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Round #1: What Do We Mean When We Say "Real" in Public Affairs: The Modern/PostmodernDistinctionAuthor(s): Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. MillerSource: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1996), pp. 101-108Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25611157 .
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Charles X Fox Texas Tech University
and
Hugh T. Miller
Univerity of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Florida Atlantic University
_,_?-_
ROUND #1
WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY
REAL " IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS: THE MODERN/POSTMODERN
DISTINCTION
Administrative Theory & Praxis, 18(1): 100-108, 1996.
"Reality. What a concept ..." ~ Robin Williams
INTRODUCTION/ABSTRACT
We would very much like to be able to draw a credible line, or band, of demarcation between the real and the hyperreal. We would like to be able to do this because we are very concerned about current debates in
public affairs that seem to us to have lost connection with warranted inference. And we would like to do it without running afoul of those aspects of the postmodern turn in philosophy with which we find ourselves in
agreement. This is no easy task. In what follows, we first provisionally sketch a macrocosmic explanation of America's current malaise. Then, bracketing that
explanation, we explore how a distinction between real and hyperreal would, if such demarcation could be
sustained, be helpful in determining that explanation's veracity in competition with other ones. Second, we
begin to sketch the extent to which distinguishing between hyperreality and reality is credible by identifying aspects of life that are quite apparently hyperreal. Third, we then outline our ontological/ epistemological stance: constructivism. Fourth, that done, we are positioned to formulate some rules which deny reality to certain types of argument that clutter up debates about public affairs in our time. Fifth, we sketch a preliminary theory of valid claim making.
MAKING A VALID CLAIM: THE PROBLEM
In the social sciences, we commonly summon variables that are political, social, or economic when we offer explanations for what ails society. The plot in such a causal story might, in one version of the story, place
blame on the liquidity of international capital. The rich, the greedy, and the well-positioned have abandoned their countries and live in luxurious walled-off enclaves wherever they please. Liquid international capital, unconstrained by national regulation and taxation, can
downsize, merge, outsource, dual source, and move
factories to the most favorable location. Meanwhile, the rest of the citizenry in the countries to which capital no
longer has firm national commitments are required to
compete among each other and those of all other countries for diminishing wages driven down by global labor competition. The natural reaction of the vast
majority of the citizens would seem to be to use their
political power, their votes, to empower the only institution with a chance to reverse these trends. That
would be the government of their nation-state.
It is, of course, always risky to use the state apparatus against capital because capital can capture it for its own
purposes. Still, it is the only chance to use political power to check economic power. Why isn't it tried? The short answer is divide and rule. For one thing, fragmented political authority in a federalist, checks-and balances system leads to incoherent policy (Robertson &
Judd, 1989). More to the point, popular will formation is made more difficult still when wedge issues, scapegoating, red herrings, and the like divide the
potential majority along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and immigration status. Paid
political entrepreneurs on retainer are used to create a constant din that pits aggrieved citizens against each other in a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Here is where the distinction between real and
hyperreal comes in. We would like to be able to say that such phenomena as declining real wages, economic
insecurity, temporary employment with no benefits, and
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latch-key kids created by the necessity of all household adults to earn wages are real. These effect work-a-day empowerment and feelings of effectiveness: whether one feels fulfilled, where one lives, how children are treated, what one eats, and what one drives. Phenomena that divert attention from this reality, whether the O.J.
Simpson trial, the Foster nomination, Whitewater
hearings, effects of Hollywood on family values, English only, or school prayer are hyperreal.
But, alas, standards of warranted inference that we
would affirm - those required to make valid claims to
press our case and confute alternative narratives - do not privilege our plot line. No such inferential rules or
protocols have a priori privileged status. Certainly, the
story about the liquidity of international capital is as
credible as the claims of those like many in the 104th
Congress, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh who
claim that "damn gummint" is the problem or cause of
the same malaise. But how to choose between these
explanations? In what way is the narrative about
international capital superior to narratives about, say, the
"new world order?" If no rules or protocols have a
priori privileged status, how can we claim that we are
right and opponents are wrong? This is the dilemma we
face. Let's begin by asserting with some confidence
what we can do before moving to more debatable
propositions.
