Stove and Searle on the rhetorical subversion of common sense

One of thestranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is thefrequency with which commentators put forward extremely dubious or evenmanifestly absurd claims as if they were obvious truths that no well-informedor decent person could deny.  Exampleswould be woke assertions to the effect that womenhave penises or that everything from professionalismto exerciseto dislikingbody odor to gettinga good night’s sleep is “racist.” In his book ThePlato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies , David Stovecharacterized a similar rhetorical move sometimes made by philosophers as “reasoningfrom a sudden and violent solecism” (p. 142).

A solecismis an ungrammatical utterance, breach of etiquette, or deviation from someother recognized norm.  For instance, “Icould of cared less” is a common grammatical solecism, and addressing KingCharles as “pal” or “buddy” rather than “Your Majesty” would be a solecismconcerning decorum.  What Stove had inmind are abuses of language that he takes certain philosophical lines ofargument to rest on.  He offers anargument from Berkeley as an example. Berkeley, says Stove, alleges that what it means to say that a certain physical object exists or has someproperty is that the object is or could be perceivedto exist or have that property.  And fromthis Berkeley infers an idealist conclusion. But in fact, complains Stove, this is obviously not what it means to say that a physical object exists or has someproperty.  Berkeley’s argument rests on amanifestly false claim about ordinary usage that he puts forwardmatter-of-factly, and in that way he reasons from a “sudden and violentsolecism.”

For purposesof this article, I put to one side questions about Berkeley’s views and whetherStove is representing him fairly.  WhatI’m interested in here is the general idea of the “sudden and violent solecism”as a rhetorical move.  Stove has more tosay about how it works, in his characteristically bitingly witty style:

The premise entails the conclusionall right, but it is so astoundingly false that it defies criticism, at first,by the simple method of taking the reader’s breath away… Say or imply, forexample, that in English ‘value’ means the same as ‘individuality’.  You can be miles down the track of yourargument before they get their breath back.

This method is not onlyphysiologically but ethologically sound.  Of course it should never be used first.  You need first to earn therespect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, orthe like: then apply the violentsolecism.  Tell them, for example, thatwhen we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was bornout of wedlock.  You cannot go wrong this way.  Decent philosophers will be so disconcerted bythis, that they will never do the one thing they should do: simply say, ‘Thatis NOT what “prime number” means!’  Instead, they will always begin to display feverish ‘displacementactivity’ (in Lorenz’s sense), casting about for an excuse for someone’s saying what you said, or ahalf-excuse, or a one-eighth excuse; nor is there any danger that they willsearch in vain.  And with this, not onlyis your philosophy of arithmetic launched, but you have already got otherpeople working for you, free of charge, at its development. (p. 142)

Note thatStove here identifies three key components to the rhetorical move inquestion.  First, the speaker has to havealready independently established his credibility with the listener.  He doesn’t open with the solecism, but introduces it only after his audiencehas been primed to take seriously whatever he has to say.  This might involve his holding an academicdegree or a prestigious academic position, a show of great learning, theputting forward of arguments of a more obviously sound and uncontroversialnature, the airing of opinions that are generally considered respectable, andso on.

Second, whenthe solecism is introduced, it has the effect of throwing the listeneroff-balance, precisely because it bothsounds counterintuitive but has also beenput forward by someone who seems credible. Rather than immediately objecting, the listener begins to doubt himself. “That sure sounds bizarre,” he thinks, “but the speaker is so smart!  Maybe I’mwrong, or maybe I’m misunderstandingsomething!”

Third, thelarger social context plays a crucial role in sustaining the rhetoricaleffect.  It isn’t just that the speaker,who seems credible, says these weird things. It’s that other people whoalso seem credible take these things seriously even when they acknowledge themto be weird.  They too seem to think that if they object to the odd utterance, they might be the ones who are wrong orfailing to understand.  As a result,rather than criticizing the odd utterance, they look for ways to render itplausible.  Before long, the speaker’sutterance becomes more than just some weird thing he has said.  It becomes a thesis on the menu of possible opinionsthat a group of people discuss,debate, and otherwise regard as worthy of being taken seriously.

John Searleindependently identified a couple of related rhetorical moves, which reinforcethe tactic of “reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism.”  In his book TheRediscovery of the Mind, Searle observes:

Authors who are about to saysomething that sounds silly very seldom come right out and say it.  Usually a set of rhetorical or stylisticdevices is employed to avoid having to say it in words of one syllable.  The most obvious of these devices is to beataround the bush with a lot of evasive prose… Another rhetorical device fordisguising the implausible is to give the commonsense view a name and then denyit by name and not by content… And just to give this maneuver a name, I willcall it the “give-it-a-name” maneuver. Another maneuver, the most favored of all, I will call the“heroic-age-of-science” maneuver.  Whenan author gets in deep trouble, he or she tries to make an analogy with his orher own claim and some great scientific discovery of the past.  Does the view seem silly?  Well, the great scientific geniuses of thepast seemed silly to their ignorant, dogmatic, and prejudiced contemporaries.  Galileo is the favorite historicalanalogy.  Rhetorically speaking, the ideais to make you, the skeptical reader, feel that if you don’t believe the viewbeing advanced, you are playing Cardinal Bellarmine to the author’s Galileo. (pp. 4-5)

