In “Blind Skepticism versus a Rhetoric of Assent” (College English 61:4) Wayne Booth offers a narrow assessment of a broad problem, the problem of skepticism. As Booth concisely puts it:
If we’ve encountered unlimited solid refutations of “truths” we once embraced, we fall into the camp of the many utter skeptics among the great thinkers: “I must doubt every belief unless I have hard evidence for it—and there may be no hard evidence for anything.”
The alternative to doubting everything is seen to promote forms of dogmatism where ideas are fixed by appeals to authority. The assault on this sort of dogmatism is strong, particularly in the realm of the rhetoric of science, where Feyerabend argued long ago that science has no coherent “method” for arriving at its “truths.” Booth’s “rhetoric of assent,” offered as an alternative to both dogmatism and skepticism, has been a subject of debate and elucidation for decades now. Underneath it lies an even older debate over how we can “know” anything about the external world at all.
Booth does not engage that issue. Avrum Stroll’s Surfaces does. Reading it, I was interested in his discussion of G.E. Moore and the problem of “direct realism.” Moore’s famous argument against skepticism goes something like this: pointing to his hand in a lecture hall, Moore uttered “I know this is a hand.” Was this a dogmatic expression of belief? I think not. Stroll frames his inquiry around this passage from Moore’s “A Defense of Common Sense”:
I think it is certain, therefore, that the analysis of the proposition “this is a human hand” is, roughly at least, of the form “There is a thing, and only one thing, of which it is both true that it is a human hand and that this surface is a part of its surface.” In other words, to put my view in terms of the phrase “theory of representative perception,” I hold it to be quite certain that I do not directly perceive my hand; and that when I am said (as I may be correctly said) to “perceive” it, that I “perceive” it means that I perceive (in a different and more fundamental sense) something which is (in a suitable sense) representative of it, namely, a certain part of its surface.
The distinction highlighted by Stroll is that we can be said to “see” something when we only see part of it. Intense skepticism might be cast as asserting that though we see a person’s face peek from behind a wall, there is no reason to assume that a human body is attached on the other side. It might be the body of a horse. Obviously, “common sense” suggests otherwise. Though it is only a probability that there is a whole person there, it is in the common sense “true” although we have no direct access to that fact. We do not need to be rhetorically persuaded that there is a whole person there. There is no “rhetoric of assent” involved.
Rhetoric becomes everything when we adopt the position that all truths are constructed linguistically. Wittgenstein rephrased Moore’s example as “I know a sick man is lying here” in his essay “On Certainty.” To this, he replied “Nonsense!”
James Conant, in “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use” (Philosophical Investigations 21:3 July 1998) argues that what Wittgenstein meant by “nonsense” was that outside of its performative conditions (context), a constative utterance (saying something “is”) has no sense. Thus, the debate central to my concerns is that there is no meaning outside of use. I am not sure that I agree with this at all, and have debated it at length. The reason why I have a problem with this construct is that it renders all history, all attempts at documentary, futile. It places us in an eternal present of cultural forces that we can no more predict or shape than we can predict or shape the weather. If there is no “sense” outside of a given use, then all the artifacts of culture that we appropriate and repurpose have no essential “truth,” but rather act like pieces in a language game.
Like Moore, I believe that “I know I have a hand.” The polarities of absolute skepticism and absolute dogmatism are artificial linguistic constructs that may or may not reflect the condition of the “world.” I do not think we can make everything dependent on rhetoric otherwise rhetoric itself becomes meaningless.