HYPERREAL AND REAL
The easiest task is the one that identifies examples of
hyperreality. Hyperreality, a concept gifted to us by
postmodern philosophy, may be envisioned as a realm
where symbols which originally denoted something or,
perhaps, arose from language games related to group
performance of tasks, have detached from their mooring in reality. The result has been variously described as the
free play of signifiers, the signifier slipping under the
signified or in our own work: self-referential
epipheonimalism. However described, the idea is that
any sign can now take up residence in hyperreality and
illicitly cohabit with other signs to mystify and entrance
those who perceive them. While neurons might be
triggered, which is to a certain extent "real," those
chemical interactions remain largely contained within the
cranium in which they occur without immediately or
directly energizing reciprocal activity with other human
beings to get stuff done.
Taking a trip to Disney World involves packing up a real family, driving in a real car, filling up with real fuel at real gas stations. Real money is spent at the gate which is a real boon to the Orlando economy. The lines to attractions are real. Space mountain, mouse and duck
uniforms, Caucasian babies of different colors in "It's a
Small World" are epiphenomena of hyperreality. After the sensa of the epiphenomena, though, the giggles of the children and the family unity of having experienced something together are real. The heat, the whining, the
spilled ice cream are also real. (The ice cream itself may not be as real as the spilling of it.)
By what principles are we distinguishing between real
and hyperreal here? Human interaction, whether with other humans or with the sensuous environment, is real.
Symbols divorced from human interaction are hyperreal, although they can be the occasion for real interaction.
The O.J. trial in one's living room is hyperreal. Discussing the state of the American justice system with a colleague at the coffee pot using O.J. as an example is
real. The idea that a particular cleaning fluid can
ameliorate family dysfunctionalities is hyperreal.
Mopping the floor with it is real.
Now, if one can determine however roughly what is
hyperreal, surely it must then be a no-brainer to
determine the real. AND to use that determination to
then go on to decide between, say, the macro
explanation based on capital liquidity, the equally
conspiratorial machinations of the forces that lead to the
explanation of the "new world order," and those
explanations based on damn gummint. So what is the
problem?
The problem is the disconnect between the
phenomenological workaday reality that we can
ontologically and epistemologically embrace and those
necessarily more general explanations that might give us
confidence in a macrocosmic social theory. This calls
forth a brief explication of our epistemological/
ontological stance. We call it constructivism.
CONSTRUCTIVISM
Constructivism is designed to be consistent with the
most devastating (to modernist metanarratives or
universalist thought) insights of postmodern philosophy. The argument for constructivism requires careful
elucidation beyond the space afforded by this venue (but
see, please, Fox & Miller, 1995). Briefly, there are three
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moments to the view: Existential phenomenology (particularly Maurice Merleau Ponty), Berger and Luckman's social construction of reality, and Anthony Giddens' structuration theory.
From phenomenology, we appropriate an intentional active subject in a situation, the confluence of embodied
subject activity, and a lifeworld. We go on to borrow the conclusions of Burger and Luckman to the effect that
reality, at least as we know it, is socially constructed. As social animals, what we intend, what we pay attention
to, is overwhelmingly influenced by our culture,
including all those others who are reciprocally interrelated body-subjects populating our affective world. From Giddens, we embrace the concept of recursive
practices. These are habits, well-worn paths, of human behavior including thought and linguistic expression. Recursive practices have varying degrees of duration and
legitimacy and are often reified and taken by body subjects as virtually physical reality, despite the fact that those practices are malleable cultural artifacts.
Institutions, by this rendering, become widely or long held recursive practices.
We hold that constructivism is, first, not inconsistent with postmodernism. At the same time, second, it avoids
linguistic determinism associated with the remnants of structuralism contained within post-structuralism. It also, third, avoids what we call entropic relativism or nihilism.
