Blaming or Learning?

What a pleasure to have the opportunity to end the semester as we began, with a book for a popular audience! Difficult Conversations has been a timely read for me, and I have found much to use in my personal life, at the same time that I have recognized the ways that it connects to themes from our other readings and conversations in this class. I found this quote to be a microcosm of one of the central themes (argument as inquiry) we have addressed: "Focusing on blame is a bad idea because it inhibits our ability to learn what's really causing the problem and to do anything meaningful to correct it" (p. 59).

Having a difficult conversation means engaging in a dialogue, rather than delivering a monologue of blame. It means being open to the other person - their views, their feelings, and their identity. It means being open to the self, which takes some digging to get at what we really think, feel, and own up to. We engage in a process of inquiry, genuinely wanting to explore together how we each contributed to see what went wrong and how it might be addressed in the future. It means learning rather than blaming.

I found myself reviewing conversations I have had with my significant other, and seeing how the process they outline is so attractive and helpful when you really care about the other person and genuinely want to address the issues that might arise between you. I can also see how this process would be important in situations where you will continue to engage with the person (such as a workplace, or with a neighbor). I wonder, though, how it would translate to the situations where the communication is more public. In the political context, mapping your part of the contribution system could be used as an opening for an attack! But I live in hope that there remain those in the public/rhetorical/political realm who do want to engage in genuine dialogue/argument/inquiry. It seems to me that what is needed is a willingness to recognize the real people, rather than seeing them as representatives of an issue. But is that giving in to American individualism? Is that mistaking public communication for interpersonal comm? We miss something if we do not see the organizational communication issues that are often at stake in these difficult conversations. See how I'm putting in a good word for our entire field over in Comm? :-)

I will continue to think on these things, and hope we will have time for a little conversation about the book on Thursday before our presentations.

Writers Block and the Process of Intellectual Inquiry

I have been in my workspace in Heinkel this evening, absolutely paralyzed trying to write my semester paper for this class. The writing process is often this way for me. As a diversion, I read the assigned reading for our class this week, and found it not only refreshing, but relevant to my writing block. I have been so worried that my desire to take a "side" in the Prop B issue would be a problem in a class that has seemed to emphasize cooperation and inquiry so strongly, that I have been afraid to start writing. What I saw in the Lynch,et al piece gave me hope. It is possible to come to a position with thought and complexity, and to stake a claim that will make a difference in the real world. Doing so is not easy, for it involves a process of inquiry that hears the complexity of the issues, examines the consequences of the various positions,and recognizes the situatedness of the various participants. I know that, for me, any paper worth its salt, particularly one on an issue that I care about as much as this one, challenges me to find the moment when I can stop researching and write. There is always more to learn, more to explore, more to consider. And, in a rhetorical piece, there is always one more piece of "text" to examine. I really love the process outlined in the Lynch, et al piece. I wish we had read it earlier in the semester, and I would have enjoyed having my paper due in four pieces at various stages along the way. It would be a very interesting exercise in arguing differently!

Qualitative Research and Representation

Last year in Qualitative Methods in Communication, we read Lindlof and Taylor's (2002) Qualitative Communication Research Methods, where they made clear the distinction between post-positivist and interpretive research methods. The interpretive/qualitative approach includes the following commitments (among a much longer list - found on pp. 11-12):

realities are plural, simultaneous, and local phenomena

research should privilege deep understanding of human actions, motives, and feelings. It should illuminate how cultural symbol systems are used to attribute meaning to existence and activity.

true knowledge is gained through prolonged immersion and extensive dialogue practiced in actual social settings

knowledge claims should preserve the subjective experience and motivations of social actors in their meaningful performances

Earlier in the chapter (p. 6) they note that "qualitative research in communication involves the performances and practices of human communication...Performances are local and unique interaction events. Their execution is collaborative and their significance is negotiable."

