"What are the ways in which lawyers and judges traditionally conceive of and talk about experience, and how can these modes of thought and expression be mastered--and perhaps modified--by an individual mind?"

"At every stage the lawyer speaks to experience and in doing so defines anew the limits and capacities of his own imagination, defines himself as a person and a mind."

"What does it mean to learn to think and speak like a lawyer?"

[James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression xix, xxxi (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973)]

An excerpt from a student's journal, written while she was a third year law student:

In Torts class last year, Professor Rogers would sometimes force us to examine a situation in the way we would have perceived it before coming to law school. This was the scenario: Rogers would come off the platform and saunter up to the front row. He'd put his foot up on the front row desk, loosen his tie and light up a cigarette. He'd instruct us to think about this in the way we would have a year ago, to forget the things we've learned since. "Picture yourself at a bar discussing the law with some of the regular patrons. You're all having a beer and talking about whether someone has grounds for a law-suit or not. The idea was to get you to admit that before you came to law school you believed that a particular behavior would be illegal. "Of course," he would say, "anyone would think that this action is illegal. It has to be, doesn't it?" He'd look at you and smile reassuringly. Everyone smiled back, tentatively at first and then confidently. All over the room, heads would be nodding in agreement. Then he would lean forward, squint, point his finger and SHOUT, "Well, boys and girls, that's not true. It is legal. They don't know over there at the bar what is and isn't legal. And neither did you, before you came here. That's why you came to law school. Those people who think something is legal or illegal because it's right or wrong don't know what they're talking about. They're practicing 'bar stool law.' Law school is where you learn what the law is. This is where you find out what is and isn't legal--what you can and can't do. What the law really is."

"Bar stool law" became the catch-phrase to describe that uneasy feeling that something should be illegal, but you didn't quite know why. Many of us came to law school with "bar stool ethics." Some things are just wrong, immoral, unethical. They're just plain wrong and everyone knows they're wrong. After a short time in law school, you find yourself defending the very things that in pre-law school days you knew were immoral, unethical, and just plain wrong. But this is where we find out what is or isn't right. This is where we find out what we as lawyers can and cannot do. Surely lawyers can't do it if it isn't legal, or right, or ethical. Right?

"[T]hose who are willing to engage in a genuinely critical conversation can learn from one another. At least that is the hope...."

[Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction 347 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)]

"Man living in society has discussions with his fellows and tries to bring them to share some of his views and to perform certain actions. Relatively rarely does he have recourse solely to coercion in order to do this. In general, he seeks to persuade or to convince; and to this end he reasons...."

[Chaim Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument 168 (1963)]

"[T]here would be no hermeneutical task if there were no mutual understanding that has been disturbed and that those involved in a conversation must search for and find again together."

[Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 25 (Berkeley: University of California, Daniel E. Longe editor, 1977)]

"Given the dispiriting alternatives to dialogue, there is surely little to be gained by discounting the possibility of productive political-moral discourse. In any event, the best rejoinder to the skeptic is Philippa Foot's: We do not know how far dialogue can go in resolving particular disagreements between particular individuals or groups until it is tried. 'One wonders...why people who say this kind of thing [that dialogue cannot be productive] are so sure that they know where discussions will lead and therefore where they will end. It is, I think, a fault on the part of relativists, and subjectivists generally, that they are ready to make pronouncements about the later part of moral arguments...without being able to trace the intermediate steps.'

Moreover, it is a basic mistake--a fundamental misunderstanding--to think that the result of ecumenical political dialogue is invariably agreement. Such dialogue is not, and cannot be, an unfailing solvent of political-moral conflict. Plurality and pluralism, after all, are ineliminable features of our social situation: We are not all the same person, with the same affective makeup and the same traces on our being of the same religious or other moral tradition.... Perhaps the idealized (and stylized) dialogues of philosophers are unfailing solvents of political-moral conflict, but not the actual dialogues and conversations of real-world, flesh-and-blood human beings. We cannot realistically hope always to achieve agreement in the midst of our plurality and, especially, our pluralism. Nor, if we are pluralists--persons who understand that a religiously and morally pluralistic context can be a particularly fertile source of deepening religious and other moral insight--will we want everyone always to agree. To idealize ecumenical political dialogue, then, is not to imagine that if we could only talk long enough with one another, and under some 'ideal' conditions, we would all finally, at the end of the day, agree. To affirm the ideal of such dialogue is to avoid other extremes as well, in particular, the skeptical position 'that there is no point in going on discussing [the] issues [that divide us]' and the 'realist' position that such issues 'are always resolved by power struggles between factions.' To affirm the ideal, and to cultivate the practice of, ecumenical political dialogue is to purse a middle way. 'To recognize that political [dialogue] is neither futile nor conclusive: that it issues in political decisions which are ad hoc, contingent, and always liable to be challenged: but nevertheless that the process of public [dialogue] is something valuable in itself.'"

[Michael J. Perry, Toward an Ecumenical Politics, 60 Geo. Wash. U. L. Rev. 599, 609-619 (1992)]

"[T]here would be no hermeneutical task if there were no mutual understanding that has been disturbed and that those involved in a conversation must search for and find again together."

[Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 25 (Berkeley: University of California Press, (1977) (Daniel E. Longe ed.)]

"In areas where differences of opinion remain after all discussion, and a final conclusion cannot be reached, rhetorical argument is all there is and no longer second best to something else."

[Jeff Mason, Philosophical Rhetoric: The Function of Indirection in Philosophical Writing 7 (New York: Routledge, 1989)]

Beyond Modest Proposals: Understanding What We Know & Knowing Ourselves

"The moral sense we make of our lives, and of one another, takes the form of discourse about what is good, which acts are right, and who is virtuous....

Understood in ethical terms, the ideas we hold give us a model of and for social reality. They tell us what is so, and what we ought to do about it. They mirror the world we enter every day, and they point out the path we ought to take through it, so that we can justify self and society only in relation to each other. To hold moral discourse central to the study of social life is not to imagine ordinary persons as moral philosophers-writ- small, but rather to recognize that they, like us, ask themselves ‘What should I do now? Why?' And that their answers matter just as much to them as do ours to us."

[Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties xiv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)]

"What holds us together as a people is not some comprehensive cultural agreement conceived as a value consensus. Rather, it is the coherence of our moral disagreement and argument within an ongoing cultural conversation that embraces multiple moral languages, practices, and their social settings. Across every line of social difference we have enough in common to understand one another when we disagree and to argue about our life together. We can understand one another because all of us share a culture woven of contrasting moral traditions, which themselves embody continuities of conflict over how we ought to live together."

