but beyond this, humans have no role in constructing truth. The difference between the two positions has been neatly captured by philosopher Richard Rorty:
If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by our current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood. Our focus shifts from the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry to the relation between alternative standards of justification, and from there to the actual changes in those standards which make up intellectual history. (Philosophy 389-90)
In Rorty’s terms, the debate between Leo and Fish may be framed as a debate between those who represent knowledge as an accurate description of essences versus those who understand it as “a right by our current standards to believe.” Those who subscribe to the first position relegate rhetoric and persuasion to a decidedly secondary status. The discovery of knowledge is to be left to scientists and philosophers expert in “the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry.” Those who subscribe to the second position place rhetoric and persuasion at the center of knowledge-making. Through “conversation” they work out “the relation between alternative standards of justification.” Which is, more or less, what rhetoricians have been doing for more than two millennia.
Discussion of Leo and Fish Part II: Getting from Duality to Commitment
In this second part of our discussion of the Fish and Leo essays, we want to return our focus to the classroom and how as teachers we might use these essays to work out a tentative definition of argument for ourselves and apply the lessons of the debate to our teaching. From a teaching perspective, what is especially interesting about Leo’s argument is how neatly his position and the position he assigns his opposition mimic the mindsets of two problematic groups of students we encounter frequently our classes. Borrowing from William Perry’s schema of cognitive and moral development, we term these two positions “duality and multiplicity.” They represent two of the earliest stages in Perry’s developmental schema and pose markedly different challenges in the classroom. A student in duality assumes there are clear cut right and wrong answers to every question and that the job of the teacher is to present those answers clearly and then test students on their recall of the correct answer. Problems arise when: a) we challenge them to come up with their own answers and/or, b) they believe we are offering them answers that conflict with answers they have previously assimilated from other authorities. If we are doing our jobs, we will do both of these things, which in turn will cause them either to retreat into their old truisms or to risk placing their faith—religious, political, or ideological—into doubt. Students in duality may well see us as threats to their very identity, as shadowy an unknowable as Leo’s terrorists in our attempts to unsettle their world view. It is important, thus, to keep in mind how high the stakes and great the risks may be for such students when we ask them to “prove opposites” and truly listen to opposing arguments.
Those in multiplicity, meanwhile, adopt a laissez faire, live-and-let-live approach to intellectual differences very much like the one Leo attributes to “multiculturalists.” Like those in duality, they too subvert the dialectic process, but by different means. Those in duality subvert the dialectic process by pronouncing One True Thesis and dismissing all alternatives as pretenders. Those in multiplicity, meanwhile, pronounce all alternative theses equally valid and imagine them leading parallel existences that never intersect. In neither case can a thesis engage an antithesis to produce any sort of synthesis. Those in multiplicity are open to new ideas, but they are incapable of critically engaging those ideas, of choosing from among those ideas the ones that make best sense in a given set of circumstances, or of combining elements of various ideas to construct a better one. Insofar as college is a place where students forsake duality for multiplicity—though few students appear to enter college deep in the throes of duality—Leo is half right in claiming that colleges encourage students to adopt something like “fuzzy ethics” as a world view. Probably at one time or another, most college students—including some of us—have embraced the sort of flaccid tolerance of alien ideas that Leo sneeringly refers to as “moral relativism,” as an alternative to the more toxic forms of intellectual intolerance bred by dualism. But contrary to Leo, most of us see our task as moving students beyond both stages toward a stage of higher order moral reasoning that embraces complexity and contrariety without lapsing into indifference.
Perry calls this ultimate stage of development “commitment in relativism.” It is a position not unlike the one that Stanley Fish represents in “Condemnation without Absolutes.” While it remains an ideal more than a realistic possibility for most people, it is a worthwhile aspiration for teachers of argument to hold out for their students. Those who achieve commitment in relativism acknowledge the impossibility of perfect certitude balanced by their need to act on imperfect knowledge. They are at once strongly committed to their principles and aware that no set of principles is infallible or incorrigible. Knowledge, they have come to understand, is a never-ending process not an ultimate possession, and the price one pays for that knowledge is doubt and self-questioning. Having weaned themselves from absolutes, having accepted the necessity of choosing the best from among imperfect alternatives and having taken responsibility for those choices by advancing them in the world, those committed in relativism are perfectly capable of not only condemning positions hostile to their own, but of putting themselves in the shoes of their adversaries and achieving some level of identification with them.
Of course there is no readily apparent way of getting students who are mired in relativism (where most entry-level college students find themselves according to Perry) all the way to commitments in relativism in a single class. Few students will get close to this last stage by the conclusion of their college careers. But so long as the goal is clear, and our methods of teaching and our manner of interacting with our students are congruent with that goal, we have a better chance of nudging students along toward something more satisfying to them and to us than if we operate in a vacuum.1 If we prefer Fish’s argument to Leo’s, so long as our preferences our grounded in the imperatives of our discipline and of our pedagogical model, we should feel free to share that preference with our students along with the reasons for our preference.
Leo and Fish Part III: The Elements of Argument
One of the first challenges we face when introducing our notion of argument to students is dispelling the faulty assumptions about argument they bring with them into our classrooms. They have, after all, acquired their own notions of argument long before they began formal study of the matter. They have seen arguments conducted in their homes and schools, read about them in books and newspapers, viewed them on television, listened to them on radio and watched them in movies countless times by the time they walk into classrooms where we presume to teach them how to write arguments. Given the random way in which students acquire early knowledge of argument, it is not surprising that they may need to be “untaught” some assumptions before the teaching can begin. In the case of the Leo-Fish essays, the first thing that may strike students as odd is the fact that the two essays do not speak directly to each other in a clash of ideas. While the Leo and Fish essays appeared on the same day, October 15, 2001, dealt with the same phenomenon, and arrive at strikingly different conclusions via strikingly different routes, they appear to have been written in ignorance of each other. Neither offers a point-by-point refutation of the other, and when they contradict each other, it is more a case of a random intersection of contrary ideas than an intentional posing of opposites.
When we claim that most important arguments of the day are carried on in a similarly indirect fashion, many students are, not surprisingly, puzzled. Their personal experience with argument is likely to incline them toward a “debaters’ model” of argument, as a direct contest of opposing ideas carried out between two (or a few) people bent on winning. One attends to such arguments for their entertainment value—the possibility that they might end violently gives them an edge—or to figure out on which side one might throw in one’s lot. One would neither engage in nor attend to such arguments—or the faux versions of same featured on TV news shows and talk radio—in order to evaluate
