A Rhetorical Conception of Practical Rationality

A Rhetorical Conception of Practical RationalityAuthor(s): Kevin QuinnSource: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 1127-1142Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4227126 .

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J JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ISSUES Vol. XXX No. 4 December 1996

A Rhetorical Conception of Practical Rationality

Kevin Quinn

... Just when I thought I couldn't stand it another minute longer, Friday came. (Accounts of that have everything all 'wong.) Friday was nice. Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! I wanted to propagate my kind, and so did he, I think, poor boy. He'd pet the baby goats sometimes, and race with them, or carry one around. -Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

And then one day they came and took us off.

Now I live here, another island, that doesn t seem like one, but who decides? My blood was full of them; my brain bred islands. But that archipelago has petered out. I'm old. I'm bored, too, drinking my real tea, surrounded by uninteresting lumber. The knife there on the shelf- it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. It lived. How many years did I beg it, implore it, not to break? I knew each nick and scratch by heart, the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of wood-grain on the handle . Now it won't look at me at all. The living soul has dribbled away.

The author is Associate Professor of Economics, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. This paper was prepared for presentation at the 1995 annual meetings of the American Economics Association in New York City, March 1995, and revised in May 1995 and June 1996.

1127



1128 Kevin Quinn

My eyes rest on it and pass on.

The local museum's asked me to leave everything to them: the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes, my shedding goatskin trousers (moths have got in the fur), the parasol that took me such a time remembering the way the ribs should go. It still will wrk* but, folded up, looks like a plucked and skinny fowl. How can anyone want such things? -And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

-from "Crusoe in England, "Elizabeth Bishop [1983, 165-66].

What happens, then, if we choose to begin with our knowledge that we are essentially creatures made in symbolic exchange, created in the process of sharing intentions, values, meanings, in fact more like each other than different, more valuable in our commonality than in our idiosyncrasies: not, in fact, anything at all when considered separately from our relations? What happens if we think of ourselves as essentially participants in a field or process or mode of being persons together? If man is essentially a rhetorical animal, in the sense that his nature is discovered and lived only in symbolic process, then the whole world shifts: even the usage of wards like I, my, mine, self must be reconsidered, because the borderlines between the self and the other have either disappeared or shifted sharply . . . All we need do is honour what we know about vho we are and haw we come to be, in language. Once we give up the limiting notions of language and knowledge willed to us by sci- entism, we can no longer consider adequate any notion of "language as a means of communication" . . . It is, in recent models, the medium in wich selves grow, the social invention through which we make each other and the stnrctures that are our world, the shared product of our efforts to cope with experience.

-Wayne Booth [1974, 134351

The quote from Wayne Booth, one of the most important contemporary prac- tioners of rhetoric, conveys the promise that a full-blown rhetorical approach to human agency holds. "Rhetoric," in Booth's hands, is much more than the "art of speaking well"; it constitutes, I will argue, a radical challenge to the picture of human agency offered by rational choice theory. Importantly, it offers a critique of inherited notions of rationality, both theoretical and practical, not in the name of "the irrational," but in the name of a "thicker" concept of rationality itself.

D. N. McCloskey's wonderful and controversial work on the rhetoric of economics has made the profession aware of the challenge offered by rhetoric to its "modernist," foundationalist, Cartesian picture of theoretical rationality. But, except in fairly sketchy and allusive ways, the potential challenge rhetoric offers to rational choice theory-the conception of practical reason that virtually defines neoclassical economics-has been missing from her work. McCloskey has used rhetoric to pre- sent an alternative picture of the knowing subject but has--again with some excep-



A Rhetorical Conception of Practical Rationality 1129

tions-stopped short when it comes to the implications of rhetoric for the acting, doing subject. These implications-the outlines of a rhetoric-based philosophical an- thropology-are Booth's concern in the passage cited above.

Put another way, in McCloskey's work, an appreciation of rhetoric would allow economists to more accurately describe what they have been doing qua scientists: participating in a rhetorical community, attempting to persuade one another with metaphor and metonymy as well as facts and logic, adhering (though often only in the breach) not to any Method, but merely to the "Socratic" norms of openness to being proved wrong, the granting of equal rights to participate in the conversation and be answered with good reasons to everyone. In McCloskey's view, rhetoric would do all this without requiring that economists change the substance of what they have been doing-except, very importantly, insofar as the Socratic norms are violated in the economic conversation: McCloskey has campaigned honorably for the inclusion of heterodox voices into the conversation, rather than the patronizing, sneering exclusion of such voices that has been the norm.