[Steven M. Tipton, The Church As A School For Virtue, 117 Daedalus 163 (1988)]

"Our capacity to use moral language, to be guided by moral reasoning, to define our transactions with others in moral terms is so central to our view of ourselves that even to envisage the possibility of our radical incapacity in these respects is to ask for a shift in our view of what we are and do which is going to be difficult to achieve."

[Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 2 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)]

"We cannot obtain the categories that allow us to describe our situation and to reflect about ourselves unless we share in specific, historically conditioned traditions of discourse that none of us authored individually. Without these categories the imagination cannot work. But with them we cannot easily prevent ourselves from becoming the unwitting reproducers of a shared picture of the world. If we stray too far or too quickly from the collective script we are left without a way to converse."

[Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Passions: An Essay on Personality 20-21 (New York: Free Press, 1984)]

"One of the more fertile insights of modern hermeneutics is that every statement has to be seen as a response to a question and that the only way to understand a statement is to get hold of the question to which the statement is an answer. This prior question has its own direction of meaning and is by no means to be gotten hold of through a network of background motivations but rather in reaching out to the broader contexts of meaning encompassed by the question and deposited in the statement.

What has to be held up as a first determination that will do justice to modern hermeneutics in contrast to the traditional kind is this notion that a philosophical hermeneutics is more interested in the questions than the answers--or better, that it interprets statements as answers to questions that it is its role to understand. That is not all. where does our effort to understand begin? What are we interested in understanding a text or some experience of the world, including our doubts about patent self-interpretations? .... [I]t will always be the case that we have to ask ourselves why a text stirs our interest. The answer will never be that it communicates some neutral fact to us. On the contrary, we have to get behind such putative facts in order to awaken our interest in them or to make ourselves expressly aware of such interests. We encounter facts in statements. All statements are answers. But that is not all. The question to which each statement is an answer is itself motivated in turn, and so in a certain sense every question is itself an answer again. It responds to a challenge. Without an inner tension between our anticipations of meaning and the all-pervasive opinions, and without a critical interest in the generally prevailing opinions, there would be no questions at all.

The first step of hermeneutic endeavor, especially the requirement of going back to the motivating questions when understanding statements, is not a particularly artificial procedure. On the contrary, it is or normal practice. If we have to answer a question and we cannot understand the question correctly (but we do know what the other wants to know), then we obviously have to understand better the sense of the question. And so we ask in return why someone would ask us that. Only when I have first understood the motivating meaning of the question can I even begin to look for an answer. It is not artificial in the least to reflect upon the presuppositions implicit in our questions. On the contrary, it is artificial not to reflect upon these presuppositions. It is quite artificial to imagine that statements fall down from heaven and that they can be subjected to analytic labor without once bringing into consideration why they were stated and in what way they are responses to something. That is the first, basic, and infinitely far-reaching demand called for in any hermeneutical undertaking.

Understanding is an adventure and, like any other adventure, is dangerous. Just because it is not satisfied with simply wanting to register what is there or is said there but goes back to our guiding interests and questions, one has to concede that the hermeneutical experience has a far smaller degree of certainty than that attained by the methods of the natural sciences. But when one realizes that understanding is an adventure, this implies that it affords unique opportunities as well. It is capable of contributing in a special way to the broadening of our human experiences, our self-knowledge, and our horizon, for everything understanding mediates is mediated along with ourselves."

[Hans-George Gadamer, "Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy," in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (eds.), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? 325-338, at 332-334, 336 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987)]

"In this game [of language and interpretation] nobody is above and before all the others; everybody is at the center, is ‘it' in this game. Thus it is always his turn to be interpreting. This process of interpretation takes place whenever we ‘understand,' especially when we see through prejudices or tear away the pretenses that hide reality. There, indeed, understanding comes into its own."

[Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 32 (Berkeley: University of California, Daniel E. Longe ed., 1977)]

"The point of moral argument is not agreement or a conclusion, but successful clarification of two people's positions vis-a-vis each other. Its function is to make the positions of the various protagonists clear--to themselves and to the others. Moral discourse is about what was done, how it is to be understood and assessed, what position each is taking toward it and thereby toward the other, and hence what each is like and what their future relations will be like. The hope, of course, is for reconciliation, but the test of validity in moral discourse will not be reconciliation but truthful revelation of self. ‘The direct point' of moral discourse ... is ‘to determine the positions we are assuming or are able or willing to assume responsibility for.' Consequently, again, what makes moral argument rational is not the assumption that we can always come to agreement about what ought to be done on the basis of rational methods. Its rationality lies in following the methods which lead to a knowledge of our position, of where we stand....

In a way, what claims we enter and what positions we take in a moral discussion is up to each of us, a matter of individual choice; yet in a way it is not subjective at all. You can take any position you want, but at the same time there are standards, and your position defines you just as surely as your action itself."

[Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice 153-54 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)]

"Those of us who believe that conceptions of human good--including conceptions tending to subvert a tolerant, democratic politics--can sometimes be transformed to some extent through discourse, can do more than hope: We can talk. Those of us who believe that such talk--moral discourse--is a real possibility even in a highly pluralistic society like our own can try to create a politics focused, in part, on questions of human good--a deliberative, transformative politics (as distinct from a politics that is merely manipulative and self-serving)--a politics in which questions of human good, of what way or ways of life human good consists in, are not marginalized or privatized but, instead, have a central, public place."

[Michael J. Perry, Morality, Politics, and Law 103 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)]

"W]e must meet and talk together, appreciating our respective histories and experiences of alienation and oppression. We must talk specifically about the kind of community we would fashion and how the rules, laws, and rituals defining the roles we adopt can be mutually empowering and facilitative of a community of equals. We must talk specifically about how we should organize, protest, agitate, and struggle to achieve our objectives, realizing that we are perennially engaged in a dialectic in which the program shapes our practices, which in turn refine and redefine our program."

[Anthony E. Cook, Beyond Critical legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, 1044 (1990)]

"[M]oral discourse, typically and generally, is discourse about possibilities, about worlds and persons that would be better and worse than the actual worlds and persons that we see around us.

There are two distinct public situations which human beings typically encounter, and in which they learn to speak their native languages: first, the deliberative council, scene of practical reasoning, of the balancing of reasons ('What ought we to do?' or 'What must we do?'); second, the prediction of, not the choice among, possibilities (for instance, trying to predict the harvest: `If it does not rain, must the corps perish?'). Human beings never have been able, and never will be able, to live without discussing these two related types of possibility and also without silently and continuously thinking about both of them."

[Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience 95, 93-94 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)]

"The moral sense we make of our lives, and of one another, takes the form of discourse about what is good, which acts are right, and who is virtuous....

