Primrose Road

In all of the writing classes I teach -- freshman composition, business writing, tech writing, writing from literature -- I make sure early on to address ethos, pathos, and logos, those three musketeers of the rhetorical triangle that composition teachers must learn to love and respect (sometimes). If you're going to write a persuasive argument (especially a 'give-me-money-please' business proposal), you have to carefully consider your audience and present yourself to that audience as knowledgeable -- or as an expert, if that's what your audience wants. The rhetorical triangle illustrates for students the variables involved in constructing an argument.

Many students immediately recognize that the ethos and pathos elements of an argument are variable. (One exception: the student who does the ethos = ethics = morality Sunday School move and uses personal belief to establish credibility, i.e. "I am a person of faith, therefore I believe that abortion/homosexuality/evolution is wrong, therefore you should too.") The most challenging variable in analyzing a rhetorical situation -- not just for them, but for me too, as you'll no doubt see momentarily -- is often the 'logos' element, the words, the stuff the argument is made of.

I read a number of skeptical blogs because of my interest in debunking supernatural beliefs that seem on the surface to be about love and tolerance but are really about self-absorption, narcissism, and making money off the less fortunate or less educated. Skeptical bloggers often argue for the importance of empirical evidence in making decisions related to public policy, education, and medical matters; in these respects, I wholeheartedly agree with them. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because of what Oprah and Jenny McCarthy say need a better understanding of how evidence works. (One cannot blame these parents, however, for being sucked into this pseudoscience. They are simply turning, in desperation, to those who promise them definitive - though wrong - answers as opposed to no answers.) As long as people refuse to accept what we've learned from observation and experimentation in the last 600 years or so, PTAs and fundamentalist organizations will continue to convince school boards to teach mythology as science and history.

At the same time, they sometimes seem to advocate an Enlightenment-style philosophy of "if it can't be observed or measured, it doesn't exist." It's often difficult to talk about or theorize history and literature from this hyper-empiricist point of view. Take, for instance, the following argument from unobservability, presented and challenged in Bill Bryson's recent book Shakespeare: The World As Stage: there is no empirical evidence that Shakespeare owned any books; therefore, Shakespeare did not own any books, Shakespeare was not well-read and could not have written the plays attributed to him. Bryson cleverly responds that there is also no empirical evidence that Shakespeare owned pants. Therefore ...

Now, I (in my persona as "scholar"?) can't prove that Shakespeare owned or wore pants, but I can argue that it's more likely than not that he wore pants. I would have to make this argument via cultural artifacts: paintings of men wearing pants, writings that reference pants, bills that suggest money changed hands in relation to the production of pants, instructions for making pants, etc. As the New Historicists have taught us (I mean, of course, those studying literature and drama from an historical perspective), we can use documents to partially reconstruct a cultural scenario, though we must always acknowledge that we're working only with bits and pieces of the past, and that there will always be multiple readings of the bits and pieces available to us.

I'm not saying empiricism is a bad thing; obviously, it's incredibly useful these days in the sciences, which are being challenged by those who claim to be speaking for God. But it doesn't work as well for literature, and it doesn't serve the same functions. If I argue from twentieth-century philosophy and performance theory and a smattering of tracts, pamphlets, and playtexts that the Early Modern English theatre was profoundly anti-illusionistic in both metatheatrical and signaletic terms, I'm (I would hope) helping students of Early Modern drama better understand what they're working with. If someone then challenges my work with an additional smattering of evidence that theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries was somehow proto-Chekhovian or proto-Strasburgian, I'd be able to accept that work as an alternate (or maybe even more correct, depending on the scenario) theory, in part because our argument wouldn't put anyone's health or well-being in danger.