Rhetoric for McCloskey has epistemological (or, better, post-epistemological) implications for the discipline. By its means, we are made more aware of the reign- ing disciplinary misconceptions about how we come and have come to know what we know-about the "foundations" for our knowledge or the lack thereof. But it has no substantive implications-implications for what we know or think we know. Its influence is second-order, not first order: we are to go on doing what we have been doing, enlightened by our brush with rhetoric. We see that we persuade each other with metaphor, and that that is how it should be, for example, but rhetoric in the use McCloskey makes of it gives us no purchase for questioning the particular metaphors we use [Browne, Bergeron, and Quinn 1993]. Rhetoric helps us see that we use metaphors, but not that they may be bad metaphors: like poetry for Auden (in his "In memory of W.B. Yeats,"1 when it comes to the substance of economics, rhetoric, chez McCloskey, "makes nothing happen."2

Booth, on the other hand, would have trouble as a rhetorician with one of the master-metaphors of economics, that of Robinson Crusoe, Homo Economicus: H.E., by stark contrast with the self as described by Booth, is essentially not one whose "nature is discovered and lived only in symbolic process," not a "creature made in symbolic exchange." The Robinson Crusoe imagined in Bishop's poem, on the other hand, is very different from the Robinson we meet in the economics textbooks, in respects that capture some of what Booth has in mind. Bishop's Robinson is a meaning-maker as much as he is a rational calculator, whose tools express himself as much as they serve him instrumentally. He is a being "constitutively at- tached" to another (Friday), not disengaged, concerned with his identity as much as with his interests. This Robinson, not he of the textbooks (or the novel, for that matter), is the sort of agent a Boothian rhetoric affirms.



1130 Kevin Quinn

It is neither possible nor desirable to detach the critique of a foundationalist, Cartesian theoretical reason that rhetoric offers from the implied critique of practical reason in which it is embedded. This latter critique puts the neoclassical econo- mist's notion of practical rationality in question. As a good rhetorician, McCloskey should be more suspicious of an endeavor that ends up challenging the form of mainstream economics without simultaneously challenging its content-the impossibility of making a neat separation between form and content being a core idea of the rhetorician, and one that she employs in other contexts to good effect.

By drawing on the work of philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson, Martha Nussbaum, Susan Hurley, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel, I will sketch a picture of how a thoroughgoing rhetorical approach to rationality, both theoretical and practical, can indeed "make something happen" in economics. Albeit from a different point of departure, this approach arrives at a very similar place as does what I consider to be the most interesting and far-reaching development in contemporary heterodox economics, namely, feminist economics [see Folbre 1994, especially chaps. 1-2; Ferber and Nelson 1993, especially essays by Nelson, England, and McCloskey]. Like the latter, and very much along the same lines, the rhetorical approach I advocate here challenges the very conception of agency employed both by neoclassical economics and by much of modem Marxist economics, particularly that species of the genus that goes by the name of analytical or rational choice Marxism. The best feminists challenge masculinist, narrow notions of rationality and agency not in the name of the irrational, but in the name of a thicker, more nuanced notion of rationality. This work forces us to rethink the mutually implicating dualisms of reason/emotion, the right/the good, justice/caring, and man/woman. Similarly, a rhetorical conception of practical rationality allows us to steer a middle way between the Scylla of homo economicus and the Charybdis of homo sociologicus, challenging the dichotomies: rational choice/irrational obedience to norms, objective facts/subjective values, or knowledge/power.

Rhetoric Thick and Thin: Two Kinds of Post-Epistemological Thought

In this section, I use an essay by Charles Taylor to explain what I mean by a possible "thick" use of rhetoric. While Taylor does not identify himself as a rhetorician, his distinction between two ways of overcoming epistemology is in essence the way I would differentiate these two potential uses of rhetoric. Taylor's favored form of anti-foundationalism shares with rhetoric an unwillingness to jettison reason. By contrast, other variants of post-modernism share with their modernist, foundationalist opponents the proposition that either reason has certain foundations, or all is power and unreason. The disjunction is either x or y: the foundationalists, appalled by y, say x; while post-modernists say not x, therefore y: rhetoric, non-Rortyan pragmatism, and a Taylorian hermeneutics reject this disjunction altogether and ar-




gue for a non-foundationalist reason. And it is precisely this specific difference that makes rhetoric amenable to the thickening I propose: the critique of a Cartesian theoretical reason is carried out in the name of a thicker reason that cannot easily avoid having implications for our conception of practical reason as well.