I share all of this as background to the material we read for this week, especially for those who may not have taken qual methods (whereas I had not had much exposure to "cognitive rhetoric"). Clearly one of the issues in all of this is how the researcher then represents the voices, perspectives and meaning-making activity of the participants. It was interesting to me to see how Flower, Higgins, and Long argue for the possibility of representation, including a fairly strong critique of self-reflexivity (I share much of their concern about navel-gazing, yet at the same time it seems to me a strength of qual research not to make a naive assumption about the ability to fairly represent the other if one doesn't remain aware of one's own social location).

It seems to me that, if we are to have any connection with the other, we will always be representing their voices, perspectives, and meaning-making activity, if only by the way we replay the home movies in our minds. Yet that does not mean, I believe, that we give up on trying to listen in the transformative way outlined in this week's reading. The process of articulating and hearing rival hypotheses can be such a transformative process, yet I wonder, in the end, how truly the voices of those who are not the authors of the article are being represented. As we learned in qual, even a transcript of a conversation is not "what really happened." And, if the final product is an article/book chapter so dense with academese that even a language-buff academic like me is falling asleep, I wonder how the participants in the research would respond. Would they feel represented? included?

Home movies of the mind

In what I otherwise found to be a slog through this week's dense reading, this question leapt out at me: "What are those contextualized representations - those home movies of the mind that we all play as we interpret a problem?" (p. 6). I think because I am currently so interested in visual representation and issues of visual rhetoric, the idea of "home movies of the mind" was particularly intriguing to me. Home movies aren't scripted, and often not particularly coherent, but they have such rich "narrative fragments" that they can be a source of a deep understanding. When we seek to understand the other, to engage in argument (in the positive sense of the word), how often do we seek a rational, linear set of "explanations" for the positions they take, the choices they make, etc.? What if, instead, we sought to get a glimpse of the home movies of their mind? I know, for me, as someone who does not tend to think in a linear fashion and has an even harder time articulating a set of logical data and warrants when asked, the idea of somehow, in a holistic way, sharing the home movies of my mind sounds like a much more invitational and promising venture.

Loneliness, Openness to Inquiry, and Public Speaking

One of the things that struck me most keenly in the Kastely reading is how profoundly lonely is the person who is not willing to engage the other. Kastely notes that both Creon and Antigone, in the end, cannot get outside themselves, and that other protagonists in Sophocles' works seem to suffer similar fates. Martin Luther spoke of sin as being "incurvatus in se" - turned in on the self - a concept that seems to me underlying much of Kastely's reflections. Being willing to engage with the other means opening up and out, like a flower unfurling its petals to welcome the bee - engaging with one who is able to bring the germinating promise of pollen, but who also carries with it the possibility of a sting. If we are to be truly open to inquiry, to changing our mind, we will engage in a similar level of promise and risk.

For teaching Intro to Public Speaking, I have often noted that the more nervous a student it, the more likely they are to be locked into their own private world - so tied to their notes they could be giving the speech in an empty room, for all they are not engaging with the audience. Ironically, since they perceive that they are scared of the audience, they actually do better and have a better time when they look up and engage. It can take a while to convince them of that! Hayley is right that a significant teaching moment comes with the chapter on listening (and I admit, when I first taught Comm 1200, I wondered how in the world i was going to do an entire lesson on something we do all the time (HA - so I thought!) ). Public speaking is all about engaging with the other, even though it is one person who is (normatively) talking. The entire process that we teach our students is audience-centered. But that does not mean that we do not encounter the problems with argumentation that Kastely outlines, especially as the students work on their persuasive speeches. And, this semester, teaching a writing intensive, I see much the same issues as first-year composition teachers experience. Somehow, I want there to be space to talk about the underlying human/spiritual/ethical issue of engaging the other, being open to the process, and getting out of the self. The Comm Dept and I both hope that, once I pass comps, I will be able to teach Comm Ethics. Something tells me I am going to be engaging these issues!