Understood in ethical terms, the ideas we hold give us a model of and for social reality. They tell us what is so, and what we ought to do about it. They mirror the world we enter every day, and they point out the path we ought to take through it, so that we can justify self and society only in relation to each other. To hold moral discourse central to the study of social life is not to imagine ordinary persons as moral philosophers-writ-small, but rather to recognize that they, like us, ask themselves ‘What should I do now? Why?' And that their answers matter just as much to them as do ours to us."

[Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties xiv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)]

"The relationship that a speaker has with his language may range from the comfortable to the impossible. Sometimes one's language seems a perfect vehicle for speech and action; it can be used almost automatically to say or to do what one wishes. But at other times a speaker may find that he no longer has a language adequate to his needs and purposes, to his sense of himself and his world; his words lose their meaning.

The question, then, is not only how one can reconstitute one's language but how one can learn from it and, in the process, reconstitute one's character and one's life.

Language is learned only by stages and only for use and by using it; and, as one learns it, one naturally but imperceptibly undergoes changes; changes in attitude and perception and sentiment by which one becomes 'acculturated,' or 'cultured,' or perhaps, 'cultivated.'

In a sense we literally are the language that we speak, for the particular culture that makes us a "we"--that defines and connects us, that differentiates us from others--is enacted and embedded in our language. . . . [W]henever we speak or write, whether we know it or not and for good or ill, we contribute to the creation of a culture, and we do so both in the way we reconstitute our language and in the relation we establish with the other person who is our reader. Every way of reading is a way of being and acting in the world.

We are in part the products of our language, but each time we speak we remake it.... One is perpetually telling one's story to oneself and others, trying to shape things so that the next step fits with what has gone before, ceaselessly claiming significant for one's experience and actions, and the question always is, in what language can (or must) one do these things? What are the implications--the adequacies and inadequacies--of our common ways of describing the world, of constituting relations, of feeling injury, of acting socially, and of aspiring to what is not yet?"

[James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community 6-8, 20-21, 277 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984)]

"[A] great conversation relies very heavily on time-worn and emotional terms, many suffering from imprecise character but still carrying enough moral authority, by precedent, habit, experience, and spiritual commitment, to be capable of moving many people in the right direction much of the time."

[David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science 301 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)]

"If philosophy is defined as inquiry into certain truth, then what I pursue here is not philosophy but rhetoric: the art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse. But the differences are not sharply definable, and I of course think of the inquiry as in a larger sense philosophical. To talk of improving beliefs implies that we are seeking truth, since some beliefs are "truer" than others. Besides, many philosophers from Cicero to the present have defined what they do precisely as I would define rhetoric.

The rhetoric that concerns us here will be the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe, rather than proving what is true according to abstract methods. It is thus always dirtying its hands in mere opinion, offering its services to both sides of a controversy, and producing results that are at best rather messy. And rhetoric is always tainted, in the view of purer disciplines, by concern for audiences.

This might not be too bad if rhetoric worried only about "what all men [and women] believe," but more often than not it alters its conclusions, as it manipulates its devices, to suit the local opinions of special audiences: rhetoric not only uses different arguments when addressing different audiences, but it will prove conflicting conclusions, since it is finally and utterly bound to whatever convictions are shared by a given rhetorical community.

By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men [and women] succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before. . . . Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case: making the worse case appear the better cause. But I am groping toward something far more important...a view of rhetoric as the whole art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertion. .... The supreme purpose of persuasion [that is, rhetoric]...could not be to talk someone else into a preconceived view; rather it must be to engage in mutual inquiry or exploration. In such a world, our rhetorical purpose must always be to perform as well as possible in the same primal symbolic dance which makes us able to dance at all. If it is good for men [and women] to attend to each other's reasons--and we all know that it is, because without such attending none of us could come to be and questions about value could not even be asked--it is also good to work for whatever conditions make such mutual inquiry possible. Whatever imposes belief without personal engagement becomes inferior to whatever makes mutual exchange more likely. The purpose of mental change is thus to fulfill one's nature as a creature capable of responding to symbolic offerings. The process of inquiry through discourse thus becomes more important than any possible conclusions, and whatever stultifies such fulfillment becomes demonstrably wrong.

So long as we have good reason to know that disputes about values can sometimes be debated productively and resolved, we have good reason to tackle any dispute that seems to us, jointly, worth bothering about, no matter how hard it is."

[Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent xiii, 10-11, 137, 139 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)]

"The attempt to edify (ourselves or others) may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making connections between our own culture and some exotic culture or historical period, or between our own discipline and another discipline which seems to pursue incommensurable aims in an incommensurable vocabulary. But it may instead consist in the "poetic" activity of thinking up such new aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by, so to speak, the inverse of hermeneutics: the attempt to reinterpret our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of our new inventions."

[Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 360 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)]

"[M]oral judgments, and also our thoughts about moral issues, whether expressed or not, are best understood as a sub-class of judgments about possibilities, and that their natural setting is within deliberation, in public meetings or in silent thought, comparing and evaluating rival possibilities. Public deliberations take place in council rooms where the various interested parties meet and where their arguments for one policy or another are evaluated; this is the original Homeric setting of moral and political decision, when the council of leaders and heroes has to decide whether it is to be peace or war. There is a need for habits and for rules of procedure within this necessary institution, habits and rules guaranteeing that opposing viewpoints should be fairly heard and in due order assessed.

Let it be accepted that we have to borrow the vocabulary that is to describe the operations of our minds from the vocabulary that describes the public and observable transactions of social life. The picture of the mind that gives substance to the notion of practical reason is a picture of a council chamber, in which the agent's contrary interests are represented around the table, each speaking for itself....

This model of practical reason as deliberation, surviving from Aristotle until the present day, is still as vivid and plausible as ever.... The deliberations of the council of war in the Iliad are paralleled by the inner discussion preceding action within the soul of any prudent man [or woman]. The parallel is not an accident: it is the parallel between a shadow, the inner process, and what it is a shadow of, the public institution."

[Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience 14, 51, 52 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)]

"The communicative action explanation of liberal rights assumes a person who is more than a strategic interest maximizer. An address to another seeking uncoerced agreement implies a claimed ability to redeem implicit validity claims. The address also presupposes the other's interest in and legitimate claim to expect the redemption of these validity claims. In these respects, communicative action is independent of and directly contrasts with strategic maximization. Indeed, the orientation toward uncoerced agreement and redemption of validity claims implicit in communicative action implies respect for the other's equality (the other has the same right as the speaker) and liberty (the other must be convinced and is capable of deciding).

Communicative action is central to our identities, as well as to deliberative politics....

