Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice

Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric

Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric William Keith and Robert Danisch 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 At the same time, however, Dewey’s commitment to the importance of science seems to have become outdated.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 firstgeneration 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 28 William Keith and Robert Danisch 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...