues and theories in rhetoric. For instance, an
early principle from rhetoric of inquiry is that each field should be reflexive,
applying to its conceptions and practices of scholarship the lessons implicit in its
substantive studies. Psychologists should conduct their inquiries in light of what they
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find about human learning generally; economists should strive to keep their methods
consistent with their theories of information; political scientists should recognize the
politics in their processes of research. Through rhetoric of inquiry, therefore,
scholars of communication can expect to encounter fresh implications for theories of
rhetoric from current research in many other fields.
Because communication studies is the discipline tied most intimately to rhetoric, its
contributors to rhetoric of inquiry have a special opportunity and responsibility to
ascertain generally how, why, and with what effects scholarship is rhetorical. What
are the rhetorical practices of scholarship? How do they differ from one field and
time to another, why, and with what implications? How does scholarship relate
rhetorically to nonacademic domains? What are the sources and results of these
relationships, and where might they be improved? How might increased rhetorical
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self-consciousness change scholarly inquiry and communication? Which changes

should we cultivate, and when? Recent research on the rhetorics of special fields is
already beginning to address such questions.
Under these (and eventually other) broad headings, rhetoricians of inquiry should
address a multitude of specific subjects. What do the rhetorical sources and
procedures of scholarship imply for the aims, audiences, boundaries, media, methods,
results, and uses of academic disciplines? What are the genres of scholarship, and
why do they differ from one field and time to another? How do generalizations and
narratives figure in different domains of inquiry? How do examples, metaphors,
models, and myths persuade, or not? When do rhetorical conventions and disputes
affect particular studies or their reception in public affairs? In any given field, what
do recent practices and theories of rhetoric imply for the conduct and content of
research?
These issues point toward other questions about the current situation of scholar-
ship and the recurrent features of rhetoric. What do similarities and differences in
rhetoric imply for relations among the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences,
and professions? How might recent practices and theories of rhetoric revise our
conceptions of rationality? What relationships bind rhetoric, logic, ethics, and poetics
to epistemics? What can we learn from anthropologies, histories, economics, politics,
aesthetics, psychologies, or sociologies of inquiry? How might increased awareness of
rhetoric reform practices of recruitment, initiation, education, advancement, and
criticism within individual disciplines?
At least initially, rhetoric of inquiry should prove especially helpful to the
humanities and social sciences. Historically, rhetoric can claim to be the first field of
the humanities; and it remains central to their concerns with writing, speaking, and
style. Today, rhetoric of inquiry portends improvements in the methods, subjects,
and self-conceptions of all the humanities. Yet the social sciences stand to gain even
more from increased rhetorical skills, tools, and self-consciousness. The humanities
regard human acts and products as objects for understanding, criticism, arid
celebration; the social sciences regard them as targets for explanation, prediction, and
manipulation. If the role of rhetoric has been underplayed in the humanities, it has
been almost completely neglected in the social sciences. Nonetheless, the social
sciences depend on many devices and dynamics of rhetoric, and greater sensitivity to
rhetoric will improve them dramatically.
Rhetoric of inquiry should also close gaps among the humanities and social
sciences. Since it springs partly from comparing different contexts and tactics of
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inquiry, it helps individual projects to learn from the results and principles of others.
Thus it also fosters and respects work in the interstices of established disciplines.
Furthermore, it takes account of changes in a field's rhetoric across interests and
time. Finally, it regards every enterprise of research as a rhetorical project. It might
therefore begin to mitigate old antagonisms among different scholarly cultures.
Communicating across academic disciplines is central to rhetoric of inquiry. To be
sure, the new field is predicated on more commonality of aims and methods than is
usually perceived. But it can expect to reveal greater interaction of fields and ideas
than is often acknowledged. To show how the sciences and professions rely not less
but only differently on rhetoric than do the humanities can encourage scholars to
rethink radically their relationships with one another. At a minimum, rhetoric of
inquiry must learn from many fields rather than a few, and it must feed back into
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ongoing research in them. But it should also reach beyond academic domains to
encompass their communication with other audiences and endeavors.
With rhetoric revitalized, scholars encounter several challenges. The most impor-
tant one is to make rhetoric of inquiry an ordinary part of their own research.
Rhetoric of inquiry should be a distinct field only insofar as it compares various
studies. Specialization in such work is inevitable. But as a field, it must remain
interdisciplinary. Were communication studies or any other discipline to subsume
the new field, its specialists would become outsiders to most actual research. Not only
would they lack detailed understanding of the studies at issue, but those studies
would lack nuanced insight into the rhetorics really involved. Rhetoric of inquiry
needs the advantages of perspective and persuasion that attend working both inside
and outside whatever research program is being addressed. It needs this for the
quality of its analysis and the authority of its advice. Specialists in communication
theory, literary theory, or other fields especially attuned to rhetoric can teach the rest
of us much about its history and theory. But rhetoric of inquiry also needs active
participation by native speakers of economics, history, political science, psychology,
physics, biology, and so on. Without them, it would suffer in both accuracy and
authority.
Traditionally, rhetoric includes how and what is communicated, what happens
then, and what improvements are possible. To this, rhetoric of inquiry adds the
interaction of communication with inquiry. Thus rhetoricians of inquiry need to
show in detail how substantive inquiries depart from externally dictated norms.
They need to explain how scholars legitimately invoke different reasons persuasively
in different contexts. And they need to study how individual inquiries can improve
their rhetorics. Throughout, they must interweave the study and practice of rhetoric
so fully that neither can be pursued without the other.
For rhetoric, theoretical questions, categories, and methods are indivisible from
practical limits, tactics, and performances. Modern dichotomies between theory and
practice are not central to rhetorical ways of addressing the world. Instead, rhetoric
spans subject and object, epistemology and ontology, audience and action, academy
and polity. As a single field of knowledge, it is immanently reflective, claiming to
criticize itself as well as others. As the general field of communication, it is eminently
elective, seeking to permeate the processes and products of all the others.