Review of the Field

I found Palczewski's article laying the groundwork to be a particularly helpful overview of feminist approaches to argumentation, and really appreciated the historical presentation. As a side note, it was cool to see names that I remember from my first go-around in school 20 years ago! I heard Dolores Williams present at Re-imagining (a feminist theology conference) in 1993, and she was very provocative (and argumentative, in the popular sense of the word, come to think of it)! I have long been intrigued by the idea of women, and other traditionally marginalized groups, coming to "voice" - in fact, that will enter into my semester project on animal perspectives in animal rights discourse. When it comes to the history of the "voice" of women, clearly there are issues with whose voice exactly we are talking about. When I was working on my MDiv (1988-1991), we were reading a lot of theology by women of color/Third World women as an attempt to widen the perspectives with which we approached our understanding of religion. It was fascinating!

Throughout the work I was doing at that time, it was clear that one thing feminist theologians were claiming was the authority of women's experience as a normative source for theological truth. This was (and I think, is) a radical claim! If traditional texts were all written from a patriarchal perspective, then women's voices need to be reclaimed in order to have a full understanding of religious truth. Taking experience seriously is one way to do that. However, as Palczewski notes, sometimes this broader emphasis on women's experience has devolved into a narrower focus on "personal testimony" as "feminine," which in the end is essentializing and unhelpful.

This brings up for me a caution about our reading of these articles, and our discussion this evening. In particular in the Bruner article, I saw a tendency to be less than clear about distinguishing between "patriarchy" and "male" on the one hand, and "feminist" and "female" on the other. To me, it is not automatically essentializing to construe patriarchal argumentation as power-over, attempting to control/change, etc and feminist argumentation as pursuing a different path based on "equality, immanent value, and self-determination." It only becomes essentializing if we assume patriarchy = male/masculine and feminist = female/feminine. Some of the biggest fights I have had with people over feminist issues have been with those who make this conflation! Patriarchy demeans/limits everyone - male and female alike. Ideally, feminist critique of patriarchy aims at a liberation that is for everyone. It is about a system, not sex/gender at the biological level.

That being said, of course Crenshaw's article brings up very interesting biological issues! I think her consideration of the "male norm" is very helpful, although I found myself wondering at a couple of points if she was trying to have it both ways regarding the "difference" issue. This will be worth more discussion in class...

Religion in the Public Square

Of all the weeks to be grading 40 papers on top of my own work! I could be spending the entire week on a close reading of Crowley, and could already have posted about five times on here in response to what I am reading. THIS is what I study! Why did I not know about this book yet? Last year I did a lit review for my final paper in Political Communication, in anticipation of what will likely be my focus area for my dissertation. In the lit review I examined the intersection of public church and public square, with a particular eye to the public participation of religious voices in the political process, especially NON-fundamentalist voices. With that lit review in my head, I already have a couple of concerns about the binaries Crowley is drawing.

First, I want to take a step back and remember Tannen's insight that binaries sometimes exclude perspectives that do not fit the two "sides" in an argument. Certainly, mainline and progressive voices (despite Crowley's brief nod to Sojourners (p. 9) ) are left out of a binary between liberalism and fundamentalism. I realize that Crowley is intentional in her focus on fundamentalists/apocalypticism (p. 7), but one of my ongoing frustrations with the current framing of religion in the political process is the seeming assumption that mainline voices do not have the power to be persuasive or of interest to scholars. As the junior political comm faculty person said when I told him I want to study progressive religious voices in the political process: "what, all two of them?" !!

More importantly, however, is that in drawing this binary, Crowley seems to be accepting (so far - I'm on the second chapter) a deeper binary that assumes liberals want to confine religion to the private sphere. She notes that fundamentalists do not like this confining (p. 11), and speaks of the fights over the ten commandments monument (what one scholar (Clement, 2009) has called "public displays of affection for God" but this misses the fact that there are liberal religious voices who also seek a public witness (and in fact are already pursuing that witness through their Washington lobbying offices, among other means). It is just that the public witness of liberal/mainline religious voices is going to do things like ask "how is this legislation going to affect the poor and marginalized?" or "what will that initiative do to the environment?" rather than try to get public displays of affection for God put up as part of a culture war.

