JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

I remember first reading Stephen Toulmin on aims and commensurability. Responding to Kuhn's vision of competing paradigms, he wrote,

When two scientific positions share similar intellectual aims and fall within the scope of the same discipline, the historical transition between them can always be discussed in "rational" terms, even though their respective supporters have no theoretical concepts in common. (Understanding 126)

On first read, Toulmin's adage--disciplined discourses are "always" commensurable if common aims can be found--seems more than simply useful; it explains the success of many amazing scientific and non-scientific communications. It helps me understand why I can order coffee in Paris though I do not speak French and why I can teach multiethnic classes of basic writers by emphasizing our common goal of academic success. In addition to providing an explanation for communicative accomplishments, his adage suggests a strategy for revising unsuccessful communication; that is, if at first you don't succeed, find common aims. But in my initial encounter, what I found most appealing was that Toulmin provided a one-line rebuttal, a bulwark, to all the chaos and danger of incommensurable discourses theorized by postmodernists. If people find common aims, then they can reason together, deliberate together, and agree on action. Toulmin, ever "the good man speaking well," provides a stable approach to traditional democracy and education in a changing society.

My naive hope for the enterprises of deliberation and reasoned commonality has long since vanished. Toulmin, however, continues to believe we can come together and reason our way to common action, and his many projects, though philosophical, are all concerned with situated, micro-social, persuasive knowledge, and therefore continue to be used in the research and teaching of rhetoric and composition. Without a doubt, Toulmin's contributions to our field are magnificent, and yet I come away from his interview deeply, sleeplessly troubled.

Rhetoric and Pluralism

In her recent JAC response to Clifford Geertz, Lisa Ede notes that Geertz's pluralism is both attractive and suspect, and this theme, though she pursues others, is worthy of more analysis, especially in the context of Toulmin's interview. The Toulmin interview, because it enacts both the attractive and suspect aspects of pluralism, dramatizes pluralism's appeal as well as the problems that it presents to a community. And I would argue that his enactment of pluralism may well be key to understanding the politics of our own field. After all, rhetoric and composition, even in its dual name, engages the problematic of pluralism.

Pluralism, the attempt to place everything in the field of persuasion, is always an ambivalent term, a term pulled between tolerance and dominance, multiplicity and commonality, marriage and seduction. Feminists, most concerned with its dangers, have best analyzed the implications of its allures and perils. For instance, Annette Kolodny characterizes feminist pluralism attractively as "the acknowledgment that we do not and need not adhere to identical ideologies" in order to "continue talking to, arguing with, and learning from one another" (Gardiner et al. 667). But Ellen Rooney's suspicious characterization may be more revealing. She finds that pluralism is often a centrist effort to contain both radical relativism and beliefs based on monistic theories or radical subjectivism; to control these disruptive positions, pluralism conceives the grounds of meaning as based in a persuadable audience and constructs every interpreter "as an effect of the desire to persuade" (22, 1). Since many pluralistic activities limit what is heard by whom, Rooney sees some pluralisms as "nothing but the desire to adjudicate other theories and thus other practices from above" (32). By Rooney's account, pluralists seek to arbitrate ideas, ideologies, and actions at a level above the committed and uncommitted. So while Kolodny theorizes an ideal practice of feminism, Rooney analyzes its practice in literary theory and finds it suspect.

With either understanding of pluralism, Kolodny's or Rooney's, we can see that it is implicated in theories of rhetoric based on persuasion, conversation, dialogue, dialectic, and reason. Toulmin professes this familiar kind of rhetoric, and his interview reveals precisely the ambivalence between the appealing theorization and suspect practice of pluralism.

Toulmin is, in fact, a pluralist (perhaps a required attribute of the "good man"). He welcomes diverse applications of his work, provided they are not "dogmatic." He encourages transdisciplinary inquiry, dismisses insistence on the "right answer," and values persuasion, whether in scientific texts or at the Rio conference. And if the interview itself is insufficient evidence for his pluralism, in Cosmopolis, he writes,

There may be no rational way to convert to our point of view people who honestly hold other positions, but we cannot short circuit such disagreements. Instead, we should live with them, as further evidence of the diversity of human life. Later on, these differences may be resolved by further shared experience, which allows different schools to converge. In advance of this experience, we must accept this diversity of views in a spirit of toleration. (30)

Here, Toulmin expresses both a tolerance of difference and the expectant hope of convergence. Unlike Kolodny's, Toulmin's purpose is neither the preservation of nor respect for difference, but rather convergence. His pluralism desires to construct others as a persuadable audience, not as subjects with different but valid ideologies.

The desire for convergence--not in itself terrifying, and certainly inherent in any persuasive activity--optimistically requires bilateral movement: both audience and rhetor reconsider their position and that of the other and somehow come to share each other's experience. Predictably, it is hard to find a clear instance of this. Ideally, in our field, rhetoricians would read experimental studies, and experimentalists would quote the sophists; but, as we know, practice deviates from the ideal: after graduate school, this rarely happens at levels sufficient to transform individual or disciplinary practice. Toulmin hopes for ideal practice, a dialectic between audience and speaker, but his practice deviates, too (Uses 19). Toulmin's desire to adjudicate from above, from his reasoned space, as well as his fear of monistic theories and relativism are enacted repeatedly throughout the interview--most noticeably in his dismissal of various intellectual perspectives, his domestication of feminism, and his refusal to read critics.