Searleoffers the example of philosophers of mind who attack the commonsensesupposition that we have beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, conscious experiences,and so on by giving it the label “folk psychology.”  By discussing it under that label, thesephilosophers can make it seem as if the supposition that beliefs, desires,consciousness, etc. are real is merely one possible theory alongside others, noless open to debate and doubt.  Bycriticizing “folk psychology,” they can avoid coming out and straightforwardlyasserting that the human mind does not exist. By associating their critique with scientific precedent, they can makeit appear as if denying the reality of the mind is no more outrageous thanarguing that the sun is at the center of the solar system. 

Note thatwhat Searle calls the “give-it-a-name” maneuver is essentially a more subtleversion of what Stove calls the appeal to the “sudden and violentsolecism.”  What Searle is describing isalso an appeal to a solecism, but one that is disguised and insinuated ratherthan sudden and violent.  When otherwriters adopt the novel labels and go along with treating them as if they namedcontroversial theories (as talk of “folk psychology” has now become common inthe philosophical literature), we have an instance of what Stove calls“[getting] other people working for you, free of charge, at [the] development”of your idiosyncratic ideas.  And the“heroic-age-of-science” maneuver is a method for what Stove describes as “earn[ing]the respect of [one’s] readers” before introducing the solecism.

A morerecent example of the “give-it-a-name” maneuver is the attaching of labels like“cisnormativity” and “cisgenderism” to the commonsense supposition that humanbeings naturally fall into one of two sexes, male or female.  This serves the rhetorical function ofinsinuating that the commonsense view is at best merely one tendentiouspossibility among others, rather than being obviously correct or even havingany presumption in its favor.  Thepretense that something called “transgender studies” has rendered thecommonsense view problematic, or even established its falsity, is a variationon the “heroic-age-of-science” maneuver. (“You deny that trans women are women? You’re a bigot, like those who refused to look through Galileo’stelescope!”)

Why dopeople fall for rhetorical tricks like the ones identified by Stove andSearle?  There are several factors, oneof them being an overestimation of the argument from authority.  To be sure, not all arguments from authorityare fallacious.  If you believe somethingbecause some expert has said it, you aren’t guilty of a fallacy if you havegood reason to think that the person really does have expertise on the topic inquestion and is objective.  All the same,even non-fallacious arguments from authority are, as Aquinas famouslyacknowledged (despite often citing authorities himself), nevertheless weak.  That an authority says something may give yousome reason to believe it, but not aterribly strong one, especially if what he says is deeply at odds with theevidence of everyday experience and common sense.  A solecism is a solecism, whatever theexpertise of the person uttering it.

A secondfactor is the influence of a vice of excess where open-mindedness isconcerned.  Every philosopher is aware ofthe dangers of unexamined premises and of foreclosing an investigation toohastily.  But it is possible to go to theopposite extreme of attributing intellectual value to what is in reality merepedantry or nitpicking.  This would be aninstance of what Aquinas calls the vice of curiosity.  By “curiosity” Aquinas doesn’t mean thedesire for knowledge as such (which is, of course, of itself good) but rather adesire for knowledge that is disorderedin some way.  For example, it may stemfrom an unhealthy motivation like pride. Quibbling over matters that the average person takes for granted cansometimes reflect, not a genuine desire for deeper understanding, but pleasurein the feeling of superiority over those perceived as less intelligent orlearned.  Or it might reflect an impulseto undermine or “do dirt on” their decent sensibilities.  Or it might stem from a desire to make one’sreputation by contributing to some body of academic literature that is notterribly important in itself but helps pad the resume, or by flattering other,better-known contributors to such a literature who might help one’s career.  These factors, I submit, can all contributeto one’s being taken in by rhetorical moves like the ones identified by Stoveand Searle.

A thirdfactor is the influence of bad theory.  Supposeyou’re already independently convinced that some version of materialism must betrue.  Then you’re more likely to take seriouslya “give-it-a-name” maneuver like treating “folk psychology” as if it were some debatabletheory.  For you might worry that failingto do so would close off a possible avenue of escape from anti-materialistarguments.  Treating “folk psychology” asoptional opens the door to eliminative materialism as a “doomsday weapon” todeploy if all other defenses of materialism fail.

A fourthfactor is the influence of moral vice. For example, if you have some deeply ingrained sexual perversion,especially one that you would like to indulge rather than resist, you’re more likelyto take seriously some academic theory you’d otherwise dismiss as crackpot, ifsaid theory would provide a rationalization for indulging the perversion. 

A fifthfactor is the influence of what, in anearlier post, I labeled the “associationist mindset.”  Ideas that don’t bear any interesting logical relationship to one another cannevertheless come to be closely associated in a person’s mind because of psychological factors such as emotionand past experience.  In someone whosecapacity for logical reasoning is weak, this can entail a tendency to latchonto silly ideas (such as that punctuality, proper speech and etiquette, and otherstandards of professionalism are “racist”).