The conception of a person as a being who engages in communicative action ... both leads to liberal supra-political rights and implies the necessity of an everyday politics that is, at least in part, deliberative and constitutive.

[T]he focus of the ideal of civic republicanism] is on deliberation aimed at finding truly common goods, the discussion proceeds like the liberal argument flowing from the implications of communicative action. The derivation of liberal foundations emphasized the need to respect the diversity of passions, and equality of the people entering into the republican deliberations. This respect is crucial for redeeming the validity claims implicit in the dialogue. It is crucial to the obligatory status of the deliberations' conclusions.... Thus, dialogic politics aimed at a common good seemingly presupposes the liberal foundations of respect for the equality and autonomy of the participating agents."

[Edwin Baker, Republican Liberalism: Liberal Rights and Republican Politics, 41 Florida L. Rev. 491, 514, 515, 517 (1990)]

"I have assumed that I live among people who are familiar with the political practices and who show their adherence to them by discussing them critically, indeed relentlessly. We have been educated as is now only possible in liberal democracies and we have a fund of historical and literary memories on which we can draw as we contemplate ruling and being ruled.... As a result, we can talk to, as well at, each other intelligibly. Whether we disagree or are at one, we can know about such an enterprise. After all, Aristotle said ‘we,' frequently. He was not addressing the Persians or future generations of barbarians, nor did he probably expect Diogenes and his kind to pay much attention to his lectures on ethics and politics. And he also did not seem to ask his audience of ‘we' to necessarily agree with him. They were, rather, to enter directly into the general spirit of his discourse. That is all that ‘we' means here."

[Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices 226-227 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)]

"A significant purpose of politics may be to reveal objectionable preferences...through processes of political discussion and debate.

. . . . The existence of objectionable or distorted preferences suggests that politics should not simply implement citizen desires, but should also allow for a measure of critical distance from and scrutiny of those desires, and bring new information and different perspectives to bear.

The republican belief in deliberation counsels political actors to achieve a measure of critical distance from prevailing desires and practices, subjecting these desires and practices to scrutiny and review."

[Cass Sustein, Beyond the Republican Revival, 97 Yale L. J. 1539, 1543 (1988)]

"When powerful interests are involved it is very difficult to change anything by arguments, however cogent, which appeal to decency, humanity, compassion, or fairness.... [Consequently,] I am pessimistic about ethical theory as a form of public service. The conditions under which moral argument can have an influence on what is done are rather special, and not very well understood by me.... It certainly is not enough that the injustice of a practice or the wrongness of a policy should be made glaringly evident. People have to be ready to listen, and that is not determined by argument. I say this only to emphasize that philosophical writing on even the most current public issues remains theoretical, and cannot be measured by its practical effects. It is likely to be ineffective.... I do not know whether it is more important to change the world, or to understand it, but philosophy is best judged by its contribution to the understanding, not to the course of events."

[Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions xii-xiii (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)]

"The form of the Platonic dialogue was quite certainly created by a historical fact--the fact that Socrates taught by question and answer. He held that form of dialogue to be the original pattern of philosophic thought, and the only way for two people to reach an understanding on any subject."

[Werner Jaeger, 2 Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture 19 (New York: Oford University Press, 1986)]

"Plato was the first to demonstrate the therapeutic use of language, in the dialogues of Socrates. In these dialogues, Socrates led his friends through discussions whose primary agenda was to make them aware of their misunderstandings of pivotal words and concepts, misunderstandings that resulted inevitably in a "misrepresentation of reality" by which they were disoriented conceptually and perceptually.

Moreover, thinking they knew what in fact they did not, they were not conscious of the dislocation of values inherent in their misunderstanding. Socrates therefore sought to unravel, by dialectic, the components of the misunderstanding, to expose the linguistic flaw that was the foundation of the false construction of reality.

This was the first step toward a more adequate construction, and it was this step that Socrates retained, never permitting himself to rush ahead to the work of construction until the dismantling of false conceptions of reality had been completed. By so doing, Socrates demonstrated the potential of language to discover and analyze misrepresentations of reality. Language is primarily therapeutic or remedial."

[Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture 139 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985)]

"One achievement is universally conceded to him [Socrates]: that by his questioning he leads his pupils to confess their ignorance and thus cuts through the roots of their dogmatism. This result, which indeed cannot be forced in any other way, discloses the significance of the dialogue as an instrument of instruction."

[Leonard Nelson, Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy 15 (New York: Dover ed., Thomas K. Brown III trans., 1965)]

"Human subjects have no privileged access to their own identity and purposes. It is through rational dialogue, and especially through political dialogue, that we clarify, even to ourselves, who we are and what we want. It is mistaken to assume that we necessarily enter into dialogue with an already consolidated view of where we stand and what we are after, conceiving of speech merely as a means to be used for winning over others, rather than as an end to be pursued for its own sake. On the contrary, communication between subjects joined in a community of rational dialogue may entail a process of moral self-discovery that will lead us to a better insight into our own ends and a firmer grasp upon our own subjectivity. Here politics functions as a normative concept, describing what collective agency should be like, rather than abiding by its present devalued meaning.... [I]t is through speech and deliberation that man finds the location of his proper humanity, between beast and god, in the life of the citizen."

[Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment 152 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)]

"Whenever you speak, you define a character for yourself...."

[James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community xi, 6 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984)]

"Action and speech are so closely related because the primordal and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?' This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds.... Without the accompaniment of speech...action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do.

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.... This disclosure of ‘who' in contradistinction to ‘what' somebody is--his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide--is implicit in everything somebody says and does. It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a wilful purpose, as through one possessed and could dispose of this ‘who' in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the ‘who,' which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his should from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters."

[Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 158-159, 159-160 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959)(1958)]

"With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative."

[Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 157 (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959)]

"Speech, the use of language, is saturated by choice because language gives us multiple alternatives to pick from when we want to say something. Language is a garden of options. It solicits choice and urges us to be more active as choosers. Still, there is a form of speech that is simply vocabulary and not chosen. It occurs when we automatically say what anyone would say in a given situation, when we say what we say all the time, when we just let words roll out. For example, if I become irritated by someone and say something like, "Why did you do that? What a dumb thing to do," or if I am pleased and say, "Thanks so much; that was very nice," I quite probably am only reacting and not choosing what I say. The use of stock words and stock phrases is hardly different from reaching out for a glass of water when I am thirsty. But if I deliberately select a word, a phrase, and a grammatical structure, my speech takes on more of the tone of a minded and effective discourse. A carefully crafted insult is more cutting--because more thoughtful--than an outburst of harsh words, and a selected expression of thanks is more grateful than a perfunctory phrase. Yet the automatic and spontaneous speech is done with awareness and done willingly; it is voluntary and we can be praised or blamed for it. But it is not chosen.