Toulmin clearly dismisses monism and relativism, positions which Rooney characterizes as unacceptable to pluralists. The move to dismissal is most explicit in his discussion of alternative interpretations of Wittgenstein. He raised his eyebrows at Albert Shalom's assertion that Wittgenstein was a cultural relativist and again when David Hamlyn asserts that Wittgenstein was a nativist. Rather than draw the conclusion that interpretations of Wittgenstein are wildly divergent, he instead says, "It's clear to me that Wittgenstein deliberately avoided taking a position," and rejects the interpretations of other scholars. His dismissal of Chomsky and postmodernists repeats the pattern, but the structuralist Chomsky's monistic view warrants hearings and discussions prior to "grave objections," while Jean-Francois Lyotard simply is dismissed as absurd, and deconstruction as not "a prudent investment." Despite his promise not to "short circuit" disagreements, Toulmin, at times, refuses the activities that create informed disagreement and deliberation. When the assumptions, questions, debates, and vocabulary differ significantly from his, when faced with a "historical transition" in his discipline, the good man fails to seek the new "rational terms" of discussion; he instead denies their existence without the necessary exertion to confirm their absence. With the advent of real difference, the effort required for that difficult dialogue is evaded.

Toulmin's domestication and cooptation of the women's movement exemplifies all that feminists suspect of pluralism: in just a few lines, he reduces an international human rights movement committed to issues as basic as suffrage and control of one's body to his increased freedom to cook. Having given this "silly" example, he proceeds to speak of feminism's worth in freeing him from sexism, racism, and classism, a freedom that few could claim in honesty. When Toulmin declares that "nothing" is interfering with his ability to take people as they are, the statement begs to be read as a denial of difference and of social and language structures. Toulmin seems unaware of the unavoidable difficulties both in understanding other people and in speaking and thinking in a language that is always historically structured and partial in its representations. The concepts of difference, margin, and center elude him. When Olson prods Toulmin to reflect on feminism in a larger frame than his own life, Toulmin acknowledges that "women very often still get a raw deal," but he amends that to say social relations are better, though maybe not in exotic countries such as France. In his discussion of feminism, Toulmin gives no evidence that he even attempts to conceive of lives outside the Anglo-America male experience.

Finally (for issues of space rather than exhaustion), Toulmin's admitted failure to read his critics calls into question his commitment to the sharing of ideas. At one level, this failure replicates his refusal to invest in reading French postmodernism, but in refusing to read his critics, he also is curtailing dialogue about his own thinking. Given Toulmin's avoidance of critique, Lyotard then seems not so absurd when he asserts that "the institution of knowledge functions . . . like an ordinary power center whose behavior is governed by a principle of homeostasis" (63). That is, the ability of any group to participate in knowledge-production depends on its ability to conform to the existing norms; a player can participate, be read, only if he or she conforms. Thus, consensus, as described by Lyotard, is an inherently conservative activity, especially conservative if the center does not read either its critics or its margins. Toulmin, in this interview, performs exactly the behaviors that precipitate Lyotard's call for a change from a goal of consensus to that of justice (66).

While the practice of pluralism can be far more complex than a cooptive move to consensus (and often is), pluralism and consensus, for Toulmin, seem to require a tame feminism, a tame Wittgenstein, the denial of twenty years of postmodern writing, and the omission of his critics. His practice demonstrates the limits of the "micro-social" (what Toulmin calls "me and my friends") in the process of deliberation and ironically gives ample evidence for the incommensurability of discourses theorized by Lyotard.

The Pluralistic Discipline of Rhetoric and Composition

I once heard the philosopher Stanley Cavell, a good man, say that he wrote as a better man than he was; that was part of the wonder of writing and, in part, why he wrote. Toulmin, too, writes a better man. The dichotomy between his hopeful writings on commensurability and pluralism and his ability to recognize and address difference is significant and probably unconscious, but the split between his theory and his practice presents the dangerous inadequacies of pluralism. In taming Wittgenstein and feminism and ignoring deconstructionists and his own critics, Toulmin demonstrates why the struggle to think our own future agenda or agendas will require more than placing our scientific inheritance "within the context of our inheritance from the humanities." While his efforts to free disciplinary knowledge from rationalism are valuable, a new humanism will require more than a promise of open-ended reason. Open-ended reason is just a new yardstick when what is needed are ways to comprehend our positions and our diverging discourses in the multidimensional world of human action. After modernisms failure to find foundations, humanism must turn to the further development of self-critique and justice--if only to reveal the Others outlines and our own.