Taylor's essay, "Overcoming Epistemology" [1991], argues that there is a thin way of overcoming epistemology that amounts, if you like, to a simple or "mere" anti-foundationalism. The quest for certain foundations of knowledge inherited from Descartes is castigated, but the picture of knowledge and the knower that led to a search for foundations in the first place is left intact. Challenging the latter provides the thicker way of overcoming epistemology that Taylor is concerned to defend. He wants to criticize the idea underlying foundationalism:

that knowledge is to be seen as a correct representation of an independent reality . . . In its original form it saw knowledge as an inner depiction of an outer reality.

The reason why some thinkers prefer to focus on this . . . rather than merely on the foundationalist ambitions that are ultimately . . . detachable from it, is that it is bound up with very influential and often not fully articulated notions about science and about the nature of human agency. Through these it con- nects with certain central moral and spiritual ideas of the modern age. If one' s aim is in challenging the primacy of epistemology to challenge the latter as well, then one has to take it up in this wider-or deeper-form, and not simply show the vanity of the foundationalist enterprise [Taylor 1991, 466].

Taylor claims that this picture of knowledge-what he calls "the epistemological construal"-is bound up in relations of mutual implication with the moral ideal of "reflexive, self-given certainty" [1991, 470]. Its moral character stems from its connection with an ideal of "self-responsible freedom," which is a defining theme of modernity by almost anyone's account. Descartes's reflexive turn allowed the individual to obtain certainty on his or her own. We do not know the world directly, but only our representations of the world, about which we can, following the proper method, obtain certainty-even when we can no longer be assured that they represent something out there, as Descartes himself was able to do once he had established from inside the existence of a non-deceiving deity. "Certainty is something the thinker can generate for himself, by ordering his thoughts correctly-according to clear and distinct connections" [Taylor 1991, 468]. The ideal of freedom both impli- cates and is implicated by the epistemological construal. More specifically:

. . . three connected notions are in fact historically closely connected with the epistemological construal . . . The first is the picture of the subject as ideally disengaged, that is, as free and rational to the extent that he has fully distinguished himself from his natural and social worlds, so that his identity is no longer to be defined in terms of what lies outside him in these worlds.



1132 Kevin Quinn

The second, which flows from this, is a punctual view of the self, ideally ready qua free and rational to treat these worlds-and even some of the fea- tures of his own character-instrumentally, as subject to change and reorder- ing in order the better to secure the welfare of himself and other like subjects. The third is the social consequence of the first two: an atomistic construal of society as constituted by, or ultimately to be explained in terms of, individual purposes [Taylor 1991, 471-2].

Truly overcoming foundationalist epistemology-and this is what rhetoricians, after all, aspire to-requires a critique of "disengagement, instrumental reason, and atomism," such as he finds carried through in thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau- Ponty, and the later Wittgenstein. Mere anti-foundationalism, a position he finds ex- emplified in Rorty and Quine, cannot dislodge foundationalism because it fails to carry out such a critique. With regard to economics, perhaps McCloskey's persua- sive rhetorical critique of foundationalism in methodology is destined to be ineffec- tive until it takes up the thicker, more thoroughgoing task of challenging the atomism, disengagement, and instrumental rationality with which foundationalism is historically and logically aligned on Taylor's account. Needless to say, such a thicker rhetoric would have major implications for the substance of neoclassical economics. Atomism and instrumental reason are unquestioned in the mainstream of the profession-alternatives are not even considered.

Taylor associates the task of overcoming epistemology, as it is carried out in the thinkers he exhorts us to consider, with a use of reason that he terms critical reason:

. . .reflection . . . in this direction would entail . . . conceiving reason dif- ferently, as including-alongside the familiar forms of the Enlightenment--a new department whose excellence consists in our being able to articulate the background of our lives perspicuously. We can use the word "disclosure" for this, following Heidegger. And along with this goes a conception of critical reasoning, of especial relevance for moral thinking, that focuses on the nature of transitions in our thought, of which immanent critique is only the best known example [1991, 480-8 1].

This way of overcoming epistemology does not reject reason but in certain respects "continues-through-transformation" the tradition of self-reflexive reason that Car- tesianism represents:

For all its radical break with the tradition, this kind of philosophy would in one respect be in continuity with it. It would be carrying further the demand for self-clarity about our nature as knowing agents, by adopting a better and more critically defensible notion of what this entails. Instead of searching for an impossible foundational justification of knowledge or hoping to achieve total reflexive clarity about the bases of our beliefs, we would now conceive this self-understanding as awareness about the limits and conditions of our




knowing, an awareness that would help us to overcome the illusions of disengagement and atomic individuality that are constantly being generated by a civilization founded on mobility and instrumental reason [1991, 479].

