Rhetoric of Inquiry

## Citation

Nelson, John S. and Allan Megill. “Rhetoric of inquiry: Projects and prospects.” *Quarterly Journal of Speech*, vol. 72, no. 1, 1986, pp. 20-37.

## Summary

Purpose: To invigorate a conversation across disciplines to "explain and advance a line of investigation we call rhetoric of inquiry." (20)

"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 a myth ends as history." (20)

### Reduction

Nelson and Megill survey the reduction and marginalization of rhetoric across Western history. As Robert Terrill notes, rhetoric is considered untrustworthy for its presumed-duplicitous nature. Rhetoric lacks a moral anchor, as Plato accuses it, and gives opinion a superior position over truth. "Where [rhetoric] is not to be disdained, it is to be feared." (21) The truth/opinion (objectivity/subjectivity) binary runs from Socrates and Plato to Descartes to the present.

### Repression

The push back against objectivist notions of reality that lionize logic, method, and science, comes in the 19th and 20th century. "Dewey and Wittgenstein reconceived the relationship of scholarly criteria to judgment and action in everyday life, while Heidegger attacked the subject/object dichotomy." (23) Nelson and Megill identify three strands of scholarship that directly contribute to rhetoric of inquiry:

1. Philosophical attack on foundationalism. Not explicitly rhetorical, but with the same principles of inquiry and communication grounding 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."
2. Philosophical reconstruction of science. Two common ways of thinking of science: as formally demonstrative and as empirically compelling, which are actually in tension with each other. The attempt to reconceive science in light of actual practices in science and disciplines using scientific method.
3. Rhetorical reconception of epistemology. Call for more work on rhetoric as epistemic in communication theory. (23)

### Regeneration

Points to a (then)-emerging strand of scholarship that challenges Cartesian and Kantian hegemony in philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger, but points out that neither were reflective on their own rhetorical-ness, as they both continued to disparage rhetoric (Nietzsche) or use it badly (Heidegger). What is useful and in common is that "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." (24)

-All of this pointing towards hermeneutics and interpretation? The ways in which interpretation and (to a degree) argumentation are always-already parts of our lives and bound up in how we live?

"Rhetoric of inquiry urges that scholars overcome insistence on certainties needed or achieved. In scholarship, as in all activities, accepting uncertainties 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. [...\] 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. [...] Hence it reminds scholars that rhetoric was the first, and in some respects, remains the foremost science of human communities." (25)

Dewey and Wittgenstein - Dewey "renounced certainty as a modern aim, while Wittgenstein sought a drastic reconception of it." Dewey celebrates engagement in public life - not just cultivating public intellectuals, but the intellect of the public. (Can I say that?) And Wittgenstein's turn to public language, "discovering the pointedly rhetorical device of language games" which focus on the particular over the general. (25)

Cavell, who picks up and extends Wittgenstein, and Gadamer - both centered on the community. "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." (26) Likewise, Rorty moves to replace epistemology with hermeneutics, condemning philosophy as the "mirror of nature" that looks for certain truth where it cannot necessarily be found.

And finally, Foucault and Derrida, who are "deliberately outrageous" and who have "presented us with one objectionable passage after another." (27) Their contributions to thinking power and language as diffuse rather than centralized and knowable, and our reality as rhetorically constructed... and how we continue to construct it.

Alasdair MacIntyre, who "argues that storytelling is a central feature of good living, and of good virtue. 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," as well as the inseparable relationship between social inquiry and ethics. (27)

### Reconstruction

The resurgence of rhetoric and renewed interest in it, post-World War II. (Likely for the same reasons Burke is interested in it - trying to come to terms with how language led us to fascism and world war?)

Perelman's *The New Rhetoric* and Toulmin's *The Uses of Argument* as texts that moved from logic of inquiry to rhetoric of inquiry - focus on argumentation, finding an audience in communication studies even though they are both philosophers. Perelman comes to rhetoric through the study of justice and the parallels between reasoning about values and casemaking in law. Toulmin comes to rhetoric through ethics, focusing on actual moral reasoning, not just the theoretical philosophical methods of doing so, and arguing for logic as a practical rather than theoretical inference.

Interesting distinction - "Where European inspirations to rhetoric of inquiry center in law, American sources tend more toward politics." Evidenced by Thomas Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, which "argues that the history of science follows lines strikingly different from those projected by logic of inquiry." (29)

The link between Perelman and Toulmin, on the one hand, and Kuhn on the other - "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.**" (29)

### Reflection

Logic of inquiry's attempt to find an "ideal language" that is 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." (30) A problem especially for social science and other disciplines that resort to describing their methods as "scientific," to the denigration of rhetoric and a problem because of the distance between what is described (theory) and what is actually done (practice).

Here's the thing: **"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.** [...] Rhetoric of inquiry studies research as continuing argument within disciplines. It explores inquiries as networks of cases, stories, metaphors, measurements, experiments, seminars, and publications." (31)

### Revolution

Finally, Burke! Along with Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke brings rhetoric to literary theory. Burke brings a reconnection of rhetoric and poetics, with his attention to symbolic action.

"For rhetoricians of inquiry, [...] Booth's greatest 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. 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." (32)

### Revision

Goal for rhetoric of inquiry to become "a regular part of scholarship in all fields." To accomplish this and to overcome prejudices to rhetoric, "the single best strategy [...] is simply to do rhetoric of inquiry as much and as well as possible." (33) Also a need for more communication between rhetoricians across disciplines. But at the same time, "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." (33) Against totalizing and universalizing descriptions of methods and practices.

Benefits for both the humanities (rhetoric as the first humanities discipline) and social sciences, as well as a way to bring them closer together.

"At minimum, rhetoric of inquiry must learn from many fields rather than a few, and it must feed back into ongoing research in them. But it should also reach beyond academic domains to encompass their communication with other audiences and endeavors." (35)

-This sounds good. But is this leading back to Cicero, on the orator's required body of knowledge? If rhetoricians are everywhere, what are the rhetoricians in communication studies (doing)? For Nelson and Megill, rhetoric of inquiry must be able to stand on its own - if it gets subsumed, we return to the problem of preaching from afar, being too remote from actual practice.

"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." (36)