The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations

Bang!

(Indeterminate, yet sharply delineated noise; perhaps of gunshot or fist thumping table or boot contacting stone)

I refute it thus.

—(Dr. Samuel Johnson, kicking a stone; rejecting Bishop George Berkeley’s idealist philosophy.) ¹

This text attempts a rhetorical analysis of two very common arguments against relativism (“Furniture” and “Death”), which take the form of demonstrations of bottom-line realities. When relativists ² talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific knowledge, technical capacity, social structure, and so on, their realist ³ opponents sooner or later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings, human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these reactions is to introduce a bottom line, a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as epistemologically constructed or deconstructible. There are two related kinds of moves: Furniture (tables, rocks, stones, etc.—the reality that cannot be denied), and Death (misery, genocide, poverty, power—the reality that should not be denied). Our aim is to show how these “but surely not this” gestures and arguments work, how they trade off each other, and how unconvincing they are, on examination, as refutations of relativism.

Furniture

No matter what the debate, whatever its content or its medium (text or talk), there is likely to be some furniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles and abstractions, cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity, we do so in chairs and in rooms, at desks and tables, or even out in the open, where the rocks and trees are. The appeal of these things is that they are external to the talk, available to show that it is just talk, that there is another world beyond, that there are limits to the flexibility of descriptions. Hitting the furniture also works as a nonverbal act, offering the advantage of getting outside of language; its force is that it avoids the rhetorical danger of appealing to nonverbal reality by putting it into words.

The Realist’s Dilemma

Of course, the hitting is not just a slapping; not only words signify. The table-thumping does its work as meaningful action, not mere behavior. All the pointings to, demonstrations of, and descriptions of brute reality are inevitably semiotically mediated and communicated. Rocks, trees and furniture are not already rebuttals of relativism, but become so precisely at the moment, and for the moment, of their invocation. We term this the realist’s dilemma. The very act of producing a nonrepresented, unconstructed external world is inevitably representational, threatening, as soon as it is produced, to turn around upon and counter the very position it is meant to demonstrate.

The solidity and out-there-ness of furniture (etc.) makes it a hard case for relativists to deconstruct. And just as commonsense observation is the hard case for relativism, it is the soft case for realism. Furniture arguments are realism working on its chosen soft ground. However, there is a cost for realism in this strategy: for in resorting to these cases, realists appear to be setting aside, conceding even, a huge amount of more contentious stuff to relativism—language, madness, the social order, cognition, even science. And it is generally disputation about these sorts of things that ends in table-thumping, the point of such gestures being to bolster a realist defence of something more contestable. In the rhetorical situation we are describing, the relativists may be winning the Epistemological Wars, but are in danger of losing the final battle. The forces of relativism are gathered about the last and best-defended castle of realism (Fortress Furniture), laying siege to it, and in the process suffering a blistering bombardment—Bang! Bang! Bang!

Undeniability Devices

The Furniture argument, as the argument of no argument, ⁴ purports to be the one that ends the rhetoric, is above rhetoric, and demonstrates its limits: it is “the naked truth,” ⁵ unconstructed, unsupported, unclothed, needing no allies. The counter to this is to name it as a device, a rhetorical construct, occasioned and deployed...