The alternative way to overcome epistemology, which Taylor rejects, is to fol- low Derrida, Foucault, and other modern Nietzcheans, who, in Taylor's words:

... attack the very aspiration to truth. All epistemic orders are imposed, and the epistemological construal is just another one of those orders. It has no claim to ultimate correctness, not because it has been shown inadequate by an exploration of the conditions of intentionality but just because all such claims are bogus [1991, 482].

Taylor sees in this a way of overcoming epistemology, a "continuation-through- transformation" of "another facet of the modern identity-the primacy of the will" [1991, 483].

If rhetoric is to fulfill its aspiration of being a serious challenge to the epistemological construal, it must take on the anthropological beliefs that Taylor has identi- fied, as supported by and supporting of that construal. This means that rhetoric must have something to say about human agency and practical reason and must therefore encroach on the substance of economics. Further, if the choice of ways to truly overcome epistemology in this sense is between "defenders of critical reason" and the voluntarism of the post-modernist neo-Nietzchean, it seems reasonable to associate a thicker rhetoric with the former camp. McCloskey has declared repeatedly- and in my view correctly-that rhetoric calls for the abandonment of a modernist understanding of rationality, not to embrace irrationalism, but for the sake of the embedded, intersubjective, messy human rationality that we have engaged in all along.

Toggling in Practical Reason: Interests and Identity

Her longtime collaborator, Arjo Klamer, has consistently pushed McCloskey to- ward a thicker rhetoric, as I am using the term-one, that is, with substantive implications for the discipline. In a fascinating conversation with Klamer in Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics [McCloskey 1994, 340-363], McCloskey agrees with the latter that the very notion of "self-interest" is fertile ground for rhetoric. In this section, I argue that this is a huge concession to a thicker rhetoric, one that has the potential for shaking the discipline to its foundation. A rhetoric that focuses on the rhetoricity of self-interest, I argue, would find a natural ally in the "cognitive conception of agency" associated with Michael Sandel [1982] and Charles Taylor [1989](and adopted by Susan Hurley [1989] and Elizabeth Anderson [1993] in their work on practical reason). The cognitive conception is offered as rival to the "voluntarist" conception of agency. As the latter is presupposed by rational choice the-



1134 Kevin Quinn

ory to reject it is to challenge the notion of practical reason at the heart of neoclassical economics.

McCloskey [1994, 293] has recently cited Lanham's notion of rhetoric as the art of "toggling," or being able to both see through language to what it is about and also to step back and look at the language itself, the way it works, the way it shapes that which it is about. The context here would appear to be theoretical reason. What would be analogous to such toggling in practical reason? I think it would be our ability as persons as opposed to "wantons" [Hurley 1989, 116] to deliberate not only about how to get what we want, employing instrumental rationality, but also about who we are, which involves evaluating our preferences. This should not be understood as applying second-order preferences (which would themselves be in need of evaluation and so on ad infinitum). What humans do in this respect is pursue self- understanding, and the primacy of self-understanding in this sense for human agents can best be understood by revising our conception of agency along lines suggested by Sandel in his remarkable critique of Rawls [Sandel 1982], to which we now turn.

Figuring out who we are, when understood as part of what we have been up to in exercising our practical reason, is the natural interpretation, the fleshing out of a thick rhetorical concern with the rhetoricity of self-interest. To revise our conception of agency along Sandelian lines is simultaneously to challenge the punctuality, disengagement, and atomism that are, on Taylor's account, the supports of the epistemological construal.

What Sandel does in Liberalism is to locate and challenge the metaphysics of the self and agency that underpins Rawls's liberalism. The liberal dogma that the "right is prior to the good" is bound up with a picture of the self as prior to its ends, in Sandel's view. This is the liberal dogma that proscribes a conception of politics as a forum for deliberating about the good, because each individual is conceived of as having has his or her own good, a good which is completely transparent to the individual concerned and opaque to everyone else. Sandel writes:

For if I am a being with ends, there are at least two ways I might come by them: one is by choice, the other by discovery, by "finding them out." The first sense of "coming by" we might call the voluntarist dimension of agency, the second sense the cognitive dimension [1982, 58].

