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Trained Capacities
John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice
Brian Jackson, Gregory Clark, Brian Jackson, Gregory Clark
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Trained Capacities
John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice
Brian Jackson, Gregory Clark, Brian Jackson, Gregory Clark
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About This Book
A collection examining Dewey's influence on effective communication in a healthy democratic practice
The essays in this collection, written by sixteen scholars in rhetoric and communications studies, demonstrate American philosopher John Dewey's wide-ranging influence on rhetoric in an intellectual tradition that addresses the national culture's fundamental conflicts between self and society, freedom and responsibility, and individual advancement and the common good. Editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark propose that this influence is at work both in theoretical foundations, such as science, pragmatism, and religion, and in Dewey's debates with other public intellectuals, such as Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Jackson and Clark seek to establish Dewey as an essential source for those engaged in teaching others how to compose timely, appropriate, useful, and eloquent responses to the diverse and often-contentious rhetorical situations that develop in a democratic culture. They contend that there is more at stake than instruction in traditional modes of public discourse because democratic culture encompasses a variety of situations, private or public, civic or professional, where people must cooperate in the work of advancing a common project. What prepares people to intervene constructively in such situations is instruction in those rhetorical practices of democratic interaction that is implicit throughout Dewey's work.
Dewey's writing provides a rich framework on which a distinctly American tradition of a democratic rhetorical practice can be built—a tradition that combines the most useful concepts of classical rhetoric with those of modern progressive civic engagement. Jackson and Clark believe Dewey's practice takes rhetoric beyond the traditional emphasis on political democracy to provide connections to rich veins of American thought such as individualism, liberalism, progressive education, collectivism, pragmatism, and postindustrial science and communication. They frame Dewey's voluminous work as constituting a modern expression of continuing education for the "trained capacities" required to participate in democratic culture. For Dewey human potential is best realized in the free flow of artful communication among the individuals who together constitute society.
The book concludes with an afterword by Gerard A. Hauser, College Professor of Distinction in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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PART I
Dewey and Democratic Practice—Science, Pragmatism, Religion
Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric
John Dewey’s career-long exposition of and commitment to democratic culture still commands praise and admiration. Contemporary philosophers, social theorists, historians, and others committed to pragmatism still commend Dewey’s faith in the democratic experience. Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Robert Westbrook, to name just a few, all explain Dewey’s towering importance in American intellectual history by way of his political activism and social theorizing about democracy. At the same time, however, Dewey’s commitment to the importance of science seems to have become outdated. Rorty suggests that the main difference between first-generation pragmatism and contemporary pragmatism is that recent philosophers and social theorists have all read Thomas Kuhn and thus dismiss Dewey’s apparently risible belief in positivism and scientific thinking (95). Thus Dewey’s philosophy of science has been sundered from his larger theory of democratic culture. This, we argue, is a mistake. It is a mistake in terms of intellectual history and in terms of the usefulness of Deweyan social theory for contemporary democratic life.
Dewey’s philosophy of democracy was participatory through and through. It required an involved community of inquirers capable of reflective thought regarding pressing problems and collective action aimed to improve difficult conditions. At the same time scientific thinking, for Dewey, was a refinement of the ordinary procedures for reflexive and practical problem solving by a community. There was no difference in kind between scientific thinking and ordinary popular problem solving. The difference was a matter of subject and formal procedure. This essay demonstrates the close affinity between Dewey’s commitment to discussion as an engine of participatory democracy and his understanding of and faith in science as a central instrument in contemporary democratic culture. We argue that Dewey’s belief in science is the other side of the same coin on which his belief in deliberation and discussion is inscribed. This represents a heretical interpretation of Dewey, given neopragmatism’s present preoccupations.
Such a reading of Dewey is made possible by, and is alert to, issues within the rhetorical tradition. Our analysis of the relationship between Deweyan deliberation and philosophy of science, instead of seeing them as opposites, reveals the manner in which rhetorical communication shapes, improves, and constitutes democratic culture. By this we mean that within Dewey’s outline of deliberative participation one finds a commitment to particular forms of rhetorical practice and particular social structures that make those forms of rhetorical practice possible. In addition within Dewey’s philosophy of science one finds the rejection of traditional realist epistemologies and a rhetoric of science capable of outlining both how communicative acts are constitutive of scientific practices and the manner of incorporating scientific knowledge into public decision-making. Both of these considerations produce what we call a sociology of rhetoric. As such, we claim that the best way to understand Dewey’s twin commitments to science and deliberation is in the light of his attempt to create a social democracy in which specific kinds of rhetorical practices become possible and useful. The search for a “social democracy” amounts to a search for the practical and intellectual conditions in which appropriate and timely communicative acts can guide public deliberation, and where public deliberation simultaneously considers both ends/values and means/technologies/knowledge.