We are relearning that inquiry is rhetorical. Increasingly we see that the very
ethos and ethics (even more than supposed roots or foundations) of our orders are
rhetorics. Descartes and Locke dreamt of demonstrable ethics and certain truths.
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Kant made universalizability the very sign and substance of them. We cannot be so
confident. For we have experienced the extent to which all orderseconomic,
political, social, scientific, artistic, religiousare governed by symbols, stories,
traditions, and persuasions.
Our world is a creature and a texture of rhetorics: of founding stories and sales
talks, anecdotes and statistics, images and rhythms; of tales told in the nursery,
pledges of allegiance or revenge, symbols of success and failure, archetypes of action
and character. Ours is" a world of persuasive definitions, expressive explanations, and
institutional narratives. It is replete with figures of truth, models of reality, tropes of
argument, and metaphors of experience. In our world, scholarship is rhetorical.

NOTES
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1
See John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences,
forthcoming; Herbert W. Simons, "Chronicle and Critique of a Conference," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71
(1985), 52-64; John Lyne, "Rhetorics of Inquiry," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 (1985), 65-73; Frederika
Randall, "Why Scholars Become Storytellers," New York Times Book Review, January 29, 1984, 1 and 31; Ellen K.
Coughlin, "Finding the Message in the Medium: The Rhetoric of Scholarly Research," Chronicle of Higher
Education, April 11, 1984, 1 and 9; Karen J. Winkler, "Questioning the Science in Social Science, Scholars Signal a
'Turn to Interpretation'," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26, 1985, 5-6.
2
We consulted Charles Arthur Willard, Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge (Tucaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1983); Robert L. Scott, "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic," Central States Speech
Journal, 18 (1967), 9-17; "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic: Ten Years Later," Central States Speech Journal, 27
(1976), 258-66; Thomas B. Farrell, "Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory," The Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 62 (1976), 1-15; "Social Knowledge II," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64 (1978), 329-34; Richard A.
Cherwitz, "Rhetoric as a 'Way of Knowling': An Attenuation of the Epistemological Claims of the 'New Rhetoric',"
Southern Speech Communication Journal, 42 (1977), 207-19; Earl Croasman and Richard A. Cherwitz, "Beyond
Rhetorical Relativism," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68 (1982), 1-16; Richard A. Cherwitz and James W.
Hikins, "Toward a Rhetorical Epistemology," Southern Speech Communication Journal, 47 (1982), 135-62;
Cherwitz and Hikins, "Rhetorical Perspectivism," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69 (1983), 249-66; Lloyd F.
Bitzer, "Rhetoric and Public Knowledge," in Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature, ed., Don Burks (Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University Press, 1978), pp. 67-93; Michael C. Leff, "In Search of Ariadne's Thread: A Review of Recent
' Literature on Rhetorical Theory," Central States Speech Journal, 29 (1978), 73-91; C. Jack Orr, "How Shall We
Say: 'Reality Is Socially Constructed through Communication?'," Central States Speech Journal, 29 (1978), 263-74;
Richard Gregg, "Rhetoric and Knowing: The Search for Perspective," Central States Speech Journal, 32 (1981),
133-44; John Lyne, "Rhetoric and Everyday Knowledge," Central States Speech Journal, 32 (1981), 145-52; Alan
Brinton, "William James and the Epistemic View of Rhetoric," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68 (1982),
158-69; Celeste Railsback, "Beyond Rhetorical Relativism: A Structural-Material Model of Truth and Objective
Reality," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69 (1983), 351-63; and Walter R. Fisher, "Narration as a Human
Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument," Communication Monographs, 51 (1984), 1-22.
3
See John S. Nelson, "Political Theory as Political Rhetoric." In J.S. Nelson, ed., What Should Political Theory
Be Now? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), pp. 173-193.
4
See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967- ) 8. Abteilung, 2. Band, p.
17.
6
1. Band, p. 323.
7
See Allan Megill, "Martin Heidegger and the Metapolitics of Crisis." In What Should Political Theory Be
Now?, pp. 264-304.
8
See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1983).
9
See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Schocken Books, 1973).
10
See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
11
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York:
Seabury Press, 1975).
12
Rorty, p. 381.
13
Rorty, p. 389.
14
Rorty, p. 376.
15
See Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
16
See Nelson, "Political Theory as Political Rhetoric," pp. 235-40.
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17
Jrgen Habermas, "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3
(1973), 181; quoted by Rorty, p. 380.
18
To date, only the first of the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action has appeared in English
translation; see Jrgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984).
19
See Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
20
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (2nd. ed.; Notre Dame, IN: University of Norte Dame Press, 1981).
21
Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 7.
22
See John S. Nelson, "Accidents, Laws, and Philosophic Flaws: Behavioral Explanation in Dahl and
Dahrendorf," Comparative Politics, 7 (1975), 435-57; Nelson, "The Ideological Connection, I and II," Theory and
Society, 4 (1977), 421-48 and 573-90.
23
See Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (Philadelphia: Chandler, 1964).
24
See Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, trans. William Kluback (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1982); Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Kuhn is now writing a book
on the language of scientists.
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25
See Clifford Geertz, ed., Myth, Symbol, and Culture (New York: Norton, 1971); The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973); Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
26
See Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Tropics of Discourse
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
27
Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press).
See also Walter R. Fisher, "Toward a Logic of Good Reasons," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64 (1978), 376-84;
Karl R. Wallace, "The Substance of Good Reasons," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 49 (1963), 239-49.
28
See Glenn Tinder, Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).