We not only have an opportunity to choose when we use language; we are obligated to do so. Speech ought to be chosen because it must be formulated in view of its two purposes, display and rhetorical effect. Merely voluntary speech is a passive response that lacks the thoughtful articulation the speech pretends to express. Merely voluntary speech falls short of being "real" speech. In this respect speech differs from action, because simply voluntary actions can be genuine actions, whereas unchosen, simply voluntary speech is less than genuine speech. Something is left out in it. If we are engaged in a conversation and one of the speakers talks in a simply voluntary way, he becomes either boorish or boring. He no longer selects what is to be said in view of the thing to be displayed and in view of the effect on his hearers. He also forgoes the substitution and the enchainment, the work choice and grammar, that would make his speech appropriate and alive. Although he seems to speak with others about something, he is really disengaged from the conversation as such, since the conversation is essentially a play of selections and counterselections and branching sequences.

Linguistic choices are made in view of a display and in view of a rhetorical effect. Other choices, the nonlinguistic, are made in view of something's coming about. They bring about a change in the agent's situation. Making something happen is different from making a display, since a display reveals what is already there or what could be there, but does not make it to be there. Hence linguistic choices, as involved in a display, intervene less in the world than do the choices in ordinary human action, which are meant to rearrange the way the world is. Linguistic choices are made in order to reveal, not to bring about. However, the rhetorical dimension of linguistic choice seems to be more like ordinary choices in this respect; in rhetoric we might seem to do something in order to change something: we speak in order to change the attitudes and beliefs and actions of other people. But even here there is a difference. The rhetorical force of words changes people by virtue of the display that these words bring about, not by virtue of a direct causal sequence. It is not because the words are loud or colorful that they influence people rhetorically, but because of what they reveal, whether about the speaker, the audience, or the situation. Rhetoric works not causally on things or listeners but through a modification of what is believed, through a modification of the way the world is made to seem. Therefore, rhetorical persuasion is not like the "persuasion" achieved by, say, compulsion or torture, not is it like the conviction brought about by an act of kindness or an act of cruelty toward the person who is convinced.

Rhetorical force is also different from the force exercised by actions when they serve as examples to other agents. It is true that our actions normally viewed by an audience. Our actions change things in the world, but they are also seen by onlookers who may not be the targets of our actions and choices: they merely watch what we do, but they also may be encouraged to act and choose as we have acted and chosen. It this effect of our actions on them not the same as the rhetorical effect our words have on an audience? Not really; if others imitate what we have done, they are responding to the new situation brought about by our performance and our choice. Our behavior introduces something new in the world and the others are reacting to it, even if they do so by imitation and not by counteraction. It is true that their opinion is changed and that the new opinion may be the origin of their performance, but the opinion changes on the basis of what has happened, not in response simply to what has been said. For instance, if the audience were to be impressed by the fact that I had the courage to make a speech in a dangerous situation, and were thereby "persuaded" to speak out themselves about the issue in question, this would not be persuasion through rhetoric, even though it was brought about by a speech; it would not be persuasion through what is said and displayed, but persuasion through example. In rhetoric as such we do not do anything and others do not react to us. We merely display the situation, its dissatisfactions and its possibilities, and make it appear differently to the audience. The appearance or the opinion has changed, not the situation itself: the work of rhetoric is done through a display.

And once the possibility of display arises, there arises also the issue of aspect-blindness. Some persons cannot be brought to se something as such and such, either because of dullness, of inattention, or perhaps because of moral character: a thief will be unpersuaded when someone says that this helpless person should be assisted; he will see the situation as a chance to steal. But an honest person would not find that thieving aspect dawning on him; he would be startled to hear someone articulate the situation in such terms. If, as Wittgenstein says, "the drawing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thinking,: then aspect-blindness means that we do not or cannot think in such a way as to allow this or that aspect to surface, to allow this or that display to occur; if the aspect is a moral one, it means that we are not the sort of agent who, by character, lets such possibilities emerge.

Many moral transactions are simply verbal achievements. The material performances that underlie many of our moral acts are simply acts of speaking. We can crease the world by saying words as well as by pushing someone or handing something over to someone; Homer often has one of his characters ask, "What sort of word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?" (Iliad, 14.83) Letting words go can be just as decisive a feeding or striking another person. Insult, gratitude, consolation, discouragement, encouragement, dedication, all can take place through speech.

It is true that usually nonverbal actions are more of a commitment of ourselves than words are. Words usually remain somewhat provisional so long as there is nothing besides words. Words work through what they display, and accomplishing the words does not yet mean we have accomplished what they display, nor does it definitely assure others that we are dedicated to what the words display, that we will act in accordance with what we have said. I may promise but not perform, I may commiserate but do nothing to help, I may join in the complaint but not do anything to remedy the situation. Ontologically there is always something of a lag between what is said and what is done, precisely because of the displaying function of words. To get caught in the words while never getting to the deed is a peculiarly human way of being a failure. Only a being with speech can fail in this way.

But words are not always irrelevant or false; if they can be idle or misleading, they can also be pertinent and true. They often do portend actions and sometimes they are the moral action itself. An insult is achieved when words are spoken. We have been redefined in our human relationships by the insulting statement. We can be encouraged or strengthened in our resolve by the words of others and we are grateful to those who knew what to say and who did say it to us. How can speech serve as the vehicle for moral transactions, and why does it have that provisional, dubious relationship toward the other kind of human performance, toward deeds? Why is speech open to suspicion in a way that deeds are not?

Speech acts sometimes make up the moral transactions, but even when they do not, they surround the performances we carry out. There is almost always an enormous amount of talking around whatever we do. There is talking before, during, and after most moral transactions. Speech helps us define and evaluate our situation, it helps us shake out ways of dealing with it, it helps us determine what should be chosen in view of the purposes we have in mind, it lets us state the action even before we perform it, it lets us test and rehearse and clarify what we are going to do, and to get an initial, and also verbal, reaction from others: it lets us display the action and its effects when the action is still absent, before it occurs. Speech then helps us explain, both to others and to ourselves, what we are doing while we are doing it, it helps us hold fast to the identifications and recognitions that make up our moral transaction, even while the circumstances continue to change under the pressure both of external factors and of our own intervention. Finally, speech allows us to restate, confirm, and interpret what we have done, it allows the action to become reputed, it allows assessment and praise or blame, it allows both gossip and commemoration, and lets other agents take our performance into account as they in turn think about what they should do in their situations. A moral transaction of any importance at all generates floods of talk and chatter and much serious speech as well.

