Argumentum ad hominem in the science of race.

• Author: Jackson, Jr., John P.
• Position: Essay

Rhetoric and argumentation have no shortage of abstract categories. Aristotle gave us ethos, pathos, and logos as modes of appeal, and deliberative, epideictic, and forensic speech types. Stephen Toulmin (1958) gave us the components of an argument and the concept of argument fields. G. Thomas Goodnight (1982) gave us spheres of argument. The Amsterdam school gave us types of discussions (Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002). Informal logicians gave us types of dialogues (Walton, 1995). More recently, Goodnight (1991, 2005) has called for studies of controversy, particularly regarding science and technology. At one point, he suggests that, given their prevalence in our culture and their multiple forms, scientific controversies might be "singularities" that refuse organization into larger categories of analysis (Goodnight, 2005, p. 27). Yet, he seems to resist this conclusion to the degree that he offers guidelines for theorizing science and technology controversies (see Ceccarelli, 2005).

Goodnight's recent call is reiterative. His pioneering essay on the personal, technical, and public spheres (Goodnight, 1982) has animated scholarship for more than 20 years. Much of this research has treated the technical and public spheres as separate, with the public sphere in constant danger of being "colonized" by the technical sphere, following, as Goodnight did, the metaphor established by Habermas (1981/1984). Often, portrayals of the technocrat's attack on the public have echoed the image of the hostile colonizer. Biesecker (1989) noted that Goodnight and others "constitute the ... technocrat as the absolutely other who is not only complicitous with but also the immediate benefactor of the displacement of the egalitarian imaginary that is the bedrock of liberal-democratic discourse and practices" (p. 68). While not always invoking this metaphor explicitly, much of the literature has warned of what Thomas Nathan Peters (1991) has termed "technical hegemony," in which matters of legitimate public concern are ceded to technocrats who base their decisions on the sterile rationality of technical argument rather than in genuine democratic participation by interested parties. Zulick and Laffoon (1991) offer a stark portrait of a public numbly succumbing to a state of unreflective domination, not only throwing themselves under the heel of oppressive institutions but chaining themselves to the boot of their oppressor with bonds of false consciousness as the intersubjectively achieved consensus regarding the proper role of society and state is shattered. (p. 250)

Many critics take as their duty Biesecker's (1989) call to "compute strategies aimed at destabilizing lines of technocratic oppression" (pp. 67-68). Goodnight (2005) continues to embrace this metaphor in his recent work on controversy, although he posits that "colonization works both ways" (p. 27) as scientists are drawn into public controversies, bargaining with the public for the freedom to pursue their research agendas. This move resonates with previous studies that have interrogated the boundaries between one sphere and another, showing how the technical and public spheres inform each other (Boyd, 2002; Fabj & Sobnosky, 1995; Hogan, 1991; Keranen, 2005; Rowland, 1986; Wallinger, 1989). Such research emphasizes contestation at the borders of the spheres: What interests scholars is whether forms of argument should be understood as technical or public (or private; see Olson & Goodnight, 1994). As Gordon Mitchell (2003) recently argued: "One normative presupposition of Habermas's colonization thesis is that there exists some proper boundary demarcating where the sphere of technical reasoning ends and the realm of communicative rationality begins" (pp. 1-2).

Although not obvious at first, informal logicians offer a similar program of study. One of the most prolific researchers in this tradition has been Douglas Walton (1995), who views argumentation through the lens of dialogic exchange rather than logical form. This orientation is evident in his pragmatic approach to fallacies, which is

based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. This framework is crucial in determining whether the argumentation used is correct or incorrect, in relation to the given details of a specific case. (p. xi)

According to this pragmatic theory, a fallacy is not simply an error in reasoning but

(1) an argument ... (2) that falls short of some standard of correctness; (3) as used in a context of dialogue; (4) but that, for various reasons, has a semblance of correctness about it in context; and (5) poses a serious obstacle to the realization of the goal of a dialogue. (p. 255)

Walton's (1995) approach requires that arguments be situated in the proper kind of dialogue in order to be evaluated accurately and fairly: "often, with fallacies and other critical errors, the underlying problem is a subtle, undetected shift from one type of dialogue to another" (p. 99). Like research that investigates the boundaries among spheres, the idea here is that the boundaries among kinds of dialogue are keys to understanding and judging argumentative disputes. Indeed, two of Walton's dialogue types--inquiry and deliberation-appear to map rather directly onto the technical and public spheres, respectively, a point that I will explore (and critique) more fully below.