Speaking from my own tradition, here is a brief section that I included in my paper last year: Lutherans do not believe that the Christian voice is due special treatment in the public square, but do believe that the church has a vital role to play in reminding the state of its primary obligation to serve the public good. Ultimately, “Lutherans are committed to the integrity of church and state, to their practical interaction, indeed cooperation for the common good in a constitutional order that guarantees religious freedom for all” (Stumme & Tuttle, 2003, p. 69).

It is my hope to focus my dissertation on how mainline and progressive voices can be wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove in getting our message out there (how we can argue differently, perhaps?). I look forward to continuing to wrestle with Crowley's work as I move towards that goal.

Adherence, Values, and Epideictic Rhetoric

So far, Perelman is quite a fascinating read! I appreciate the clarity of his prose, and have been interested to see (for the first time since beginning my study of rhetoric at MU) references to preaching that are illustrative rather than pejorative. [If I had a dime for every use of "preach" to mean talking at/talking down/power-over/non-listening, even amongst well-meaning colleagues, I would be significantly richer].

Perelman emphasizes the importance of what he calls "adherence" in his discussion of argumentation and persuasion. It is not enough to engage in logical proofs of an almost mathematical precision. What is needed is an awareness of an actual audience who will be disposed to respond to a speaker based on the extent to which the speaker shares or moves their values. Forensic and deliberative rhetoric, as important as they have been seen to be in the history of teaching persuasion, do not cover the whole of what is needed when it comes to making arguments that persuade others. Perelman writes: "epidictic oratory has significance and importance for argumentation, because it strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds" (p. 50). Even more strongly, Perelman notes on the next page: "the speaker tries to establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience" (p. 51). In Perelman, I believe we do indeed see a "new" rhetoric in the sense that he seems to be moving towards an almost Burkean emphasis on identification here, rather than a traditional Aristotelian emphasis upon logical proof.

Perelman's emphasis on values, communion, and adherence raises very interesting questions that once again (as with Toulmin) move us towards a more realistic view of how people actually engage in argumentation. Who defines the shared values? How do they come to be the values of that audience? That speaker? To what extent does the appeal to values involve an "appeal to a universal order, to a nature, or a god that would vouch for the unquestioned, and supposedly unquestionable, values" (p. 51)? As a preacher working in diverse communities, I recognize these questions as real and significant, and I take them seriously every time I get in the pulpit. Looking forward to more reflecting on this in days to come!

Analytic arguments, Quine and Toulmin

Last week I posted a summary of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature on my blog, where I briefly discussed the difference between analytic (true in virtue of meaning alone) and synthetic (true in virtue of meaning + how the world is) truths. Rorty draws on Quine, who earlier had made a convincing argument that there are, in reality, no analytic truths, since every statement is inextricably connected to a set of assumptions about reality. In reading Toulmin, I once again hear echoes of the philosophical arguments going on around him. Warrants have backing, and one can, ad infinitum, continue to ask for backing for the backing. Yet it is interesting to notice that Toulmin makes a practical claim that Quine does not, which is to say that certain warrants (or backing for those warrants) can be accepted on face value alone: "the acceptability of the most reliable warrants is something we are entitled to take for granted" (p. 99). Once again we see Toulmin's interest in the actual practical level of engaging with one another in making arguments, for his concern is that if we become caught up in the infinite web of backing for our warrants, we will never begin to argue!

Yet, I wonder, how it is that some warrants would be deemed to be “reliable” and others not? Is it, as Rorty would contend, a matter of whether society allows us to claim it as true? And, if then, what is “society”? Who decides? One of the exciting things about inquiry is to question assumed truths. Yet, at a certain point, we do just need to sit down and talk with one another!

One of my hopes is to teach a course on communication ethics. It certainly seems that this question of reliable warrants would be particularly sharpened when making ethical arguments. Hmmm…a possible semester project?

Teaching Toulmin and Recognizing Warrants

During the last month we have taught the students in Communication 3050 (Survey of Communication Theory) the Toulmin Method for analyzing arguments. They had a homework exercise in which they had to read a news article and label the claim, data, and warrant, and also find the reservation, qualifier, and backing. What quickly became clear is that they found it much easier to label the claim and the data than to articulate the warrant. They also had a hard time distinguishing the data that supported the warrant (the backing) from the data that supported the primary claim.

