Rhetoric

As we have seen in the transition form Part I to Part II of this book, the inductive riskiness of doxastic methods applied in testimonial uptake or prescribed as exemplary of religious faith, helpfully operationalizes the broader social scientific, philosophical, moral, and theological interest that people may have with problems of religious luck. Accordingly, we will now speak less about luck, but more about the manner in which highly risky cognitive strategies are correlated with psychological studies of bias studies and (...) human cognitive ecology. Chapter Four is concerned with connections between psychological study of biases and heuristics, and the comparative study of fundamentalism. The first section looks at work by psychologists and philosophers on our bias blind spot. Later sections ask, ‘In what ways might biases and heuristics play a special role in aiding our understanding of, and response to, fundamentalist orientation?’. The judgments we make in ignorance of our own biases Montaigne calls our importunate presumptions, and he suggests a host of practical factors that make them appealing. Montaigne, as I discuss in the first section, associates many of our errors with one or another kind of presumption, often about our similarity or differences from others, or from God. Our obvious psychographic diversity, and the polemical ground dynamics involved in our ‘culture wars’ are compounded on the agential side by the invisibility of our biases to ourselves. A number of person and social biases are described that plausibly affect all of our beliefs in domains of controversial views, religious views included. The second section continues to study of how etiological symmetry (similar patterns of belief-uptake) gives rise to religious contrariety (diverse narratives and theologies) in testimonial faith traditions, and what the implications of this are for philosophy of religion, generally, and for an improved comparative study of fundamentalism, in particular. Utilizing the work of philosophers such as Rachel Fraser and psychologists such as Emily Pronin and her co-authors, I offer a four-step genealogical account for how etiological symmetry so easily gives rise to religious contrariety. This account begins with the narrative nature of testimony in the Abrahamic family of religions, and how narrative content confounds our “source monitoring.” My genealogy also introduces what I term biased-closure inferences (BCI) as one of the key enablers of religious exclusivism and absolutism. These are the seemingly ‘logical’ but actually very self-serving inferences people often make, inferences from their own belief being true, to any belief contrary to it being false. Those who claim unique truth, epistemic access, and/or virtue and religious value for the home religion are no exception to the broad pertinence of bias studies across domains of controversial view. The proximate causes of belief are all that we can study, and in these there may be significant etiological symmetries. Yet those groups themselves, especially to the extent that they are exclusivist, are tunnel-visioned on claims of doctrinal uniqueness: on content differences of a theological sort. Comparative philosophy is met with the puzzlement that symmetric or essentially similar doxastic strategies should give rise not just to cognitive diversity, but to what we can call polarized or polemical contrariety, contrariety of a kind where each view adamantly rejects all others. Arguably, the more that theologies offer explanations of a counter-inductive sort, or profess counter-inductive thinking as exemplary of faith, the better evidential ground there for inferring that bias involved in the acquisition or maintenance of beliefs. This provides more substance to the question of when censure, and etiological challenges to faith-based beliefs are philosophically well-motivated. (shrink)

“If you will listen to me, I will say, do not involve yourselves in any –ism. Study every –ism. Ponder and assimilate what you have read and try to practice yourself what appeals to you out of it. But for heaven’s sake do not set out to establish any –ism.”William James’s 1907 treatise Pragmatism is the book in which James most clearly lays out the core tenets of pragmatism and makes arguments for pragmatism over against rival schools of philosophy. Precisely (...) for this reason, I argue, it may very well be his least persuasive case for pragmatism.To understand why, we will need to analyze the distinctive grammar of pragmatism. According to James, pragmatism is a method and “a method only,”2 specifically a method that... (shrink)

Some classic historical vignettes depict scientists achieving breakthroughs without effort: Archimedes grasping the principles of buoyancy while bathing, Galileo Galilei discovering the isochrony of the pendulum while sitting in a cathedral, James Watt noticing the motive power of steam while passing time in a kitchen, Alexander Fleming finding penicillin in Petri dishes that he had omitted to clean before going on holiday. These stories suggest that, to establish important findings in science, hard work is not always necessary. In this article, (...) I suggest that such stories capture an important aspect of scientific.. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how the Greek men of science negotiated a role for their enterprise within the Greek public sphere, from the institution of the modern Greek state in the early 1830s to the first decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on instances where they appeared in public in their official capacity as scientific experts, I describe the rhetorical schemata and the narrative strategies with which Greek science experts engaged the discourses prevalent in nineteenth- (...) and early twentieth-century Greece. In the end, my goal is to show how they were neither zealots of modernization nor neutral actors struggling in isolated wastelands. Rather, they appear as energetic agents who used scientific expertise, national ideals and their privileged cultural positions to construct a rhetoric that would further all three. They engaged eagerly and consistently with emerging political views, scientific subjects and cultural and political events, without presenting themselves, or being seen, as doing anything qualitatively different from their peers abroad. Greek scientists cross-contextualized the scientific enterprise, situating it in the space in which they were active. (shrink)

Semantic essentialism holds that any scientific term that appears in a well-confirmed scientific theory has a fixed kernel of meaning. Semantic essentialism cannot make sense of the strategies scientists use to argue for their views. Newton's central optical expression "light ray" suggests a context-sensitive view of scientific language. On different occasions, Newton's expression could refer to different things depending on his particular argumentative goals - a visible beam, an irreducibly smallest section of propagating light, or a traveling particle of light. (...) Essentialist views are too crude to account for the richness and subtleties present in actual episodes of scientific debate and theory-change. (shrink)

Acceptance of three tenets of the doctrine of scientific objectivity, namely, the tenets of consensus, compartmentalization, and ahistorical truth, undermines scientists‘ appreciation of the importance of scientific controversy and consideration of the policy and value implications of controversial scientific theories. This essay rejects these tenets and suggests scientists appreciate theoretical diversity, learn rational means for adjudicating value differences, and cultivate conversational as well as written forms of communication.

In this much-anticipated revision and translation of Scienza e Retorica, Marcello Pera argues that rhetoric is central to the making of scientific knowledge. Pera begins with an attack of what he calls the "Cartesian syndrome"--the fixation on method common to both defenders of traditional philosophy of science and its detractors. He argues that in assuming the primacy of methodological rules, both sides get it wrong. Scientific knowledge is neither the simple mirror of nature nor a cultural construct imposed by contingent (...) interests, thus we must replace the idea of the scientific method with that of scientific rhetoric. Pera proposes a new dialectics of science to overcome the tension between normative and descriptive philosophies of science by focusing on the rhetoric in the proposition, defense, and argumentation of theories. Examining the uses of rhetoric in debates drawn from Galileo’s Dialogues, Darwin’s Origins, and the Big Bang-Steady State controversy in cosmology, Pera shows how the conduct of science involves not just nature and the inquiring mind, but nature, the inquiring mind, and a questioning community which, through the process of attack, defense, and dispute, determines what is science. Rhetoric, then, is an essential element in the constitution of science as the practice of persuasive argumentation through which results gain acceptance. (shrink)