Dewey does not offer a rhetorical pedagogy, a way of practicing rhetoric. Instead he offers a sociology of rhetoric—a systemic account of the theoretical and normative ways in which social structures, institutions, and forms of individual agency are both guided by and constituted by communicative practices. Rhetoric’s traditional concern with specific interactions (as typified by a focus on speeches) is displaced by a structural account of what makes such interaction possible and meaningful. Dewey’s sociology of rhetoric amounts to a set of recommendations for developing a democracy in which specific forms of communication guide decision and judgment. These forms are largely modeled on science. In other words, science is critically important in this sociology of rhetoric, and Dewey provides us with a way of understanding science as a form of rhetorical practice uniquely fit to American democratic culture. Only in the light of specific practical and intellectual conditions can scientific thinking be thought of as rhetorical practice that makes democracy possible. We aim to show, therefore, just how Dewey endorses a rhetorical way of life built on his twin commitments to science and deliberation. This provides the ground for a uniquely American democratic rhetoric, and Dewey is a key resource for articulating and endorsing such a rhetoric.
This essay first explains what a sociology of rhetoric is, why Dewey ought to be thought of as offering such a theoretical concept, and what the payoff of such an idea might be. Second, we explain the link between science and deliberation and show how the two preoccupations parallel and reinforce one another. This work is carried out in light of the rhetorical perspective outlined in the first part. Third, we explain the kind of rhetoric of science that can be gleaned from Dewey’s work and show how it is different from other, more traditional versions of a rhetoric of science. Furthermore we argue that this rhetoric of science is a uniquely pragmatist contribution to democratic theory. Finally we argue that Dewey grounds a particularly American orientation to rhetorical practice, one that emphasizes and makes possible a specific set of practices different in kind from other orientations to rhetoric. The aim of this essay is to reconsider Dewey’s preoccupation with science from the perspective of rhetorical theory. By such a move we hope to show how our own democratic society can still be enriched and improved by using the resources of pragmatism, but only if those resources are married to the rhetorical tradition.
A SOCIOLOGY OF RHETORIC
Among American liberal intellectuals, Dewey is perhaps the most important advocate of participatory democracy. We might loosely describe this as the belief that democracy calls upon men and women to build communities in which opportunities and resources are available to every person to realize their full potential through participation in political and social life. Dewey’s belief in participation rested on a “faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (Dewey, Later Works 227). The stipulation of “proper conditions” is an essential feature, then, of participatory democracy, and Dewey spent considerable time concerned with these conditions, especially in The Public and Its Problems. His philosophy of education, in some way, could be read as an attempt to formulate such conditions in a formal school setting. In this essay we argue that one way to understand Dewey’s search for the conditions within which participatory democracy is likely to flourish is to read him as explicating a “sociology of rhetoric.” In many ways a sociology of rhetoric is deeply important to the development of a democratic culture and can reveal much about the constitutive features of particular democracies.
What, then, do we mean by a sociology of rhetoric? This is not Dewey’s phrase, nor is it a phrase used by any other pragmatist. We are using it to highlight a feature of Dewey’s work and to theorize the manner in which Dewey’s work is useful for advancing both the rhetorical tradition and contemporary democratic theory. A sociology of rhetoric attempts to understand and explain how, on the one hand, social structures are products of specific communicative acts and how, on the other hand, those social structures affect human attitudes, actions, and beliefs by conditioning the kinds of communicative practices available to us as agents within larger groups. It is a way of exploring the role of communication in constructing, maintaining, and altering social organization, and a way of showing how social organization conditions the possibilities of human agency. This phrase is designed to synthesize several strands of Dewey’s legacy. First, Chicago pragmatism was intimately related to critical work in the development of American sociology. Second, Dewey’s often-cryptic comments on communication hint at how important Dewey thought communicative practices were to democratic and social life. Third, participatory democracy, for Dewey, often required deliberation, discussion, or some form of face-to-face interaction designed to solve pressing problems. These three strands of Dewey’s legacy offer some insight into how he saw the relationship between structure and agency, a relationship that has, for an enduring period, been central to sociology. The phrase “sociology of rhetoric” is meant to highlight the ways in which such a relationship is managed by communication and to suggest that rhetorical practice gets conditioned in important ways by social structures. A “sociology of rhetoric” concerns the practical, intellectual, and social conditions within which communicative practices become possible.