Constructivism eschews modernist universalism, essentialism, or canonical metanarratives. It has no
deontological nomothetic first principle from which the rest of the universe may be deduced. It is not a god's eye or Archimedean view. In his life, Merleau-Ponty worried about whether he had not simply replaced the Cartesian cogito (I think therefore I am) with the
embodied-subject. We find him not-guilty. Embodied
subjectivity in a context is not a first principle; it is an existent or precondition. It does not privilege any particular body-subject nor any particular context. White
bourgeois males cannot use constructivism to legitimize claims to patriarchy, they can only describe their own lifeworld and offer it up to others differently situated. Since these are reports of meanings contained within recursive practices, these meanings are malleable and
subject to challenge, change, adjustment, or reaffirmation. Jump ball!
Constructivism is not part of the linguistic turn in
philosophy. It does not, for instance, view everything as
a text. It affirms subjective volunteerism, albeit within a context. But it does not turn things around to claim that the context rules. Modernism says that Faulkner authors text and knows what he is doing. Postmodernism, following from structuralist thought of Claude Levi-Strauss and carried forward by Michele
Foucault, says that the South writes Faulkner, denying him agency. Constructivism regards the action as a
dialectical relationship between the body-subject Faulkner, indeed imbued with the context in which he
developed but not determined by it. Perception is the
mediating moment between body-subjects and the contexts which they embody and act upon. Linguistic hyperreality may overmuch influence subjects, but it does not independently cause them to be or do.
At the opposite end of the controversy, those who still hold on to either some particular universal first principle or canonical metanarrative (everything from biblical text to historical materialism, to psychodynamics) scour
postmodernism for its relativism and/or nihilism. To
them, with their first principles to guide them to ethical
purity, anyone without such must fall into standardless nihilism. We don't think so. Absence of first principles does not mean no principles at all. We are not faced with such a Hobson's choice. The body-subject-in-the world suggests some relative, albeit not absolute nor
invincible, standards. "Body-subjects like mine ought to be able to avoid pain, enjoy pleasure, be afforded nutrients whenever possible. Empathy arises from
recognizing another body-subject like mine with similar needs and aspirations." In the current kultur k?mpf strident individualism is invoked to mute this existent. The strategy of bloody tyrants is to convince one sort of
body-subjects that others are not body-subjects at all ~
have somehow lost their status, are Untermenschen. Yet we are nonetheless moved by Sarajevo carnage and mass Rwanda burials. (Even ghoulishness can be traced back to inter-subjective empathy. The breakdown of, say, an
air-conditioning unit does not draw a crowd.) Constructivism with body-subjects in the world is consistent with the Aristotelian dictum that humans are social animals.
Again, we apologize that space constraints prohibit meticulous argumentation of constructivism and how it walks the fine line between being either fully modern or
postmodern. We have rhetorically imagined it at a high level of abstraction for the reader. Focus now returns to the question on the table: Can such an ontological/ epistemological stance ground our particular
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macrocosmic explanation of what ails us and foil other ones?
CONSTRUCTIVISM APPLIED TO MACRO POLITICAL ANALYSIS
Let' s begin with foiling others. Constructivism can be used to attack 1) absolutes, 2) reductionist explanations, 3) incomplete or small truths, and 4) reifications. These errors are not self-contained or without overlap.
Absolutism
It seems to us that many political positions of our day are based on absolutes. One has a belief, a particular point of view, and all observations, instances, and evidence are seen through the lens of it. These positions are basically tautological. Things are true or false by definition. Evidence can be admitted only as a
confirmation of the absolute. Potential evidence that
might evoke cognitive dissonance are lies, the result of a biased media, or part of a conspiratorial manipulation of facts. Contradictory evidence becomes not the occasion for questioning the absolute but, rather, the occasion for paranoid constructions of the motives of those who communicate that evidence. Tribal
explanations must demonize alternative explanations to demonstrate and affirm the tautological truths of that
dogma. The belief or faith precedes evidence and then
shapes, skews, or tortures all evidence in its image. Absolutist constructions do not admit of alteration; one
cannot fruitfully argue with someone who says for
example that God told him/her so. As we have
explicated in more detail elsewhere (Fox & Miller, 1995, Ch. 3), this is an aspect of neo-tribalism. As the common culture increasingly becomes epiphenomenal, thin, divorced from workaday intersubjective reality, there is a dialectical counter-tendency for tribes to form
around robust explanations of the world based on
absolutist constructions of the form described above. (As a brief aside, we think that absolutist neo-tribalism is an
aspect of the postmodern condition. We mean to
distinguish between that condition and postmodernism which refers more generally to developments in thought - that is, elite academic thought.) The seeming
proliferation of absolutists does not bode well for the
body politic.
