JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

I appreciate very much Alan Gross' careful and thoughtful response to my article. Before I respond to his observations and concerns, however, I should say a word or two about my appropriation of Donald Davidson's ideas, or, perhaps more accurately, what I take to be his ideas. Because Davidson--as Gross makes clear--is not a rhetorician, he cannot be held responsible for what I do to him in my attempts to apply his work to issues in our discipline. I realize, too, that in my appropriation of Davidson's work I may be guilty of cheerleading--after all, I think that he's right about most things--so I plead guilty to Gross' charge that my regard for Davidson's writings probably makes me less skeptical about his claims than I should be. Consequently, Gross is right on target when he points out that I should have been objective enough and even considerate enough to supply at least some "clue concerning the highly contested character of these imported ideas in their field of origin." Somewhere in the article, I might have discussed in detail how Davidson's radically anti-Cartesian conceptions of language, belief, intention, truth, and so forth confront and threaten the ideas held by quite different contemporary philosophers like John Searle, Charles Taylor, Saul Kripke, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Noam Chomsky, and Jürgen Habermas, just to mention a half dozen of the more prominent names who have been challenged by Davidson's writings. By supplying such a critique of Davidson's views, I might have avoided at least in part the appearance of importing, as Gross puts it, the "ideas of a well-known scholar from an other, presumably more prestigious discipline to bolster the credibility of [my] own otherwise dubious arguments."

As I understand Gross' comments regarding my arguments, his primary objection concerns my claim that effective communicative interaction "requires us to interpret continually and publicly the language of others in an attempt to match our vocabularies with theirs." Stated differently, Gross objects to my contention that interpretation goes all the way down. In opposition to this claim, Gross takes the Diltheyan position that interpretation stops somewhere. He believes that some utterances require a lot of interpretation while others require none at all. Deciphering the Rosetta Stone, for example, requires interpretation, but understanding a mundane utterance, like "Pass the salt," requires none. According to Gross, some utterances require no interpretation because language "mastery is enough" so that "I effortlessly experience the sense [everyday utterances] are making." If I understand clearly Gross' formulation here, he (at least it seems to me) begs most of the important questions. For instance, if language mastery constitutes the foundation for effortlessly experiencing the sense of an utterance, what are we mastering when we master language? Are we mastering only the grammar of a natural language, or a framework of social conventions, or a conceptual scheme? When we think that we have mastered something, a grammar or whatever (that is, according to Gross, "almost invariably sufficient for effortlessly producing and understanding [a natural] language") we obviously must imagine that something exists out there to be mastered. According to Gross, once we've mastered it, we don't need to worry about interpretation, for we need interpretation only when an utterance deviates from the thing mastered.

This notion strikes me as positing some sort of central core for language, something that serves as the standard against which utterances may be measured in order to distinguish between those utterances that require interpretation and those that do not. Davidson thinks that we don't have a candidate for such a core, and, of course, I agree. If we insist that something exists out there to be mastered that will enable us to understand effortlessly a natural language, I believe that we run straight up against the problem of essentialism with all its attendant Cartesian baggage--the dualism of mind and world, the subjective/objective distinction, the notion of language as correspondence, and so forth. I tried to suggest in my article that an antiessentialist position--a position I attribute to Davidson's externalist account of communicative interaction--gets us around these problems by allowing us to think of language without a core.

Certainly, I would not deny that I want to press this issue. In fact, I want to press it until it hurts, for I believe--along with antiessentialists like Davidison, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish--that once we start thinking in antiessentialist terms the idea that interpretation stops somewhere would never occur. Rorty, perhaps more than anyone else, harps on this point. In "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-dualist Account of Interpretation," for example, he tells us,

Of course, Gross is correct--again, if I understand him accurately--to point out that we do not require an explicit theory in order to understand run-of-the-mill utterances such as "Pass the salt" or, for that matter, to understand any utterance at all. Obviously, I failed to emphasize this point in my article, for Gross seems to take this observation as a critique of Davidson's position when in fact it represents perfectly one of his basic claims. In an effort to clarify matters, let me repeat what Davidson says about prior and passing theories: "For the hearer, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter's prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use" (442). As hearers and speakers, our prior theories about the meaning of "Pass the salt" may or may not be correct; no framework, no knowledge of context, no grammar can ensure in advance that our prior theories match. Only our passing theories can be made to match, and, as Davidson points out:

By way of concluding, I will admit without hesitation that Gross is correct when he says that, in my College Composition and Communication article, I desire to jettison "discourse communities as a useful concept." For reasons that I cannot rehearse here, I believe that the concept of a discourse community creates more problems than it solves. In addition, I even admit, following Davidson, that our conceptions of, as Gross phrases it, "the language itself, as it is usually understood" might be jettisoned as well. On the other hand, I am not quite ready to jettison rhetoric, for I believe rhetoric, like interpretation, goes all the way down and, finally, to employ Gross' words again, "gives life to language as a subject to be investigated and taught." Consequently, I believe that the view of language and communicative interaction suggested by Davidson opens up new, albeit provocative, possibilities for investigating and teaching writing; in my view, Davidsonian externalism certainly does not lead, as Gross suggests, to a kind of pedagogical paralysis, nor does it promote some form of "intellectual euthanasia."

However, these knotty issues cannot be settled here and might be better left for future discussions that I hope will occur at other times and at other places. Although much clearly remains to be said about these issues, I am grateful for the opportunity in these pages to address Alan Gross' interesting and insightful comments about my article. I am also thankful that JAC offers us the space and encouragement to engage in such interchanges, for this kind of give and take constitutes the raw material from which passing theories are made.