What is crucial in the Rawlsian conception is the "antecedent individuation of the self"-antecedent, i.e., to its ends and values. This rules out what Sandel calls constitutive attachments:

One consequence of this distance [of the self from its interests] is to put the self beyond the reach of experience, to make it invulnerable, to fix its identity once and for all. No commitment could grip me so deeply that I could not understand myself without it . . . No transformation of life purposes and plans could be so unsettling as to disrupt the contours of my identity. No




project ... so essential that turning away from it would call into question the person I am . . . But a self so thoroughly independent as this rules out any conception of the good (or bad) bound up with possession in the constitutive sense. It rules out the possibility of any attachment (or obsession) able to reach beyond our values and sentiments to engage our identity itself. It rules out the possibility of a public life in which, for good or ill, the identity as well as the interests of the participants could be at stake [Sandel 1982, 62].

For the Rawlsian self, "the identity of the subject can never be at stake during mo- ments of choice or deliberation" [Sandel 1982, 62]. But for Sandel, following Tay- lor, there is a species of reflection that is not "limited to the objects of desire, but . . . penetrates further to reach the subjects of desire" [1982, 161]. For Taylor, the ability to reflect on the subject of desire, to be a "strong evaluator" of one's preferences as opposed to a "simple weigher" of desires, is essential to human agency:

Whereas a reflection about what we feel like more, which is all a simple weigher can do in assessing motivations, keeps us as it were at the periphery; a reflection on the kinds of beings we are takes us to the center of our existence as agents [Taylor, cited in Sandel 1982, 160].

The paradox of the Rawlsian self is that because it has no constitutive attachments, because it is prior to its ends, the notion of choice alternates between being simply the reading off of its defacto desires or the empty, criterion-less choice of a radically disembodied self. Only for a self with constitutive attachments can the see- saw be stopped; to give sense to our notions of choice and agency, the self must exist in what Taylor calls a moral horizon, with constitutive attachments formed by his or her participation in a community of shared values.

For Sandel and Taylor, the notion of "self-understanding" becomes crucial to human agency in a way it cannot be for the liberal, Rawlsian self. This notion is worth spending some time on as it is useful for fleshing out the notion of the "rhetoricity of self-interest" that Klamer and McCloskey agree needs to be addressed. It is also a crucial concept for philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson [1993] and Susan Hurley [1989].

Self-understanding is, for Taylor [1989], both creation and discovery. There is something out there to get right-we can make mistakes in our self-understanding; we can be second-guessed by a lover or a close friend, for example-but at the same time our articulation of who we are is partly constitutive of it.3 Because we use language to "articulate" who we are, the notion of language as an instrument serving our ends has to be entirely rejected. We are constituted in part by the language we share with our community: no individual is self-sufficient in his or her ability to achieve self-understanding. Dialogue, friendship, democratic political interaction- all, on this view, become means of discovering who we are, not merely instrumen-



1136 Kevin Quinn

tally important to advancing our preformed interests, but activities through which our identity, our interests, are discovered/created in the first place.

The account of human agency adumbrated by Sandel and Taylor gives us a notion of practical reason that emphasizes a kind of "toggle" between interest and identity analogous to the toggling in theoretical reason that McCloskey makes essential to a rhetorical account. Here, for instance, is Hurley, nicely collecting themes from Taylor and Sandel:

What cannot be taken as fixed by theory of rationality for self-determining agents is not just the unit of agency, but, more generally, the character of agents. Such a theory must address questions about what kinds of agents there should be as well as questions about what given kinds of agents should do. Such a theory of practical rationality is an ethic. It is distinctive of human beings as persons, as opposed to wantons, that they are self-determining agents: it is correspondingly distinctive of them that they are capable of ethi- cal concern, character improvement, and cooperation. To suppose that human beings are wantons is to allow the theoretical tail of maximization with respect to a fixed agent with a fixed character to wag the dog of facts about human nature [Hurley 1989, 1581.

Hurley is not using "ethic" here as a synonym for "morality" in the ordinary sense, where the latter is sharply distinguished from prudence or self-interest:

Ethics does not sustain the sharp distinction between morality and self-interest as it is usually conceived by post-classical philosophers. The distinction between public and private interests is blurred by the capacities of persons to determine themselves and the constitutive relevance for the exercise of this capacity of social practices and forms of life [Hurley 1989, 158].