Constructivism would disallow claims made on the
basis of absolutes. No one point of view of even the
most hyperkinetic body-subject in the world can totalize with any finality sufficient to establish an absolute. To be sure, body-subjects develop favored habitual
comportments ? recursive practices
~ that become for them an identity. But body-subjects are primordially an
opening to the world that includes others. Absolutists are often only so in a restricted talk-show-call-in realm of their lives. They will remain open to, say, rejecting a
previously favored restaurant if they smell rancid grease upon entering. At the bar, they will have a genuine discourse with a stranger on the prospects of a sports team.
Tangentially, non-absolutists are at a disadvantage in the current public debate. They must pause and consider all claims with a presumption of factual veracity and
sincerity. Absolutists need only pound away with well rehearsed lines and preselected examples in favor of their absolute ? rather like a phalanx against an
undisciplined crowd.
Reductionism
A second class of reasoning against which constructivism may be opposed is reductionism. Reductionism is similar to absolutism discussed above. Reductionism is often tautological; it admits only such evidence as fits the premise. Like absolutism, it is modernist. We afford it its own separate category because, unlike absolutism, reductionist explanations can
be more scientific and have about them less the feeling of fanaticism. Creationism is absolutism. Economic
theory and rational choice theory are reductionist. Unlike
absolutism, reductionist theory is more complex and
open to the development of auxiliary corollaries to
explain phenomena not covered by the base theory.
We choose individualism as a paradigm case of
reductionism from which other reductionist arguments
might be identified. In public policy debates, it is often
assumed that individuals act to maximize their own self
interest. This is, of course, the Hobbesian premise as
well as that of homo economicus. It also founds versions
of teleological/utilitarian ethics. It is the basis of the
discipline of economics. It also grounds the rational
choice cum neo-institutionalist tendency in political science.
Now, one has to admit that much behavior can be, at
least in a formal causal modeling sense, explained if one
takes value-maximizing as one's a priori first principle.
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We might even be willing to admit that it is the most
powerful explanatory available to social science. Yet two
things are wrong with it. First, it reduces complex and
multiple human motivation and behavior to a singular term and becomes thereby tautological. Second, unquestionably embracing it beyond its, perhaps, legitimate social science theory application distorts
public policy discourse. As to the first, to assume that all behavior is motivated by self-interest is to collapse into one term other-regardingness, altruism, community spirit, and family love. One can say that all these other
phenomena are naught but self-interested strategies, but it diminishes them and violates phenomena as they are
experienced by body-subjects. The self-interested
assumption has become an arrogant construction and a denial of the "other's" experience by social scientists for the sake of elegant and parsimonious theory building. The self-interest model is also tautological and thus
impervious to falsification. In what might be called the
Ayn Rand fallacy, altruism is "nothing but" the self interested desire for the approval of others. Such assertions can only stop conversation; they are not debatable.
Second, when the self-interested model is applied to
public policy disputes, it distorts them. An example is the current debate over "illegitimate" births. The
assumption is that economic self-interest, with enhanced welfare benefits as the inducement, virtually all by itself causes baby-making. The cure: deny enhanced benefits to welfare recipients who have "extra" children. Then
they won't be born. The proposition that welfare mothers calculate their fertility and exploit it for a small increment in allowances does not resonate well. On the
contrary, rational calculation would most likely result in a decision to forego family enlargement. Yet, some members of Congress and their public-choice advisers are so obsessed with the homo economicus model that
they cannot transcend its strictures. It must be -
explanations that do not include incentives cannot be admitted ? that it is the very modest increment for each child that motivates mothers to have them.