A possible difference between these two literatures is that dialogue types are specified a priori in order to enable critical judgment about illicit shifts among them while argument spheres emerge and are delimited in the course of controversies. On this reading, the point of denoting public, technical, and private spheres is to observe how the boundaries among them are contested and constructed. Rather than a priori analytic categories, argument spheres are historically contingent productions with permeable boundaries.

In practice, however, the distinction between an a priori analytic category (as in Walton) and an emergent achievement (as in Goodnight) means little. That a sphere is historically contingent, dare I say socially constructed, does not mean that arguers or critics don't treat it as fixed. Many social constructivists argue that all of our categories of experience are historically contingent. Yet, ironically, we do--indeed, we must--treat those categories as objectively real. "Irony about X," writes Ian Hacking (1999),

is the recognition that X is highly contingent, the product of social history and forces, and yet something we cannot, in our present lives, avoid treating as part of the universe in which we interact with other people, the material world, and ourselves. (p. 20)

Most writing on argument spheres is in this ironic mode: After a perfunctory nod to emergence and construction, the critic gets on with the business of sorting arguments into the appropriate argumentative spaces. The consequence of this ironic stance is an abundant literature on the technical sphere's colonization of the public, in which the structure and characteristics of the spheres are used to reach some normative judgment about argumentative practices. As Shawn Batt (2003) recently suggested:

The spheres framework asks if any given discourse is capable of fulfilling its own normative assumptions. Social discourse enacts, at any given historical or critical moment, a certain relational structure among the personal, public, and technical spheres. The critic asks is such an enactment is sustainable and makes judgments of particular communicative practices based on this analysis. (p. 88)

That the framework itself, contingent though it may be, might hinder the critic's ability to make such a normative judgment, is a consideration that seldom arises. Our concepts of argument spheres, controversies, and types of dialogue assume in common that the argumentative action occurs at the boundaries of abstract categories.

Space is the underlying metaphor here. Arguments occur "within" and at the borders "between" (or "among") spheres or dialogues. "The domain of controversy ... widens," encroaching on new territories (Goodnight, 2005, p. 26). These spatial metaphors direct our attention toward the possibility of distinguishing among kinds of argument and reassure us that, although interesting argumentative clashes may occur over boundaries, eventually arguments settle in their proper territories and peace reigns throughout the land, at least until the next border incursion.

A much different picture emerges from a different starting assumption. Study of a controversy may reveal that separating domains of argument is neither possible nor enlightening. Our categories of analysis may in fact hinder our ability to understand a controversy. Argumentation scholars should attend to the particulars of a case, seeking especially a deep understanding of the social context of scientific controversies and avoiding grand theorizing.

To illustrate my position, I will examine the controversy over research into racial differences in intelligence (RDI), financed by the Pioneer Fund, a controversy in which ad hominem arguments play a central role. Following a brief introduction to the controversy, I will discuss our current understanding of argumentum ad hominem, particularly Walton's view of dialectical shifts during the course of an argument. Third, I will locate Walton's approach within some larger issues in argumentation theory, especially as this theory relates to the rhetoric of science. Fourth, I will contend that argument in the human sciences, especially the scientific study of race, is both inquiry and deliberation, in Walton's terms, and I will show how the Pioneer Fund's critics are making a nonfallacious ad hominem argument. Some theoretical implications conclude the study.

THE CONTROVERSY: THE PIONEER FUND

Incorporated in 1937, the Pioneer Fund was...