A practical reason conceived along these lines, as an ethic, in Hurley's sense, is quite obviously at variance with rational choice theory. The idea that we deliberate not only instrumentally about how to best get what we want, but also about who we are, what we do want and should want-that we reason, not simply "express" given tastes about which we cannot be wrong-all of this is alien to the the world of rational choice undergirding neoclassical economics. Practical rationality becomes, inter alia, intersubjective to the core on this account. And this Sandel/Taylor line is highly congruent with the thick rhetoric espoused by rhetoricians like Wayne Booth, who argues that we "are essentially creatures made in symbolic exchange"; and who sees language not as a mere "means of communication," but as the "medium in which selves grow" and the "social invention through which we make each other" [Booth 1974, 134-35; these phrases are taken from the passage cited at the begin- ning of this article].




Platonic Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Incommensurability: Against Method

The sustained critique of foundationalism in the philosophy of science really took off with Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution in 1962. The way Kuhn is employed by a particular anti-foundationalist-and in particular the interpretation given to his notion of incommensurable paradigms-is a good way of distin- guishing between those who advocate a rethinking of (theoretical) rationality and those who believe, by contrast, that when Cartesian rationality has been exposed as an impossibility, there is nothing left to rationality at all. The former group includes the rhetoricians and defenders of critical reason such as Taylor, while the latter includes many of the Continental thinkers Taylor has called neo-Nietzcheans-Fou- cault, Lyotard, and Derrida.

The core issue here is whether Kuhn's claim that different scientific paradigms are "incommensurable" means that transition between or discussion among paradigms cannot be "rational." Kuhn's old guard critics called him a relativist-an irrationalist. As Ramberg [1989, 1261 notes, the accusation was, "since we cannot, as Kuhn sees it, rely on any predetermined method or decision procedure to provide an objective decision in cases of paradigm conflict, science according to Kuhn is irrational." But Kuhn can be read instead as arguing for a non-algorithmic, a non-criterial rationality. Ramberg, taking up this interpretation, suggests that incommensurability reflects the absence of agreement about "the criteria, or upon the relative rankings of the criteria, of what constitutes a rational decision" [1989, 127]. There is a divergence of "cognitive values":

Yet these divergent cognitive values are themselves open to discussion. And such discussion can certainly be rational, even if no predetermined algorithm can be found. Perhaps the best account we have of such non-criterial rationality . . . is Aristotle's account of phronesis. Cross-paradigmatic argument- what Gadamer describes as a fusion of horizons-then becomes a matter of wisdom in the Aristotelian sense. It becomes a matter of judgement which is not the application of a given standard as much as it is an interpretation, a hammering out, of standards [Ramberg 1989, 127].

The contention that theoretical rationality is non-criterial is very much at the heart of McCloskey's championing of rhetoric in debate about economic methodology. Just as Kuhn is, she is dismissed as an irrationalist, a relativist, by those unrecon- structed foundationalists who believe that rationality is criterial or it is nothing-it is either method or madness: choose! But recognizing, with Ramberg, that the roots of McCloskey's view are in Aristotle's notion of phronesis immediately suggests that there is no reason to confine such a non-criterial rationality to the realm of theoretical reason: Aristotle's phronesis was precisely an account of a non-criterial practical reason, of how we deliberate and choose in the presence of conflicting, incommensurable values.



1138 Kevin Quinn

If rhetoric's promise is in its ability to limn the contours of a thoroughgoing, non-criterial rationality-in both the theoretical and the practical sphere-then it would appear to be on a collision course with rational choice theory. For the latter is the most sophisticated, newest, most-improved, latest model of an algorithmic, a thoroughly criterial account of practical reason.

Martha Nussbaum's early work [Nussbaum 1986] represents perhaps the most fine-grained and most sophisticated revival of Aristotle in our time, and it behooves any contemporary rhetorician to pay attention to it. She argues that while Plato ultimately denied tragic conflict and the incommensurability of values, Aristotle's philosophy remained true to the tragedians' understanding that such conflict could not be ignored in an account of a genuinely human agency. But recognition of the plurality of our values and their incommensurability did not leave us unable to use our judgment, to deliberate and choose, to exercise the non-criterial rationality that phronesis amounts to.

The search for a Method in theoretical reason and the consequent narrowing of the notion of rationality-its identification with criterial rationality alone-had its ori- gins in the seventeenth century with Descartes. It was a consequence of what has been dubbed "Cartesian Anxiety"-anxiety in the face of the disenchantment of the world implied by Galileo's mechanical philosophy of nature, as well as the social and political crises that Descartes lived through and in the wake of [Bordo 1987, Toulmin 1990]. Nussbaum, in a remarkable reading of Plato's Protagoras [1986, 89-12 1], identifies an analogous anxiety on Plato's part and an analogous search-but in the realm of practical reason-for a method that can ease the anxiety. Plato's anxiety about the incommensurability of the values we embrace in our practical lives is eased by the development of what amounts to a proto-utilitarianism, according to Nussbaum.