Constructivism would not abide reductionism.
Constructivism, with its phenomenological base, would not allow the privileging of an abstract explanatory scheme, however elegant and parsimonious. It would not allow the body-subject experience in situational contexts to be diminished in favor of an outside imperialistic gloss on that experience. Altruism is a human behavior that can be described only tortuously as self-interest. The
self-interest hypothesis explains only incoherently the
self-sacrificing behavior of soldiers diving on hand
grenades to save their loved comrades.
Small Truths
A third, related tendency in political analysis against which constructivism would militate is what we will call small truth. Some of the phenomena described below
may be subsumed under the more generic social science term: genetic fallacy, that is, reasoning from the instance to the general. It is a kind of category mistake. A small
truth, whether the result of deliberate spinning for
political gain or just lazy or misinformed thinking, is a factoid or factoids divorced from a richer context. For
instance, it is true that birthrates for unwed mothers who end up on welfare has been growing. Therefore, some would reason, welfare causes "illegitimate" births. But births to single women have grown across class and ethnic lines at about the same rate. Therefore, it is an invalid inference that welfare causes "illegitimacy." Policy formulated on such inferences are likely to have adverse unintended consequences far outweighing whatever small increment of behavioral change that occurs in the hypothesized direction. Other examples of small truths include adducing statistics with, say, base
years deliberately chosen to press one' s political claim without informing interlocutors that different base years would moderate the claims. Also in this class is
argument by anecdotal horror story. A bad experience with an OSHA regulator or standing behind a food
stamp purchase of filet mignon are true experiences, but
global policy conclusions do not follow from them.
Small, incomplete truths lead to "bumper sticker" policy analysis and bad policy formation. Constructivism does not deny small truth experiences of body-subjects. Neither does it privilege a particular concatenation of them. Intentional body-subjects in situations includes other body subjects as part of the situation. Given the obvious plethora of body-subjects like ours, the more of their perspectives one can take into account, the more
triangulation on a problematic one can achieve, the better. Please note, however, that this is not to argue for what is called in our literature the rational
comprehensive position. Entailed in situations is action, and there is no "objective" in-itself out there that can be
completely grasped.
Reifications
Reification is the confusion of a concept with a material reality. Bureaucracy, for instance, is an ideal
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type concept developed originally by Max Weber to help theorize the rational-legal form of domination. To talk, usually in a pejorative way, about the bureaucracy is to
reify that concept. In the current policy debates selective
reifying of "bureaucracy" or, for that matter, "government" confuses more than it informs. The
rational-legal form of domination may be conceptualized as occurring throughout business and at all governmental levels. Yet block grants or tax cuts are sold to the public as relief from the bureaucracy.
Stripped of our self-imposed limitation against absolutes, reductionism, small truths, and reifications, is there any way remaining for us to claim that the
liquidity of international capital is the cause of social ill health? What CAN we say?
MAKING CLAIMS
Since Aristotle, it has been customary in logic to divide arguments into three fundamental parts: minor
premise, major premise, and conclusion. The minor
premise answers the question "What have you got to go on?" while the major premise answers the question "How do you get to your conclusion from that?"
(Toulmin, 1958). The minor premise, following Toulmin
(1958), is composed of data, information, or grounding. The major premise, referred to by Toulmin as the
warrant, makes explicit how the data bears on the claim.
The conclusion might also be called the claim of the
argument.1
More explicitly, the basic elements of a policy
argument (Dunn, 1993 as derived from Toulmin, 1958) involve, first, the minor premise or point of departure of
policy-relevant information. This is a description of the
relevant situation as best we can discern it. Second, there
is a warrant which is the bridge between policy-relevant information and the claim and provides the reason for
accepting the claim. These are propositions that, in a
knowledge claim, attempt to determine the
generalizability of the evidence. For example, if a
random sample of a population is surveyed, the results
are claimed to be generalizable to the whole population
(only a small proportion of which were actually
surveyed) by implicit reference to sampling theory.