Both Dewey’s work and our argument are prescriptive and descriptive. Every democratic society presumes and instantiates a sociology of rhetoric. By that we mean that every democracy has a set of social structures that are maintained by specific communicative practices and that recommend the cultivation of specific rhetorical habits for the maintenance of that democratic society. We might, for example, describe a classical Athenian sociology of rhetoric, in which specific forms of speech acts were made possible and privileged by the intellectual, practical, and social conditions of that moment in time. Many historians of rhetoric and rhetorical theorists have labored to show how rhetoric was made possible at this unique moment in history and how rhetoric guided political deliberation. But classical Athenian rhetoric was particularly fit for that place and that moment, and not necessarily for ours or for Dewey’s. The prescriptive argument is that if we alter the social structures of a democratic society, we alter the kinds of rhetorical practice available and acceptable in that society. Such acts of alteration require transformative rhetorical practices. If we wish to improve our democratic culture, we must assess the sociology of rhetoric that conditions and organizes communicative practices within that culture. Dewey had both of these tasks in mind within his consideration of “social democracy.”
When Dewey arrived in Chicago to the unrest of the Pullman strike, he was alerted to the actual, practical machinations of democratic culture. This both sparked an ongoing social and political activism and drove his more speculative, philosophical projects. In other words, Dewey saw firsthand the conditions of the operative sociology of rhetoric in Chicago and then sought to articulate a different but still potentially achievable sociology of rhetoric that could improve decision-making and incorporate a greater number of citizens into the life-affirming participatory process. This is how one ought to read Dewey’s proclamations about communication. On the one hand, they were descriptions of what he witnessed as central experiences within his democratic culture. On the other hand, they were prescriptions for how to improve the conditions for communication within American democracy with the hope that those improvements would ultimately have positive consequences for both individual citizens and the well-being of the state. Take, for example, his statements about communication in Democracy and Education: “Men live in a community by virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common . . . Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties that partake in it” (4, 9). Here is a general description of the coordination of social action and the sharing of experience. But it also states, at the same time, an ideal.
The famous proclamations from The Public and Its Problems are similarly both descriptive and normative: “The essential need . . . is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially on freeing and perfecting the process of inquiry” (208). Thus The Public and Its Problems is an attempt to outline the practical and intellectual conditions for community-based inquiry, both descriptively and normatively, as a method of channeling communicative practices for the benefit of democratic society. The details of this particular sociology of rhetoric will be described in the next section. At its core, however, lie two methods of inquiry: inquiry that requires deliberation and discussion; and inquiry based on the methods of scientific thinking. These two prescriptions would improve American democratic culture, or so Dewey thought. It may be useful to consider what this sociology of rhetoric is not. It is not a commitment to the centrality of public address (as an Athenian sociology of rhetoric might be). It is not an agonistic model of rhetoric—it seeks the cooperation necessary for community-based inquiry, upon the model of scientific work. It is also not a mediated rhetoric of symbols, icons, or images—it seeks the face-to-face in an effort to leverage the knowledge of each participant in a deliberation. In other words, Dewey prescribes a unique sociology of rhetoric.
The Public and Its Problems centers on a vision of a “great community,” a community whose success would rely on the “perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (155). Accordingly, Deweyan pragmatism seeks methods of communication that would allow individuals in a democracy to participate in decision-making and realize the interconnectedness of the community to which they belong. Dewey, therefore, suggests a sociology of rhetoric that makes communion and cooperation possible and desirable. As we show in the next section, the details of such a sociology of rhetoric are related to Dewey’s view of scientific work. In any case, democracy and community are tied together for Dewey by the belief that a specific version of communication as rhetoric is the primary means by which individuals become self-actualized and politics becomes a melioristic instrument of change: “The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. . . . Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion. . . . It [democracy] will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication” (Public and Its Problems 184).
This is no doubt one of Dewey’s most famous proclamations about communication. It is an endorsement and a prescription, as is all of The Public and Its Problems, of a sociology of rhetoric that conditions a specific form of communication (communal inquiry, discussion) and is brought into being by specific rhetorical acts (art, moving communication oriented to communion and cooperation).
Rhetorical practices do not happen in a vacuum but instead are made possible by a particular context. The challenge posed by Dewey is to account for what kinds of rhetorical practice exist within specific political cultures and what kinds we want to exist in our political culture. Where are we, and where should we go? Dewey’s desire was to establish a sociology of rhetoric that made deliberation, discussion, communal inquiry, and cooperation possible, and he thought the possibility of it already existed, waiting to be actualized and universalized. Such a sociology of rhetoric would facilitate the growth of the individual citizens of the political culture and leverage the knowledge of all of the members of a political culture in order to improve decision-making. In scientific work and scientific thinking, Dewey saw a concrete model of this kind of sociology of rhetoric at work, and that is why science lies so close to the heart of deliberation in a Deweyan democratic culture.
SCIENCE AND DELIBERATION
The approach we advocate here finds the essence of rhetoric in the ground rather than the figure. The rhetoric we see all around us—in print and electronic media, in conversation, in governance—is the figure, and for the most part the rhetorical tradition has attemp...