The dialogue pits the rhetorician Protagoras against Socrates. The former, at the dialogue's outset, insists that any account of how we deliberate and choose in our practical lives must respect the phenomenon of incommensurable values if it is to be true to our experience. We do not decide by quantifying the qualitatively different demands upon us, but rather by interpreting these conflicting demands in the face of the highly particular situation we are faced with. Choice is an art, not a science, we might say, but no less rational for that.

Socrates cannot abide this. The anxiety we feel in the face of conflicting, appar- ently incommensurable values is unacceptable. He offers us a techne (a science) that can "save our lives." He proposes that we change ourselves so that we are able to see whatever we seek as varying quanta of the same quale: pleasure! (Nussbaum comments that for Socrates, "we will be saved only by something that will assimi- late deliberation to weighing and measuring" [1986, 110].)




Nussbaum suggests that Socrates's account must be rejected. It would not be, she says, "our" lives that would be saved. We would not "recognize ourselves" in the people Socrates asks us to become. She concludes:

We thought that the science of measurement was a science that simply pro- vided instrumental means to an external agreed-upon end. We have now come to see that a deep modification of ends is itself a part of the art.... we supposed, naively, that we could go on recognizing our rich plurality of values and also have the precision and control offered by a quantitative social science . . . Plato tells us with his characteristic sternness that this does not look to be the case. Science does change the world. If part of our humanness is our susceptibility to certain kinds of pain, then the task of curing pain may involve putting an end to our humanness [1986, 120].

Rhetoric, Rationality, and Liberty

There is a close connection between a thick rhetoric as I have been using the term and a strong conception of democracy, a conception according to which self- government is intrinsically valuable and not a mere means of maximizing welfare. The strong conception of democracy is at odds, quite often, with liberalism, because the former is indelibly linked with the notion of positive liberty (see below), while the latter offers no purchase for such a notion. Classical liberalism holds fast to a defense of the negative liberties of rights-bearing individual atoms, the autonomous signers of the social contract.

In an interesting unpublished article [McCloskey 1996], McCloskey has argued for an intimate association between rhetoric and liberty. The liberty in question is negative liberty, the freedomfrom coercion. She sees rhetoric as explicitly opposed to positive liberty, the freedom to realize one's self through participation in collective self-government [Berlin 1969, 118]. McCloskey uses rhetoric to bolster the tra- ditional liberal case against a positive conception of liberty and criticizes particularly the case against negative liberty made by Charles Taylor in his "What's Wrong With Negative Liberty" [Taylor 1985, 211-229].

Since I have enlisted Taylor and Taylor-inspired thinkers such as Hurley, Ander- son, and Nussbaum in my attempt to spell out what a "thickening" of the thin conception of rhetoric espoused by McCloskey might come to, I want to pay close attention to the McCloskey's objections to Taylor's case against a purely negative conception. While a thin rhetoric embraces negative liberty, I argue, a thick rhetoric cannot avoid raising the banner of positive liberty; if the former both reflects and reinforces liberalism, the latter does the same for democracy. We run into a peren- nial debate in political theory from an unusual starting point.



1140 Kevin Quinn

Taylor argues that a purely negative conception of liberty cannot make sense of our experience of internal, along with external, obstacles to freedom. We can be unfree because, e.g., "irrational fear or spite" prevents us from pursuing our interests. The ability to evaluate our desires and to form second-order desires defines human agency for Taylor. We can be unfree when we act on desires that are not genuinely our own. The discovery of our "authentic" desires or purposes is, Taylor claims, as was noted above in the discussion of Sandel, a cognitive task, an enterprise allowing for rightness or wrongness-the individual can be "second-guessed" in his or her identification of his or her purposes. He makes the Wittgensteinian point that ascribing incorrigibility to the agent in his discovery of his purposes is a denial, contrary to our intuition, that cognition is involved at all: "How can he never, in principle, be wrong, unless there is nothing to be right or wrong about in this matter?" [Taylor 1985, 2231. All of this goes to establishing the inadequacy of a conception of freedom that sees it, along Hobbesian lines, as the absence of external obstacles to doing what one wants, whatever that may be:

What has this got to do with freedom? Well, to resume what we have seen: our attributions of freedom make sense against a background sense of more or less significant purposes, for the question of freedom/unfreedom is bound up with the fiustration/fulfillment of our purposes. Further, our significant purposes can be frustrated by our own desires, and where these are signifi- cantly based on misappreciation, we consider them as not really ours, and experience them as fetters. A man's freedom can therefore be hemmed in by internal, motivational obstacles, as well as external ones [Taylor 1985, 227].