Sampling theory serves as the warrant in this case.
Warrants are general statements that bridge the data and
the conclusion of the argument - the "since" of the
argument. Warrants may be rules, principles, inference
licenses ? but not further items of information
(Toulmin, 1958). Warrants are offered with an eye toward a counter-assertion, anticipating an agonistic tension around the claim that is to be made. The warrant is the statement that makes the data meaningful in the
policy argument. Third and last, the claim itself is the
argument's conclusion, the "therefore" or "so" of the
argument.
Despite centuries of thought that have gone into
claim-making, the pillars in the various structures remain unstable in important ways. As the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle came to realize in the 1930's, moving from empirical data (which are themselves organized into human-structured and therefore disputable categories) to fully generalizable claims is problematic. The logical positivists' particularly modernist
epistemology, based on the pursuit of logic and facts, is consistent with their aspiration to find a universal
language of scientific explanation under which all
disciplines would unite. They had hoped to develop a
system in which a fully generalizable claim would have
predictive value and would serve as universal postulate (law or rule). The argument would contain statements that are empirically verifiable (data, or minor premises) and statements that are mathematically and logically coherent (warrants, or major premises). But they ran into intractable problems. For example, exactly how
empirical verification might be accomplished was a
matter under dispute. Consistent with the positivist dedication to empirical facts, all statements ? to be
scientifically useful ? must be definable in terms of
observables. But observables are already contaminated
by the subjectivity of the observer and cannot, therefore, be independently validating. Realization of this problem by the positivists had a profound effect because they had set out to demonstrate that terms not verifiable by scientific observation were meaningless. Moreover, even
those empirical observations that could be replicated could not, therefore, be logically defended as universal
propositions. The 1000th observation might be different
than the previous 999. Hence the more modest
aspirations of falsifiability and description displaced
verifiability and prediction. The hope that science would
become a universal language against which all truth
claims could be judged was dashed. Put another way, there are no warrants that can carry data from
observation to universal truth. Reality is not provable.
But things can be ruled out. The project of inquiry and the proffering of knowledge claims has not subsided.
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Social scientists these days implicitly and sometimes
explicitly qualify their claims through the use of
probabilistic estimation. This seems appropriate. The warrant that allows a sample to be generalized to an
entire population is qualified: "plus or minus three
percentage points 95% of the time." This probabilistic qualifier yields a weaker claim than the logical positivists desired to make. The claim no longer seeks to define reality but is a statement about tendencies, associations, or likely outcomes that may or, by chance, may not occur. Reality itself remains, more or less, a
question mark; claims about reality are more plausible, or less so.
ACTION CLAIMS VS. KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS
In the practical world, one is often confronted by competing plausible claims. Such ambiguity is
commonplace for public administrators. The ambiguity faced by academics is magnified for practitioners. The
problem is in the major premises, the warrants. In a
knowledge argument, a warrant is a logical, perhaps mathematical, statement that attempts to move data from
meaninglessness to general applicability as a knowledge claim. In academia, knowledge claims are paramount. However, in the public administrator's world, action claims ascend to primacy. Here, claims that address the "what to do?" question take priority over the "what is real?" or "what is true?" questions. While knowledge warrants tend to be logically or mathematically premised, action warrants often include in addition:
values, feelings, preferences, or beliefs. An argument containing an action claim might be structured as follows: given that (say) 10,000 women have abortions each year (data); and since human life is sacred
(warrant); so, therefore, abortion should be prohibited (claim).
Another argument might be structured as follows:
given that median income as measured in constant dollars is declining (data); and since the liquidity of
capital causes low wages (warrant); so, therefore, repeal NAFTA and GATT which increase capital liquidity. In the above two arguments, the action claims rely on warrants that are disputable, albeit plausible. The
battleground is in the warrant. Within the warrant resides the ideology, the belief, the emotion, the logic. In a
sense, the warrant shapes the data. The warrant is what will make the data useful and precedes them in that sense. Facts do not speak for themselves; warrants make information meaningful.
