I had the chance to speak with a specialist in Rhetoric the other day. She had fascinating views on many questions, but on one question I found myself asking, I found her wanting. The question was this: How do you feel about logic?
Now I'm hardly the most logical of people, and have run from the mathematistic pretensions of analytic philosophy, which glorifies logic, for years, so even I was surprised to hear myself ask this question. But as the rhetorician answered it, I remembered why I'd asked it.
The distinction between logic and rhetoric, like other disciplinary distinctions, is one we should challenge, she said. In fact, every discourse has its own logic and rhetoric, and it's important and empowering for students to learn this.
Yeah, yeah, I wanted to say - Foucault was in the air when I was in graduate school, too. But now I'm an educator, and frustrated at students who don't know how to make a logically coherent argument in part because they don't know why to. Isn't everything subjective, open to interpretation? Isn't an argument something you come up with in order to justify an opinion, and so by definition disingenuous?
The reason I was asking, I recalled, was a discussion I'd had a few weeks ago with two Indian economists who've recently joined our faculty (and become friends). They were troubled by students' resistance to evidence and argument, confused by their conflation of demonstration and assertion, and bemused at their view that it is "judgmental" to make judgments. Maybe students should - as I had to - suffer through a course on "Uses and Abuses of Logic" their first semester. It's distressing to think of what they are getting from their education if they're deaf to the demands and rewards of logical demonstration!