McCloskey is brusquely dismissive of this whole line of reasoning:

[Taylor] argues that Berlin's "philistine" no-physical-coercion definition fails because there are internal constraints on a person's behavior-he mentions explicitly false consciousness-and the person may not know what they are . . . But Berlin's criticism [of postive conceptions of freedom] is un- touched by Taylor's argument: knowing yourself is a good thing, but a good of identity, not of freedom. Little wonder that Socrates the anti-democrat took it as his motto . . . freedom is most usefully defined as negative, as a freedom from coercion [McCloskey 1996, 13].

But McCloskey's argument seems question-begging. Taylor is arguing that identity and freedom are connected; he is not confusing the two. He says:

For freedom now involves my being able to recognize adequately my more important purposes, and my being able to overcome or at least neutralize my motivational fetters . . . but clearly [this] requires me to have become something, to have achieved a certain condition of self-clairvoyance and self-understanding. I must be actually exercising self-understanding in order to be




truly or fully free. I can no longer understand freedom just as an opportunity concept [Taylor 1985, 228-29].

And McCloskey's allusion to Socrates here is out of place. For Taylor, though not for the Platonic Socrates, the achievement of self-understanding is something the agent cannot do on his or her own. Dialogue, conversation, and ultimately participation in democratic deliberation about the framework to govern collective life are for Taylor, as they are not for Socrates/Plato, essential to the achievement of self-understanding. This is precisely why we cannot do without positive liberty.

The irony in McCloskey's position is this. Taylor's argument can be derailed in a non-question-begging way, and the replacement of negative with positive liberty arrested, if the agent can be legitimately viewed as incorrigible when it comes to discovering his or her genuine purposes, his or her identity. Holding fast to a merely negative conception, if Taylor is correct, requires such a move. But then we would have McCloskey, fresh from his defeat of Cartesianism in theoretical reason, implicitly embracing Cartesianism in practical reason with her defense of negative liberty. The intersubjective, corrigible account of theoretical agency in McCloskey would coexist uneasily with the subjective, foundationalist, incorrigible account of practical agency implicit in his defense of negative liberty.

If, on the other hand, McCloskey wants to see self-understanding, like world- understanding, as (thickly) rhetorical, then she must jettison the Hobbesian absence- of-coercion conception of freedom, and embrace a postive conception. In this conception, the truth-rhetorically understood, sought intersubjectively, in dialogue and also in genuine political deliberation-will set us free!

Notes

1. ". . For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/in the valley of its saying where ex- ecutives/Would never want to tamper. It flows south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives/a way of happening/a mouth" [Auden 1977, 242].

2. McCloskey [1994, 341] quotes this same phrase from Auden and denies that rhetoric is in the same boat as poetry-in virtue of its ability to "improve speech morality" in the discipline. My use of the phrase refers to whether rhetoric can affect the substance of the discipline-a different issue altogether.

3. Sandel's last chapter, "Character, Self-Knowledge and Friendship," contains an eloquent treatment of the conception of self-understanding he shares with Taylor.

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Auden, W. H. The English Auden. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems. New York: McGraw Hill, 1983.



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Booth, Wayne. Modem Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Bordo, Susan. T7he Flight to Objectivity. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987. Browne, M. Neil, Suzanne Bergeron, and Kevin Quinn. "Dominant Economic Metaphors and the Post-

modern Subversion of the Subject." Unpublished manuscript, 1993. Folbre, Nancy. Who Pays for the Kids: Gender and the Structures of Constraint. London: Routledge,

1994. Ferber, Marianne, and Julie Nelson. Beyond Economic Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993. Hurley, Susan. Natural Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. McCloskey, D. N. Knowledge and Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

. "The Rhetoric of Liberty." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 9-27. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Ramberg, Bjorn. Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language. London: Blackwell, 1989. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and The Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Taylor, Charles. Philosophy and The Hwnan Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

. Sources of the Self Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

."Overcoming Epistemology." In After Philosophy, edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: M1T Press, 1991.

Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis. New York: The Free Press, 1990.



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A Rhetorical Conception of Practical Rationality