Moreover, it is specifically moral transactions that generate so much discussion. The process of making a product, the activity of changing or servicing the condition of things, and even the activity of choosing in view of an end, do not call for nearly as much comment and continuous reappraisal. They also do not bring nearly as much fame or infamy. Speech is thus one of the elements of human conduct, and it is related to performances in a way different from the way actions are related to reactions; somehow speech as an element for action can be outside the action itself. It can be only the cushion and the mirror for action. What is speech, and what is moral action, that the two should be related in this way?

The speech that surrounds and cushions action is related to the prudence, the understanding of a situation, that reflects character and enables performance. Both the serious discourse and the chatter are a continuous reprocessing of the situation as understood and the action as performed within that understanding. The speech is a continuous airing of the situation as appraised. There is talk about what should be done, about what is being done, about what has been done, about what should have been done, and all this talk keeps expressing the understanding that made the action possible. It is not the action as creasing the world that is simply repeated in speech, but the understanding that created a context and a plausibility for the performance. The reason why the understanding is a topic of speech is that it culminated in the action, but the action by itself, abstracted from the agent's own understanding and the understanding of the onlookers, is too episodic to catch in speech. But the prudential understanding that yields the action, as an act of thinking, provides an abundance of material for verbalization.

In fact, the activity of working out an understanding of a situation can sometimes, and especially for some personalities, get overdeveloped and expand so much that it paralyzes action. We can analyze and refine so much that we cannot move. This happens especially with those who deal a lot with words: academics, actors, commentators, journalists, philosophers. They get enthralled in telling and may never do anything. They also may overanalyze a situation and put themselves into a nervous panic about acting: their words and thoughts can balloon into huge constructions with problems, avenues, and solutions so highly articulated that they could never be brought back into the situation and its resources. Too many words, whether arising from enjoyment or from anxiety, block performance. This moral affliction is made possible by an ontological structure, by the lag between speech and deeds. The activity of displaying overwhelms the possibility of doing something to be displayed. It is not just that such people cannot act, it is that they do something else instead of acting, something that seems to "contain" the actions and can therefore somehow make the person think he has acted when he has only talked.

Speech about action, gossip and commentary, draws primarily on the understanding an agent has of his situation. Such understanding comes between character and actual performance. Both gossip and serious talk can therefore move off in two directions. They can expatiate upon the agent's character as the origin of this concrete moral understanding, or they can focus on the deed itself. The character: 'What kind of man is he to have done that?' 'She must be very different from what we thought her to be.' 'Do you know what else he did, and what he said?' 'She is proving to be very reliable.' The performance: 'He then stood up and walked away; you should have seen the looks on their faces.' 'She then got the material through and we were able to proceed.' 'He took Joe's watch and Joe ran after him and caught him.' Both these forms of talk and evaluation, the retrospective, which reflects on the character of the agent, and the prospective, which reflects on the action and its effects, are worked out through the understanding of a situation that enables the performance to occur and makes the performance the agent's own.

The prominence of moral understanding as the central topic of gossip and commentary is shown by the reaction people have to actions that appear puzzling. On the large scale, an election always provokes much talk about what the electorate is trying to 'say' (the electorate only acts; it exhibits its political intelligence but does not formulate it). Moves in the stock market are analyzed to find 'what the market is telling us,' that is, how it understands its economic situation. An individual may perform an act that solicits commentary: Pope John II meets with Yasser Arafat; somebody promises to deliver something but repeatedly refuses to do so. What is going on? The commentary is an attempt to work out the situational understanding that went into the action, the understanding that crystallizes the situation and allows the action to be performed, the anticipation with which the action is to be identified.

Speech about the actions of others has an analogue in speech about what happens in sport. We are interested in spectator sports not simply because we enjoy watching a game. Our interest extends into all the talking that goes on about the game, before, during, and after it is played. Sports give people something to talk about, something with which to fill up conversation. And much of the talk is about the way the players and coaches understand the situations in which they are to act. People talk about whether a quarterback called the right play, why he was afraid to move toward this or that player, how he exploited that weakness of the opposition, how he misjudged, what he will do next time, how this player was able to react to that situation, who will pitch in the next game. This focus on the prudence of the players and coaches sometimes moves toward comments about the ability of the players and on their 'moral' character as players (on whether they are impetuous, cunning, foolish, or lazy), and it sometimes moves toward remarks about this or that good or bad performance, which is where the ability and the prudence, the assessment, come fully to themselves. There will also be comments on the material resources that surface in situations--on the weather, on injuries, on the quality of the turf on which the game is played, on the home team's advantage--and on the restrictions they impose and the opportunities they provide for the participants. Sports thus provide an interesting analogue to life, both as regards what is done and as regards what is said about what is done."

[Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study 34, 35, 36-37, 38 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)]

"Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the world and the all embracing form of the constitution of the world."

[Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 3 (Berkeley: University of California, Daniel E. Longe ed., 1977)]

"[L]iving speaking and the life of the language have their play in a back and forth movement. No one fixes the meaning of a word, nor does the ability to speak merely mean learning the fixed meanings of words and using them correctly. Rather, the life of language consists in the constant playing further of the game that we began when we first learned to speak. A new word usage comes into play and, equally unnoticed and unintended, the old words die. This is the ongoing game in which the being-with-others of men [and women] occurs.

The common agreement that takes place in speaking with others is itself a game. Whenever two persons speak with each other they speak the same language. They themselves, however, in no way know that in speaking it they are playing this language further. But each person also speaks his own language. Common agreement takes place by virtue of the fact that speech confronts speech but does not remain immobile. In speaking with each other we constantly pass over into the thought world of the other person; we engage him, and he engages us. So we adapt ourselves to each other in a preliminary way until the game of giving and taking--the real dialogue--begins. It cannot be denied that in an actual dialogue of this kind something of the character of accident, favor, and surprise--and in the end, of buoyancy, indeed, of elevation--that belongs to the nature of the game is present. And surely the elevation of the dialogue will not be experienced as a loss of self-possession, but rather as an enrichment of our self, but without us thereby becoming aware of ourselves."

[Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 56-57 (Berkeley: University of California, Daniel E. Longe editor, 1977)]

"[With question and response] the inner demands of dialogue come into play.... Questions seek responses; when given, responses claim to be relevant, responsive, responsible, etc., to the question. But, whether the response is relevant, etc., requires further dialogue. That is, responses are taken up within the dialogue as mere claims, and as such are always to be tested. As claims, they are dialogically held in suspension or parentheses, held in abeyance precisely to enable this further dialogue, testing, by the one whose ignorance and inquiry is at issue. Thus, responses are essentially invitations to further questions, which lead to still further responses, to further questions, and so on--in shared talk (com-munication), until and if that point is reached when the dialogical partners are free from ignorance and freed for truth....