Being able to articulate the warrant, it seems to me, is crucial to understanding an argument, and also to being able to listen generously to someone else’s argument. If part of our goal is to argue differently, to be able to, in Aikido fashion, move alongside someone else who may differ from us, it seems to me that doing so means being able to name the warrant in our own position, and in the other person’s position. The warrants may be diametrically opposed (as in the abortion debate), but they may just be implicit and not well understood, even by the one holding the position.

One of the reasons I enjoy philosophy (and particularly philosophy of language) so much is that good philosophical investigation, it seems to me, asks us to step back and examine the warrants in our arguments. How does this connect with that? What assumptions are we making to connect that data to that claim? Do we really have a warrant for using this example to support our position? Could we grant that someone else’s position is, in fact, based on the same data, but seeing it through the lens of a different warrant?

Philosophy - yes!

It is a pleasure to be reading philosophy again! Last year, when I was taking Philosophy of Language (Phil 7100) with Dr. Claire Horisk (who is *wonderful* by the way), we spent the semester considering the kind of logical issues that Toulmin references. How is it that we use language to refer? To make logical connections? To build arguments? The whole project of philosophy, at least analytical philosophy since Kant, has been to lay out a kind of epistemological logic that allows us to make truth claims about the universe. Although Rorty critiqued that project in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (I did a book report on that for Comm Theory last year), and Toulmin challenges the universality of logical norms in the book we are reading, there has been strong resistance to such rethinking. I loved the introductory note where Toulmin likened his book to a child that had made new friends – in this case, communication scholars – when the philosophical community responded negatively to his work.

(As a side note – had an “aha” moment reading Toulmin regarding my bibliographic network: I had forgotten about/not considered my entire training in philosophy, especially philosophy of language. Yes, I do have background in building philosophical arguments! More on that (soon) on my personal blog.)

The question that Toulmin is exploring - whether syllogistic logic can be applied across arguments, or whether there needs to be more of what I might call an organic approach – is actually, I believe, analogous to the kind of struggles we have in communication scholarship between, broadly speaking, the social scientific and qualitative/rhetorical approaches. There is something very appealing about being able to quantify and lay out the logic in our scholarship and research. And, I must admit, I *love* the whole philosophical project of pulling language apart to see what it is really doing/saying. But if that is not how people conceive of communication (or, in the case of our course topic: argumentation), there may be limits to the usefulness of a narrow, logical approach. I’m not ready to chuck it out the window though. At least in terms of philosophy of language, it is too much fun! (if any of you wants to see what we studied in Phil 7100, I would be glad to share the course syllabus, and my summary sheet of the content we covered)

Reasoned discourse: Is there still hope for it?

There are several directions I am interested in pursuing in discussing Aristotle, but the one most related to our particular class focus is the way that Aristotle ties persuasion in with demonstration: “Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.” He then discusses the difference between dialectic, which depends on syllogisms, and rhetoric, which makes more extensive use of enthymemes (a syllogism where the audience supplies one step in the logic, perhaps unconsciously). In reading this aspect of Aristotle’s thought, I realized that I have, probably naively, tended to believe/hope that if people can just be made aware of the whole truth about something, they will be persuaded (probably to think like me?!). That is, I think that if something can just be demonstrated clearly, truthfully, and well, the related persuasive point will be more easily made. If only people could read all the facts on global climate change, we would all be willing to make a difference for the environment. If only a clear case could be made for protecting helpless animals, no one would oppose Prop B, etc…

You can call me naïve, and I probably am, but I do think there is something to Aristotle’s connection between logic, demonstration, and persuasion. It is just that in our argument culture, we are so busy watching the agonistic fights that we no longer seem to have time to consider reasoned demonstrations. It is one of the things I like about Obama: his emphasis on intelligent, reasoned discourse. At the same time, we are beings who respond to pathos, as Aristotle also emphasizes, and I realize that people seem to have been more responsive to Obama when they could focus on his elegant rhetoric rather than hear from his wonky side. He has been getting kudos lately for speaking with passion again. Yet I do not want to give up hope that reasoned demonstration can actually make a difference!

