Dubious Facts: The Evidence of Early Chinese Historiography

CHAPTER THREE Politicized Truth and Doubt

21 CHAPTER THREE Politicized Truth and Doubt In general, for any persuasive argument, political or otherwise, the end is by definition the broaching and overcoming of certain doubts assumed on the part of the audience relating to the issues at hand.1 To attempt to investigate the qualities of such doubts requires a careful consideration of what could be put into doubt. And before we can do this, we must attempt to answer some general considerations relating to the expression of doubt, particularly as it relates to matters of deliberative politics. A thorough analysis of expressions of doubt, enmeshed in a whole system of epistemic values, demands addressing, among other questions, what we consider worthy of doubt, how and whether we need to answer such doubts, and whether these doubts will lead us to any simulacrum, if we believe it to exist, of the truth. Complicating these matters even further is that, realistically, these doubts, like persuasive speech, do not spring from an unfettered discursive space but from the frequently constrictive, or just directive, atmospheres of culture, society, and language. Doubts are limited not only by the language that expresses them but also by the social dynamics that permits or forbids their communication. A doubt expressed among a group of sympathetic friends is clearly not the same doubt as that expressed to a suspicious or hostile audience, regardless of its import. Similarly, a doubt expressed within a discursively open environment must be evaluated completely differently when expressed within a regime that, even if its demands seem harmless, inevitably inspects and suspects the speaker’s motives and underlying meanings, such as a monarchic one. It is clear that the memorial addresses were attempts not merely to manipulate the audience, but to persuade it using legitimate knowledge claims to overcome the various doubts that the audience could have been or would prospectively be entertaining over the course of deliberations about a certain issue. I thus take the addressors as attempting to “reach” 22 Dubious Facts another’s mind, informed by cultural constants, yes, but also informed by what doubts were typically associated with a particular issue and the various means by which such doubts could be overcome. The avenue I wish to pursue will treat the speeches of the Warring States and early Han periods, in particular the hortatory addresses (or “memorials”) relating to military affairs addressed to the monarch, as politically engendered texts, in which the aims and modes of argumentation were less guided by state-independent norms of (relatively) careful argument than by state-dependent norms of persuasion, by the norms of political rhetoric. In this study, I attend to the architecture, the basic components that structure and organize the arguments, or persuasions. I attempt to determine, from the structural form of the persuasion, what might have been considered open to doubt and what was deemed a relatively fixed axiom. These divisions, by necessity, are imprecise, for we neither have, nor ever can have, an unfailing insight into the processes of another’s mind, and specifically what he might doubt, nor can we have an unfailing insight into the cultural codes of a distant temporal and cultural context. Nevertheless, I insist that a thorough and careful reading of the texts does point to, if not conclusively define, certain boundaries. THE EPISTEMIC FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICA L A DDR ESS The axiomatic foundations necessary for rhetoricized argumentation that are removed from probable or reasonable doubt are what could be called axioms of “common sense.” Commonsense propositions are, by definition , transparent, self-evident, their truth perceived as immediate and obvious. They are the propositions to which members of a community would readily assent and, in general, are so pedestrian as to be almost banal. At times, however, especially when touching upon nonconcrete matters—moral or metaphysical—they can involve propositions that may appear odd or dubious to those lying outside the community.2 But the lack of comprehension, ours or others, should not automatically render them spurious. Though they may not be firmly certain to all, they have the certainty of a life community, thus, for that community, of being certain beyond reasonable doubt. In this way, they are fundamentally acceptable to a wide audience, a crucial constituent in the effectiveness of a rhetorical address. As rhetoric deals with subjects in a nontechnical, general way for people who are nonspecialists, or simply “untrained thinkers,” the addressor must have a sufficient grasp of the topic to know which propositions are...