Politics of practical reasoning: integrating action, discourse, and argument PDF
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Politics of Practical Reasoning Politics of Practical Reasoning Integrating Action, Discourse and Argument Edited by Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics of practical reasoning : integrating action, discourse, and argument / edited by Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7391-7226-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-7227-8 (electronic) 1. Practical reason. I. Edmondson, Ricca. II. Hülser, Karlheinz. BC177.P58 2012 128'.4—dc23 2012018320 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America For Markus H. Woerner Contents Contents Contents Preface Introduction PART I: FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURES OF PRACTICAL REASONING Chapter 1: Aristotle’s Political Anthropology Chapter 2: Pragmatics and the Idea of the Illocutionary in Stoic Language Theory Chapter 3: Utrum gratitudo sit virtus moralis vel passio animae, or: Gratitude—An Aristotelian Virtue or an Emotion? Chapter 4: Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us Chapter 5: Reasons to Act and Practical Reasoning PART II: DEVELOPING CONVINCING ARGUMENTS Chapter 6: Practical Reasoning in Place Chapter 7: Toulmin’s Rhetorical Logic Chapter 8: Reason, Production, and Rival Visions of Working Life Chapter 9: Reasoning About Disability in the Light of Advances in Technology Chapter 10: Principles in Practice PART III: ENGAGEMENT FOR THE PRACTICAL UNITY OF LIFE Chapter 11: The Theory of Double Truth Revisited Chapter 12: Philosophia sine qua non Chapter 13: Skeptical Wisdom Chapter 14: Art as “Organizer” of Life Afterword About the Contributors Preface Practical reasoning, manifestly, is a central theme in contemporary philosophical debate. It is an activity carried out by and among people in the context of human interaction, mostly in situations marked by uncertainty but decisive for human life-courses, and developing over time. This collection represents a conversation between authors addressing this common topic from subject areas that interrogate human agency from different viewpoints: applied ethics, aesthetics or metaphysics, rhetoric and argumentation theory. Their methodological approaches include analytical philosophy, phenomenology and analytical Thomism. This diversity is designed to allow the capture of features of practical reasoning that are otherwise easily occluded. The complementarity of these contributions is strengthened too by the fact that they develop approaches within which practical reasoning has been interrogated during the career of a specific philosopher, Markus H. Woerner. His work stresses the need for an unblinkered exploration of factors in verbal communication that can give us grounds for being convinced by each other, particularly in connection with human affairs. The first section of this book thus highlights implications of the fact that practical reasoning is immersed in life and geared to action, interpersonal and in the end political. It explores the multifaceted nature of political reasoning in the work of Aristotle, with his stress on the conjoined and relational aspects of human action. It continues to the radically pragmatic dimensions of language interrogated in the insights of the Stoics: they are related to features of language which Woerner also explored, in the first monograph in German to reflect on J. L. Austin’s work on performatives and illocutionary acts. This section of the book treats Thomas Aquinas as another ally in this tradition; his stringent conception of reasoning would not have supposed it entirely divorced from other human capacities such as emotion or habits of character. It explores the work of Adam Smith, influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics, who expressly returned to the concept of reasoning as involving sympathy and imagination, and concludes by examining contemporary research about reasoning and the version of naturalism it supports. The second part of the book focuses on practical reasoning in social and political life, analyzing how argumentation proceeds in detail in cases that cannot rest on certainty, and interrogating the influence of particular conceptions of practical reasoning on public life. This section responds to Woerner’s work on argument and rhetoric, reflected not only in his analyses of Aristotelian rhetoric but also in his contemporary work on the most constructive forms of rhetoric, wise arguing. It underlines the political implications of this approach to reasoning, for example, showing how different forms of organization of work are based on different conceptions of practical reasoning, how public policy on disability is influenced by different argumentation styles, or how attempts to apply ethical principles in public life cannot be conducted without the types of case responsiveness and practical wisdom in which Woerner is particularly interested. The last section begins by addressing themes central to his work: on the one hand, religious and other sources of meaning, and on the other hand science—interrogating their compatibility in a lived life. It deals too with philosophical responses to overall uncertainty, before going on to a field crucial to Woerner’s work on reasoning as an integrative set of creative and imaginative human responses to the world: aesthetics. Thus it approaches the ways in which works of art may be regarded as cases of practical reasoning, and in which artistic production as a practice is a (political) form of reasoning. In this way, this book follows a narrative that explores the ways in which reasoning about human affairs is enlivened by its embeddedness in action; this narrative is deepened by the friendship of its authors with its dedicatee. We wish to acknowledge the support for this book given by its publisher, Lexington, and our editor, Jana Hodges-Kluck, as well as by the Grant-in-aid-of-Publications Fund of the National University of Ireland, Galway, and by its Social Sciences Research Centre. The cover shows an etching by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), no. 43 in his 1799 collection Caprichios, entitled “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos/Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” This image is reproduced by kind permission of the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY. The five works by Jackson Pollock rendered in c. 14 on pp. 270–283 are reproduced by kind permission of the respective copyright owners listed on p. 290. Ricca Edmondson is grateful to the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Potsdam (in particular Professor Hans-Peter Krüger), for allowing her the opportunity to complete much of the work involved in this collection. She would also like to thank Professor Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila of the Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki, and the late Professor Richard Harvey Brown of the