Obviously, at any moment the entire process of dialogue can break down, be betrayed, diverted, become aborted in many ways and for many reasons: failed insight, sloppy thinking and talk, dishonesty, impatience, and still others. But once initiated, dialogue--founded on honesty, restraint, and courage--is inherently exposed to such failures, and the failures reflect on those who make them by their own free choices, for that alone initiates the dialogue and sustains its course in shared discourse.

Such reflections, however, require that we not be naive. After all, just as Socrates, so all of us can and do use all manner of tricks, guises and disguises, cunning and cleverness, to make the invitation to listeners and readers as attractive and inviting as possible. The appeal needs to be appealing. But is not that only a guise covering over the exercise of power or manipulation? Can there be an appeal (a way of speaking, or writing) which is not also manipulation in one or another sense of violence, merely using the other person, hence coercing him or her in some way? More directly, is dialogue possible without manipulation (hence use of power, hence violence) Or, what is the relationship between dialogue, as the form of moral discourse and violence?

[In some of our dialogues there is an "invitation" to others] to respond freely and mutually, without force or violence, whatever the other many make of that invitation. It is, then, an act that seeks to enable the other to be free in his or her response (as authentic listening is an act enabling the question to be genuinely spoken), thereby enabling the questioner to be free from and free for. Thereby, too, the responder becomes freed. The dialogical partners who are able to sustain moral dialogue, thus, effectively collaborate in each other's freedom.... Freedom is not the act of a solitary consciousness or pure will; it is rather the mutually enabling act which occurs, when and if it does occur, at the heart of moral dialogue.

Morality is therefore not a matter of merely of autonomy; it is, rather, that of mutual enablement, an act of communing with one another about issues that matter, make a difference in one's life. Its hope is that the act of genuine questioning...will really speak to or tell the other persons, will in that sense be significant for the other who, hopefully, will really listen and then respond with the asker. But its hope is just as importantly that the asker will take the response...in the same way the asker asks the responder to do--that here, too, there will be real listening and talking with the responder. By sharing freely with the other, the hope is that very act itself will enable the other...to be responsive and responsible from within his or her own life, and will then be open for further seeking.

And what are we to make of the tricks, the devices, disguises, guises, and ironies of discourse? The centering issues here are at the nub of actual talk among people, ingredient to our naturally occurring conversations, our dialogue. Each of the participants in moral dialogue must continually and in every conduct and speech remind one another that they can each only be free to respond and to question. The 'others must be told,' but the telling must also be the awesome telling of the other that he or she is able to be, and must be, free, and in this freedom must be responsive and responsible.

The core response to the cunning and wiliness of reason is the moral one: the moral of a person's life story is within the moral dialogues of his or her life. If the questioner in any way masks or betrays the other's freedom to respond (prohibits, conceals, or disguises the other from this), and if the same is not true as well for the responder, then manipulation, power play, control, and violence are invariably at hand, and the morality of the discourse is destroyed. In different terms, it is only by both participants' continual and insistent enabling of each other to be themselves in speaking, only by displaying this in each of the respective 'talkings,' that freedom is possible. Each collaborates in the other's freedom and responsibility. Freedom is therefore not a matter of autonomy, but rather of mutuality.

It remains only to insist on this, that the one who questions, who initiates the moral dialogue, faces an ultimate test, perhaps anguish, the actual prospect of having to live in the face and in the aftermath of the other's choices. The same is true for the responder, that genuine listening and responding will itself go unheeded, whether the asker was merely playing around, looking for an answer of which he or she was already convinced, or whatever.

The same is true, too, of an author: to live with the real possibility that none will read his or her words; and for the teacher, that none will listen--that, in short, dialogue will not occur. How one can come to accept that and resist the very real temptation to use force on the listener/reader, however indirectly or subtly, is perhaps the awesome challenge to one's courage in sustaining dialogue with others about vital issues."

[Richard M. Zaner, Failed or Ongoing Dialogues? Dax's Case," in Lonnie D. Kliever, Dax's Case: Essays in Medical Ethics and Human Meaning 43-61, at 56-59 (Dallas: Southern Methodist Press, 1989)]

"In the ordinary use of discourse--for example, in a discussion between two friends--the interlocutors use any available ammunition, changing games from one utterance to the next: questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are launched pell-mell into battle. The war is not without rules, but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance.

From this point of view, an institution differs from a conversation in that it always requires supplementary constraints for statements to be declared admissible within its bounds. The constraints function to filter discursive potentials, interrupting possible connections in the communication networks: there are thing that should not be said. They also privilege certain classes of statements (sometimes only one) whose predominance characterizes the discourse of the particular institution: there are things that should be said, and there are ways of saying them. Thus: orders in the army, prayer in church, denotation in the schools, narration in families, questions in philosophy, performativity in businesses....

.... We know today that the limits the institution imposes on potential language 'moves' are never established once and for all (even if they have been formally defined). Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without. Examples: Does the university have a place for language experiments (poetics)? Can you tell stories in a cabinet meeting? Advocate a cause in the barracks? The answers are clear: yes, if the university opens creative workshops; yes, if the cabinet works with prospective scenarios; yes, if the limits of the old institution are displaced. Reciprocally, it can be said that the boundaries only stabilize when they cease to be stakes in the game."

[Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Postmodern Condition," in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (eds.), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? 73-94, 76-77 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987)]

"To a great extent, the meaning and structure of a person's life are molded by the linguistic and symbolic descriptions which we use to isolate specific aspects of our dreams, emotions, desires, and past experiences. . . . Our understanding of reality is constituted by the language we use to express it."

[Stuart L. Charmé, Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean Perspective 15 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984)]

"The formulation of experience which is contained within the intellectual horizon of an age and a society is determined . . . not so much by events and desires, as by the basic concepts at people's disposal for analyzing and describing adventures to their own understanding."

[Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art 6 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 3rd ed., 1973)]

"We discern situational patterns by means of the particular vocabulary of the cultural group into which we are born. Our minds, as linguistic products, are composed of concepts (verbally molded) which select certain relationships as meaningful. Other groups may select other relationships as meaningful. These relationships are not realities, they are interpretations of reality--hence different frameworks of interpretation will lead to different conclusions as to what reality is."

[Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change 35 (New York: Boobs-Merrill, 1965)]

"The word is critical and makes every position critical. The end of 'naivete' begins. Naivete is of the order of the 'there is': there are things, there is nature, there is history, there is the law of work, there is the power of those who command. The thing, the act of making and inciting to action is virtually brought into question by the dubitative word: world, work, and tyrants are globally contested by the corrosive power of the word. The great philosophers of the question--and of the 'calling into question'--Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl have elucidated and carried to its extreme point this dubitative genius of the word. In this they are the soul of every culture which rebels against the always premature syntheses proposed and imposed by the civilizations of collective belief, whether the unifying theme of these civilizations be the robe, the sword, or the tool.

It is in the world of the dubitative word that there are contestations. It is in the world of contestation that there are affirmations.

[T]he imperative word does not only work with respect to others, but also with regard to man who, through the word becomes a signifying being. Whoever speaks pronounces also upon himself, decides himself; he thus passes judgment upon himself and this elucidates him and brakes up the previous affective confusion. The interior word, which every decision involves, is a striking manifestation of the promotion of mankind represented by the word: if I say nothing to myself, I do not emerge from the inhuman confusion of the beast. Without the word I am no more ordered than my work.

In opening the field of the possible, the word opens also that of the better. Henceforth the question is posed: what does my work mean, that is to say, what is its value? Work is human work beginning with this question concerning the personal and communal value of work; and this question is a matter for the word.

[T]he word develops self-wareness and self-expression in multiple directions.... [T]he imperative word by which I come to a decision, bringing judgment upon my affective confusion; the dubitative word by which I question myself and bring myself into question; the indicative word by which I consider, deem, and declare myself to be such; but also the lyrical word by which I chant the fundamental feelings of mankind and of solitude."

[Paul Ricoeur, "Work and the Word," in Hwa Yol Jung (ed.), Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory 36-64, at 48, 49, 44-45, 51, 52 (1972)]

"In the Ethics Aristotle remarks that doing the right thing, the virtuous thing, is not something that can be taught in the manner of the sciences. To be virtuous is to judge and act correctly in the changing circumstances of the world. It is to act on the basis of one's character in such a way that one does the right thing, in the right way, and at the right place and time. Such action takes discernment on the part of the agent. The right thing to do cannot be worked out a priori. Rather, one must see how principle and circumstances come together in the particular situation.

"The case of rhetoric is similar to this. When the orator seeks to persuade a jury or an assembly that a certain verdict is to be reached, ora certain course of action is to be followed, he must marshal all the facts and principles relevant to the desired outcome. As Aristotle puts it, he must bring together all the available means of persuasion. Certainty in these matters is simply not available. Though logical argument has a role to play in the putting of a case, logic alone cannot settle the issue. It is not like mathematics or geometry in which proofs are available and the results hold necessarily and with unrestricted generality. This is not the case in situations in which the techniques of rehtoric are needed.

"Rhetoric begins and ends in the relam of opinions. Alternative points of view, verdicts, courses orf action, etc. are never ruled out by logic. What matters in rhetoric is the particular judgment and the decision which follows upon it. Alternatives are ruled out by choice, and they can be opened up to further consideration in the future. Therefore, the activity of persuasion never permanently ceases but simply comes to a halt for the time being in a decision which is reached."

[Jeff Mason, Philosophical Rhetoric: The Function of Indirection in Philosophical Writing 7 (New York: Routledge, 1989)]

"[O]ur views of what we should do are the result of experience, emotion, and conversation. This conversation occurs in a social and historical context. The conversation will continue as long as human beings live in a society that permits them to talk freely with each other. And as long as the conversation continues, we will reconsider and sometimes revise our beliefs."

[Peter Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 Yale L. J. 1, 26 (1984)]

"Man interposes a network of words between the world and himself and thereby becomes the master of the world." (7)

"To come into the world is to begin speaking (prendre la parole), to transfigure experience into a universe of discourse." (9)

"The world is given to each of us as a body of meanings, the disclosure of which we obtain only on the level of speech. Language is reality." (38)

"Our lived space is a space of speaking, a pacified territory in which each name is a solution to a problem." (39)

"It is by speaking that man comes into the world and the world comes into thought." (39)

[Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965)]

"Our care for language shapes our responsibility to ourselves and others; it is the mark of our faithfulness to the nature of things, to their shape and drift."

[John O'Neill, Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology 18 (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1974)]

"This intimate tie between language and the being of the world and man, in whatever form it is experienced, appears . . . as a constant characteristic of the human consciousness of values."

[Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole) 15 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, P. Brokelman trans., 1965)]

"[Conversation is] the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood."

[Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 389 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)]

"All discourse proves the reality of value, because all discourse presumes the reality of value. That is what discourse is and does: it realizes values of various kinds, self-expression, fulfillment of a personal motive to realize some good for oneself, to speak truth (a good), to communicate to other people (that is, to commune with them, a good), whatever. Language is motivated and human, which is to say immersed in value, presuming value, value-laden, value-seeking, value-realizing. A skeptic, momentary or confirmed, may doubt the reality of value, and may doubt the value of language, even though there is no way to say that doubt consistently, for to use language is to be public, human, value-intended, value-confirming.

Language realizes values, as ends, to fulfill actualities, to recognize truth, to express feelings, to amuse, to perform other functions. Functions are fulfilled well or badly. Human beings seek ends as good, and judge how well or how imperfectly ends are fulfilled.

Language is through and through evaluative, value-laden, value-founded, value-presuming, value-seeking, value-structured. Hence the notion of mere fact, pure description, is a delusion, a persistent and deep delusion much hammered at. . . ."

[Paul Ramsey, The Truth of Value: A Defense of Moral and Literary Judgment 34-35, 91, 92 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1985)]

"Language can on occasion function informatively--but only because it first of all functions interrogatively, imperatively, emotionally, and performatively. After all, precisely the driest statement of fact becomes meaningful only in terms of some question which it answers, some need which it fulfills. . . ."

[Cyril Welch, "Speaking and Bespeaking," in James M. Edie (ed.), New Essays in Phenomenology: Studies in the Philosophy of Experience 72-82, at 81 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969)]

"Through silence, the status quo is more likely to remain secure."

[Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)]

"There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "this...this..."; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud with subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other person or communion with the cosmos."

[Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry 15 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972)]

"Language is more than silence because truth is manifested in language. There is truth in silence, too, but it is not so characteristic of silence as it is of language that truth is present in it. Truth is in silence only in so far as silence participates in the truth that is in the order of being in general. In silence treuth is passive and slumbering, but in language it is wide-aswake; and in language active decisions are made concerning truth and falsehood.

It is truth that makes language clear and firm.... Truth is the scaffolding that gives language an independent foothold over against silence.

[Max Picard, The World of Silence 31, 32 (Washington, D.C.: Regency Gateway, 1988)]

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