Dialogue or Arguing?

Last year in Communication Theory class we read Speaking Into the Air by John Durham Peters, who takes his readers on a sweeping yet in-depth journey through the philosophy of communication. In the opening chapter, he outlines a contrast he will follow throughout the book - a contrast between communication as dissemination and communication as dialogue. For Peter, communication as dialogue is exemplified by Plato's Socrates, who in Phaedrus puts forward a vision of communication that "must be soul-to-soul, among embodied live people, in an intimate interaction that is uniquely fit for each participant" (Peters, p. 47). It was interesting to come to Aristotle's Rhetoric with echoes of JDP and Plato still in my head, and to see his more practical consideration of the "available means of persuasion." Why do we teach Aristotle and Cicero in Introduction to Public Speaking, and not Plato? Why has the Western tradition rewarded those who can persuade and win arguments rather than those who develop skills in the area of intimate, dialogic, soul-to-soul communication?

I am still hesitating to begin my bibliographic network, because I realize I have NO grounding, no background, no training in argumentation. What I have learned of ethos, logos, and pathos, I have learned since starting to teach at MU. What I know about forensics I have learned at the feet of fellow graduate students (thank you Hayley!). I realize that, instead, my training has been in dialogue, in listening, in speaking the truth in love, in speaking truth to power (but realizing that often means "losing" in the world's eyes), in searching for that which can most powerfully convey truth that is forged in community, and which honors the multiple voices that contribute to the process. Even though I am intensely interested in political communication, and worked on my first campaign at the age of seven, I do not think I could hold my own in a political debate! So it is with real curiosity and more than a little hunger that I come to Aristotle. As I am beginning this reading, I see the familiar outlines of what we teach in Comm 1200, but I am looking forward to going deeper. More in another blog post once I get to that depth...

Religion, Politics, and Agonistic Dualism

As I read Deborah Tannen's book, I found myself wondering why I had not even heard of it before, let alone read it. During seminary days, I had read and found very helpful You Just Don't Understand, but somehow The Argument Culture had slipped past me. I found the book to be one of those rare gems that is simultaneously insightful and also recognizable as truth that you already know. It may be a "popular" take on argumentation, but it seems to me to be one that takes very seriously multiple problems in our current media, political, and academic cultures.

I found particularly insightful her distinction between agonistic, ritualize opposition ("fighting for the sake of fighting") and reasoned argumentation. Although I agree with Maxwell regarding her use of sources, I think the overall lines she traces through the media, the law, politics, and academia weave a strong fabric of support for her thesis. As someone who studies political communication and has long had a passionate interest in truth-telling, I thought her analysis of the way the "two sides" approach distorts understanding of crucial public issues was spot on. The truth is too often victim to the way we have come to believe that "both sides" must be aired - even when one of those sides does not have a leg to stand on (e.g. holocaust deniers), or there are, in reality, multiple perspectives to be considered.

As I mentioned in class, the main background I bring to my current life in academia is my experience in the church as a pastor. Allow me to make a connection, if you will. Each year during Holy Week I watch again the third part of Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, and I have also used this section of the film with confirmation and adult classes over the years. Zeffirelli is a master at showing the way others projected onto Jesus what they wanted him to be, and particularly the way that they tried to fit him into boxes of their own making. There is this wonderful moment in the film where he heals the centurian's son, and some zealots, watching the scene, remark to each other "so, he's a friend of the Romans." It is so clear at that moment that, in a world of dualistic opposition, he cannot be seen for who he really is, and his message cannot be heard. It is a realization that will lead to his death.

I wonder, with Tannen, to what extent our cultural insistence on dualistic thinking leads to an inability to see or hear the truth (or, to be post-modern about it, the multiple truths of peoples' lives), and what profound opportunities we miss in the process.