Rhetoric and composition itself is a pluralistic discipline; our methodologies--close reading, ethnography, discourse analysis--diverge as well as intersect; our formal training in education, English, or communication reflects the multiple intellectual aims that form our questions. As the discipline develops, our research becomes more specialized and harder to evaluate from across the field; we sometimes fail to recognize each other's outlines, situations, and aims and how they are circumscribed by institutional discourses. Thus, the disciplinary tensions underlying our current practice, tensions between current-traditional and sophistic rhetoric, between paideia and liberation pedagogy, between theory and practice, are increasing. These tensions can be productive if the discipline uses them to demarcate sites for deliberation and growth, if it uses them to hone tools of self-critique and justice. But the tensions also can divide us.

Differences--whether as disruptions to the community or as sites for critique, demarcation, and growth--call for special recognition, a careful self-reading; but as Toulmin demonstrates, that kind of reading is difficult. For a careful self-reading to happen, rhetoricians and compositionists will need to conceptualize--in pragmatic, situated ways--where differences position us both within the structure of the university and in our disciplinary work.

Faced with the impulse to adjudicate difference and given the theories discussed so far, we have at least three postures toward persuasion to consider: anti-pluralism, convergence pluralism, and tolerant pluralism. Each posture has political strength, but in the complexity of human life, rarely is any one posture enough for extended play, or could it be effective in all situations; the three postures are only possible conversational moments which shift with the rhetorical situation; they are codicils to persuasion by good reasons.

In sparse gesture or outline, let me demonstrate how the postures already play in institutional and disciplinary practice; while this is offered only as an outline, not an argument, I believe it is a useful reminder of the politics implicit in the activity of persuading. Too often a seductive persuasion with undesirable outcomes is blamed on a sophistic rhetor, and the role of the audience in controlling a situation is minimized. But the demagogic rhetor before the ignorant crowd is far from the only rhetorical dynamic.

Anti-pluralism, the refusal of persuasion, has been offered as a necessary though self-conscious position by feminists such as bell hooks and Gayatri Spivak. By insisting on one's difference, one maintains its value and a voice for its value; one successfully keeps a novel value before the speaker. In English departments, rhetoricians and compositionists do this by insisting on the value of student texts and public discourse as opposed to the texts of high culture. In refusing literary models, they create a position separate from the more populous factions of English departments, and since the center most easily contains the margin by its own adaptation, some literary factions recently have responded by defining themselves as cultural studies and granting intellectual status to the study of ordinary language.

Convergence pluralism, Toulmin's theoretical model, seeks a synthesis and ordering of values and practices, but in the process of convergence, it minimizes the values of marginal positions. Its hope for political harmony usually entails accepting the power of the majority as well as cacophony and conflict along the way. An example: in English departments, rhetoricians often are privileged above experimentalists and ethnographers because the methodologies of rhetoric more closely approximate those of the literati. For purposes of convergence, rhetoric may become writing's departmental voice; still, it is worth noting that the rhetoric of English departments often identifies with hermeneutic techniques, methods of reading, rather than with the pedagogical or political art of performance. Thus, the convergence requires adaptation even within rhetorical practice; that is, rhetoric becomes more theoretical and interpretive. The pattern of privileging is reversed in education programs where often composition's methodologies and pedagogies dominate. In each case, however, the character of a larger community decides what is valuable for rhetoric and composition and slights the criteria of our own broad practices.

Tolerant pluralism, exemplified by Kolodny's acceptance of different ideologies, is a fragile and transient posture. The suspension of judgment, a therapeutic stance, may facilitate the solving of problems and support movements toward justice. But in addition to the practice of open responsiveness, which requires the temporary abandoning or minimizing of our personal disciplinary aims and priorities, tolerant pluralism requires "talking to, arguing with, and learning from," and that is difficult. Rhetoricians and compositionists come together in organizations such as NCTE or MLA, but they find even their internal diversity uncomfortable. After all, what sessions do you attend? What do you retain or use from a session based on a different methodology? I think it is safe to say, "talking to, arguing with, and learning from" happens. But most often it happens across small difference, not large.

These three postures toward persuasion clearly are in need of more discussion than this essay can provide, but I think it safe to conclude that once speakers acknowledge that they are not operating in a formal system of logic or rationalism, once they have accepted Toulmin's arguments for reason over rationality and the situatedness of knowledge (and who hasn't in 1993?), the next step seems to be the consideration of power and difference. As Toulmin's interview shows, ignoring these postmodern concerns diminishes the justice and wisdom of a good man's arguments.

Without a doubt, Toulmin's work has been significant in reestablishing the value of practical reason in the process of deliberation, but throughout his interview, he enacts the split between the professing of pluralism and the practice of recognizing and respecting difference. At his best, Toulmin recognizes the struggle, saying "all knowledge is related to a human interest of one kind or another." But that insight does not lead him to the observation that reason also is a social construct, no more than the elaborate invention of some "me and my friends," certainly no guarantee of dialogue or justice. A good man can speak well, but that never, by itself, stops business from proceeding as usual.

Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Works Cited