Degrees of Separation-Degrees of Verisimilitude

I have to admit that my blog post this week is a little bifurcated. With that said I will do my best to address both the assignment and the readings, albeit somewhat awkwardly. I found the database assignment to be an insightful experience. As I mentioned in class this type of work is what I frequently encountered in social science research. I do, however,  have concerns in regards to its applications in a theoretical/ philosophical context. To be clear I mean  by “this type” of investigations one’s that calls for  statistical evaluation that yield conclusions drawn from patterns observed in the data- just for an offhand reference lets call it statistical analysis. I don’t mean to devolve into a pedantic discussion of which methods “belongs” where; especially now when it seems that inter-disciplinary modes of research are becoming the new normal.  What concerns me is predominantly the loss of exactness and meaning. Take my undergraduate thesis. I evaluated the impact of  major presidential addresses on public opinion in order to ascertain the amount of political capital the president could self-generate.  To arrive at a conclusion the only choice I had was to use a statistical evaluation of public opinion as it was stimulated by  major presidential speeches. 

Granted, someone could critique my methodology and my statistical models (I could have done this or that better), but ultimately what I could NOT do was ask every single American citizen how the president’s speech changed their opinion on him (the president) and the issue addressed. This is perhaps “the” dilemma when one studies large groups of subjects in the social sciences, we can not ask everyone. So methods of inquires are established to approximate the answer as best as possible, conceding a certain loss of information and meaning in the process in the hopes that if the methodology is just right, it will at least get the particular pieces of information sought after. When I am interrogating a text, however, such as Giambattista Vico’s New Science, I CAN simply ask him, figuratively, how he feels about a particular issue. In other words, I don’t have to accept the loss of meaning that I do when I set up a statistical evaluation.  I can just consult the text from beginning to end and pick up every piece of denotation and connotation. To perform a statistical analysis on such a text seems to add degrees of separation that may do more harm than good. However, and this is a big however, if we use these statistical evaluations alongside thorough readings of the text, we can perhaps throw all my concerns into the waste-basket. 

I was very surprised, for example, to see that rhetoric was only addressed twice in Vico’s New Science, and civility was not addressed at all. My knee-jerk reaction was to change the search terms (to alter my variables), so I searched for what I thought may have been synonymous terms more likely in use in Vico’s time. For civility I did not see many related terms pop up, but for rhetoric I saw several references to arguments and argumentation and other terms that could be taken to imply rhetoric. At least for civility, this type of research may prompt one to think why in a text that devotes so much energy to the function of religion in the human world, is there an apparent silence on the topic of civility. To wrap up my discussion of the assignment, I thoroughly enjoyed Google’s Ngram viewer. I see Ngram as more in orthodoxy with this type of statistical analysis.  When we use Ngram we are essentially analyzing- in broad strokes- the prevalence of the search terms through time, and using this to inform our discussion. While I would imagine that Bacon would be the dominant author of the three examine, I was surprised at just how much he dwarfed Wollstonecraft and Vico. In the class discussions and from additional readings I’ve come to see Vico as someone modern scholarship has expropriated to advance the field of historicism. I would be interested, therefore, to conduct a new Ngram search this time from 1800’s into the present to see if new intellectual movements have made Vico more prominent to Wollstonecraft and Bacon.

readings

Last class Kyle and I were tasked with defining the word “system” and it was discussed how a majority of the author’s we’ve read so far effectively create/theorisize their own “systems” of rhetoric.  This is a very useful thinking tool for me in terms of how I approach each text. Every text I read, I ask myself:  how can a practitioner of rhetoric use this authors system to enhance his advance his field?   From a presidential speechwriter to the South Florida Water District supervisor; what does this text have to speak to both of them? In essence I think this is a question, at least to a large extent, of verisimilitude. Whose “system” more closely reflects reality.  Only with a proper diagnosis of  the ailment can the physicians prescription yield any positive change.  The source of the challenge I was posing at the end of class last Tuesday came from wondering how closely Campbell and Kant’s systems reflected reality in a few key ways. Kant writes, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the ability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.” (Kant 41).  Kant argued that if the public were endowed with freedom, than “enlightenment is almost inevitable.”(42).  He saw that in his own time enlightenment had not been reached, but that he was witnessing a process of enlightenment and that there were “clear indications that the way is now being opened for men to proceed freely in this direction and that the obstacles to general enlightenment- to their release from their self imposed immaturity are gradually diminishing.” (44-45).  The reason why I take issue with this point in terms of rhetoric, is in regards to the orator’s task of conceiving his audience. If we think we are addressing an enlightened audience than the orator would be addressing an audience that has cast off the chains of its guardians and are free to independently analyze his speech. One would imagine with the new found freedom prevalent in leading industrial nations and the centuries that have past since Kant’s own time we would certainly living in the era of the enlightened audience. I would have to argue that that is not close to the truth.  What freedom has accomplished is that it has allowed individuals to live in a greater market-place of guardians than before. Instead of Kant’s “pastor to serve as my conscience, [and] physicians to determine my diet”, there are an innumerable amount of print and television pundits, and experts. Then again, this is not something that Kant didn’t imagine could happen. He writes “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men…gladly remain in a lifelong immaturity…” (41). So then I guess the criticism I can levy at Kant is being overly optimistic on the effect of freedom.   

The clearest lesson I’ve taken out of this course so far is that rhetoric is not just how to arrange your words to sell a point.  So maybe the questions I bring to the text a very limited. However, I can’t help but think about  the South Florida Water District supervisor. I was comforted to think that Bitzer felt he had a role to play in addressing his communities water shortage “exigency”.  Working within Bitzer’s system the SFWD supervisor has an important rhetorical role to play as the change agent in mobilizing his community’s  utilization of water resources. If he had to survey these theoreticians in advance of a renewed effort who could he best rely on?  These some of the questions I will be keeping in mind.