University of Maryland for their constant encouragement and their passion for understanding the nature of practical reasoning. Karlheinz Hülser would like to thank Professor Mauro Nasti De Vincentis of the University of Salerno in Italy, whose symposium in the autumn of 2000 provided him with his first opportunity to discuss his ideas on pragmatics in the context of Stoic logic. Both editors would like to recall the services to philosophy of Professor John Cleary of Boston College and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, who wished to contribute to this book but was prevented by his untimely death. R. E. and K. H. Introduction Integrated Practical Reasoning Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser In everyday language as well as in some academic conventions, practical reasoning is often understood in the context of differentiations: in opposition to theory and theoretical argument, to mere speaking, to productive reasoning and production, to scientific argument, technology and statistics, to the world as such. All these distinctions can be useful for pragmatic purposes connected with what reasoning is used for on particular occasions: an argument about technology will look very different from one about, say, history. But this diversity masks a more fundamental unity of practical reasoning and human practice, a unity that demands an integrated understanding of what we are doing when we take decisions and make choices about the world in which we move. This collection explores this integrative concept of practical reasoning, considering it first and foremost as a characteristically human activity. It examines multiple implications of seeing reasoning about human affairs as a process of engaged interaction with the world and other people. Thus it asks what follows from stressing that reasoning is performed by and between people, in particular practical circumstances, predicaments and environments that are shared in multifaceted ways, yet may be heavily contested. On this approach, practical reasoning is not simply a cognitive process, distinct from other human activities and in need of reconnection with them. Nor is it a defective or subordinate form of thought, but on the contrary at the center of human activity itself: embedded in acting in the world, in relationship with other people and their interwoven forms of reason, emotion and character. The contributions to this collection exhibit the appeal and the challenges of treating practical reasoning as integrating interpersonal, political sets of capacities, closely entwined with virtues and practices, and inseparable from communication and action. Practical reasoning is the commonest form of reasoning there is. It is also the most complex, embracing not only explicit reasoning about what I, you, we or they ought to do or practicably can do, but also the whole realm of implicit reasoning built into directed activity itself and the social and political contexts in which it is carried out. Thus, the field of practical reasoning is not focused narrowly on what precisely constitutes “a reason.” It embraces reasoning as a process, characteristically an interactive one with discursive causes and effects, incorporating assumptions and implications about who the reasoners involved are, how they should be envisaged, and what capacities they possess. Problems about what individuals can and should do are not altogether separable from questions about what can and should be done by larger groups and societies; social and political deliberations are central forms of practical reasoning. Key among the capacities they involve are those concerned with communication and argument, forms of action with conspicuous consequences whose real-life modes of functioning can tell us much about appropriate criteria for assessing them. The impacts of this integrative position can be understood against the background of powerful efforts during the last century to reconcretize our understanding of reasoning. In different ways, phenomenological, Wittgensteinian and Austinian approaches to philosophy all urged views of reasoning which located it within an understanding of everyday action. Parallel emphases were achieved by the link underscored between interpretation, tradition and reasoning by Gadamer, by the stress placed on the concept of communicative and emancipatory action by Habermas, or on praxis as highlighting deliberation within communities by MacIntyre. But much longer traditions featuring responses to practical reasoning as practical derive from classical Greece, including among others aspects of the work of Aristotle or the Stoics. Medieval theologians and philosophers such as Aquinas confront these issues, as do thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and as does Kant. In sum, for over two and a half thousand years, informal, emotional, characterological, aesthetic, social and political aspects of thought have been explored as potential constituents of reasoning as well as influences on it, and demand engagement today. Human beings in their daily lives, singly and together, deliberate and act in ways that try to embody reasonable inferences in which a variety of emotional and evaluative processes and effects of virtue or character are intertwined: when weighing the advice of psychologists, when deciding how to act in political dilemmas, when trying to understand how something can seem good grounds for action to someone from another culture. Exploring what is done in the course of such activities allows us to interrogate the multivalency of the term “reasonable” and to identify, and critique, some of its implications. This does not present reasoning as less rational than might have been expected, but it exposes new challenges to the sorts of justification it needs. The problems examined in this collection—what it means to respond to arguments about meaningful work or disability, or how to communicate in terms of habitual or traditional aspects of everyday inferences, for instance—are not susceptible to exclusively “cognitive,” technical solutions; this does not mean abandoning them to unreason. It may mean situating reasoning in close relationship to other activities central to engagement with the human condition: acknowledging, and evaluating, its intrinsically hybrid nature (see Dunne 1992). Practical reasoning itself responds in complex ways to problems with roots in disparate sources. It therefore seems inevitable that attempts to understand what processes are involved in it demand contributions from a wide variety of sources. In this collection we aim at cooperation between different theoretical approaches, trying to make perspicuous the conventions of particular intellectual practices in order to make their fundamental rationales intelligible to others. The contributors to this volume show that it is possible for seemingly diverse approaches to converse with each other, even over historical time, beginning with
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