The Saving Lie: Truth and Method in the Social Sciences

Part III: Agency and Rhetoric

Part III Agency and Rhetoric For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars And not in generalizing Demonstrations ofthe Rational Power. -William Blake, ]erusalem "Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form. Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one another as form and content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately comprehensible conceptions offreedom and inevitability. Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception ofman's life." -Tolstoy, War and Peace This book runs at two levels. One is abstract theory-Blake's "generalizing Demonstrations" or Tolstoy's "form"-which are ideas conveyed discursively in propositions about social systems. Ideas of that kind occupy its first two parts. The third part, which is about agency, attends to "minutely organized Particulars" and to Tolstoy's "content." It draws on the ethnography of everyday life, in which ideas are presented not only as theories to be judged true or not true, but also as weapons. In other words, they are put to use, and that requires not only propositional knowledge but also know-how. Agency models presume alternative structures and therefore are choice-theoretic and goal-directed. In them the simple bottom-line neoclassical scheme, in which utility has its narrow meaning, dissolves into a complexity of motives, calculations, messaging, and self-presentation, some of it devious. Players are modeled as doing what they think will "pay" them; but what they think will pay them, and how they play their hands, are complexified not only by morality and bounded rationality , which are a trouble for rational-choice theorists, but also by the use of irony, hyperbole, humor, hypocrisy, equivocation, plain deception , and various other forms of tactical indirection, which most social theorists do not place at the top of their agenda. There are two complementary ways to construct a choice-theoretic model: (1) through psychological or cognitive frameworks that focus on the chooser, or (2) through agency models that describe (a) a range ofstructures and (b) the strategies used to make one or another structure prevail. Psychological and cognitive models derive from theories about the emotions we feel (psychology) and about the mental procedures that we use (cognitive studies) in coping with our experiences. Although my focus is on the choices, not the choosers, some basic presuppositions about the human psyche-our need for meaning and 128 Agency and Rhetoric order, for example, or our disposition to seek advantage-are required to construct an agency model. All three models-psychological, cognitive, and agency-have their uses, and they are complementary rather than contradictory. This third part of the book moves away from the use oflogic, which is correct reasoning from given premises, in the direction of rhetoric, which is persuasive "reasoning" intended to make a premise or a point ofview-a presupposition-acceptable. I will use a simple interactionist and intentionalist1 model of the part rhetoric plays in social systems. The model is constructed out of three elements: one is a repertoire of alternative ideas (structures) both about how a system should work (a morality) and about how it actually works (a presumed reality); the second is a cast of performers; and the third is a set of techniques used by performers to foist ideas on one another and so define the situations in which they interact. The model connects agents (the performers) with structures (the ideas) by describing the persuasive techniques (rhetoric) they use either simply to prevail over one another, which I will call the palaestra[ application ofthe model, or (sometimes) also to promote a structure they prefer, which is its instrumental (or consequential or constitutive) version. Both versions (the paleastral and the consequential) presuppose the saving lie: no structure and, more generally, no idea (including, of course, the model itself) could be an eternal verity. In varying degrees all structures and all theories are fallible when put to use, not because they fall apart when confronted by "absolute truth," but because they are liable to be displaced by another structure, which the performers hope will better suit their purposes. Truth, in this model, is only something to be argued about, and the sole eternal verity is that there are no eternal verities.2 This fallibility ofideas, the absence ofTruth, gives agency, and therefore rhetoric, a part to play in social life. In communicative encounters a situation is defined...