Of course, it may be the case that we cling to our
favored postulates (that is, our major premises) more
fervently than we cling to data. Inflexibility in that
regard is precisely what we mean by absolutism (see above).
With warrants looking for data to use for making action claims, one is rightfully skeptical of any sort of
political argumentation. Opposing warrants resemble the
free-floating interplay of signifiers found in hyperreality. The question remains, even for those who are
unpersuaded by the hyperreality thesis: how can
apparently free-floating warrants be redeemed when
challenged?
Our answer is to provide public space where plausible claims are allowed to compete with one another for favor. There would be no entrance requirements to this
public space, but there are rules of conduct that need to be followed if the claim-making that takes place in the
public space is to be grounded, that is, prevented from
escaping to only rhetorical hyperspace. Because action, and not knowledge, reality, or truth, is the ultimate effect of policy claims, discourse is inherently political. That there are no ontologically fixed meanings makes the ensuing struggle all the more open-ended and
susceptible to chicanery. The temptation to offer
specious claims is strong; there are incentives to
misrepresent the data; and if no one else seems genuine, any one individual would be a fool to be the exception. But ultimately, why would anyone bother attending such a public space? A genuine discourse in the pubic space is, we have argued elsewhere (Fox & Miller, 1995), necessary for democratic, popular will formation, necessary if the collective is to decide what it wants to do. We should expect a struggle over meanings, premises, beliefs, and the like as participants urge varying courses of action. Were everyone to agree on a course of action, there would be little point in continuing the conversation. And, because we expect the public space to be an environment of agonistic tension, clashing interests, and diverse values, we propose a discipline.
We propose sincerity, situation-regarding intentionality, willing attention, and substantive contribution as the rules of conduct.
Sincerity means that the speaker is asking to be taken
seriously in the public forum; the speaker's remarks are
earnest, honest, and genuine. Situation-regarding intentionality assures that the discourse will be grounded in some social context. There is an empirical context, an
experiential base, a phenomenological lifeworld which
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grounds the discourse. This is our best defense against hyperreality where abstractions and detached symbols flourish disconnected from human context. With
situation-regarding intentionality, the conversation has a context. Third, participants are willingly attentive; they listen; they are not coerced; they speak willingly. Lastly, substantive contribution is a grant of mercy to all the other participants who are serious about the matter at hand. Expertise, experience, rationales, information, data
might constitute substantive contributions, but the bloviations of fools and free-riders would not be welcome. To the extent that participants are insincere, their remarks overly abstract or ideological and
ungrounded in a situation, their participation coerced,
apathetic or inattentive, and their contributions lacking substance, the public conversation's worth is diminished. This sort of nightmarish public conversation is too
recognizable for comfort.
In the end, then, the line we tried to draw to separate the real from the hyperreal turns out to be the same line we would draw between genuine and disingenuous discourse. While we have fallen short of finding the
master key from which we can infer universal statements
about reality, we have posited a public space where
competing action claims my be considered, giving us
hope that debates in public affairs may possibly become
disciplined with respect to the sorts of claims that are
proffered.
So, then, is the liquidity of international capital really to blame for society's contemporary ailments (such as
declining median income measured in constant dollars)? Is it further responsible for the dismal quality of the
public conversation? Is collective action obviated by diversions (such as school prayer, the O.J. Simpson trial,
English only, or family values) and scapegoating of
immigrants, drug users, and single mothers whose families are supported by AFDC? Well, we may not
have been persuasive. There are contrary accounts. What now? An invitation: shall we go to the public space and assess the authenticity of these various accounts? First move: is welfare the cause of dependency or is it that
international capital (operating in the U.S. through the undemocratic Federal Reserve Board) requires unemployment rates of six percent or more?
NOTE
1 Other elements of Toulmin's (1958) structure include
qualifiers, backing, and rebuttal, but these are not
considered the basic elements, which together with data,
warrants, and claims modify/challenge the classic
syllogism.
108
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