Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

by Booth, Wayne C.

• ISBN13: 9780226065724
• ISBN10: 0226065723
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1974-10-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new "philosophy of good reasons" Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that "you cannot reason about values" and that "the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted," and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a "befouled rhetorical climate" in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes--defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of "values" becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find "identity" or a "self." In casting doubt on systematic doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of "systematic assent," Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of "good reasons"--many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These "good reasons" are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, "When should I change my mind?"

Author Biography

Wayne C. Booth is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His books include The Rhetoric of Fiction, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, Now Don't Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age, and A Rhetoric of Irony. He is the editor of The Knowledge Most Worth Having.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Motivism and the Loss of Good Reasons

The Crisis in Our Rhetoric

When Should I Change My Mind?

The Factual ""Is"" and the Wishful ""Ought""

Five Kinds of Modern Dogma

""Good Reasons Apply to Means, Not Ends""

Some Consequences of Motivism

Bertrand Russell's Rhetoric and the Dogmas of Doubt

Russell as Representative

Modern Motivism in Russell

Dogmas Two and Three, the Agent and the Scene: Man as an Atomic

Mechanism in a Universe That Is Value-Free

Dogma Four, the Principles of Knowing The Preac

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