Reading Zarefsky.

• Author: Willard, Charles Arthur
• Position: Report

Professor David Zarefsky's contributions to the argumentation discipline cannot be easily summarized. It would be gilding the Lilly to belabor his distinguished standing in our field. He has ample garlands: distinguished scholarship awards and the presidency of the National Communication Association and the Rhetoric Society of America. It would require a substantial treatise to adequately capsulize the content of his numerous books and essays. But perhaps a focus on four facets of Zarefsky's thinking will underscore the considerable rewards for readers who should revisit his work or for those who are encountering it for the first time.

This essay will focus on (1) Zarefsky's call for a theory of presumption and a theory explaining the process of judgment; (2) Zarefsky's call for normal science, as opposed to revolutionary science; and (3) Zarefsky's vision of the evolutionary character of the argumentation discipline. These three ideas scarcely exhaust the possibilities for discussing ideas suggested by Zarefsky's work. But they may suffice to suggest the breadth and depth of his contributions. Finally, perhaps unsurprisingly in an argumentation journal, and de rigeur in an essay about a scholar who has devoted his career to the study of controversy, a criticism is worth entertaining: (4) Zarefsky can be criticized for making public policy argument more rational than it is. Put differently, as a side effect of a scholarly focus, he understates the irrational. This criticism is by no means pro forma. It may strike at heart of what the next generation of argument scholars will make of Zarefsky's work. After sketching his contributions to argumentation, tracing where he has led us, the question arises: Where does he go from here?

THEORIES OF PRESUMPTION AND THE PROCESS OF JUDGMENT

Keynoting the first Alta conference in 1979, Zarefsky emphasized that "we lack clarity or consensus as to the object of our study--what, in brief, is the relationship between argumentation and forensics?" (1980a, p. 21). His answer to that question--or he might have said his prolegomena to an answer--asked his listeners to turn away from a myopic fixation on debate itself. He called instead for taking forensic practices as a starting point for research, with an eye to developing, inter alia, a theory of presumption and a theory explaining the process of judgment in forensic situations. Such work might feed, or even formulate, "a theory of choice under conditions of uncertainty, a philosophy of public action, and a theory of ethics...." (1980a, p. 24).

These were genuinely new ideas. (1) Since the postwar era, the nature of policy debate had been more or less taken-for-granted in the vaguely-articulated sense that forensic practices corresponded in some way to real world policy-making. But as a matter of student demographics, the pedagogical value of forensics resided more in the preparation of law students and political scientists than communication scholars. And though by the time of the first Alta conference, debate had helped attract an astonishing number of important scholars to the communication field, most of them moved to distant sub-specialties. For instance Barnett Pearce, a national champion debater, became an eminent scholar in the field of interpersonal communication. Many scholars of his generation similarly dispersed. This was a boon for the communication discipline but it left argumentation without champions.

The search for theories of presumption and the process of judgment in forensics practices was part of a larger revolution whose origins and chief revolutionaries are harder to identify. The revolution involved a turn away from pedagogy toward mainstream scholarship. "Pedagogy" in the 1960s was code for framing materials exclusively for classroom use. It was a derogatory term in academe, on a par with "vocational," seen as different from and inferior to seeking knowledge for its own sake. In this spirit many research universities studiously avoided anything in their curricula more exotic than public speaking. A number of speech departments were abolished partly on the rationale that their scholarly work was overly pedagogical. Some debate professionals became poor relations in their departments, at best indulged, at worst frozen out of the larger scholarly community.

Not entirely divorced from academic politics was an intellectual turn that proved to have enormous consequences. The matter is by no means clear, but the revolution may have begun with Stephen E. Toulmin's The Uses of Argument (1958) and, published the same year, Chaim Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca's La nouvelle rhetorique, with its juicy and provocative subtitle traite de l'argumentation. As if following up on the idea that the new rhetoric needed to be a treatise on argumentation, Karl R. Wallace (1963) published "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons." The oddity of his title, with its tinge of medieval alchemy, stemmed from the charge that rhetoric had no substance, that is, no subject matter of its own. The instigator of this Original Sin was not Aristotle, but rather an overly robust, which is to say absurd reading of Aristotle's claim that "rhetoric is not bound up with a single definite class of subjects...." (Aristotle, Rhetoric. 1355b7-8). (2) In the academic politics of the day, no subject matter of one's own meant no department of one's own.

But quite apart from politics Wallace's essay was influential. It led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation," the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay for this pragmatic turn was probably Ray Lynn Anderson and C. David Mortensen's (1967) "Logic and Marketplace Argumentation." G. Thomas Goodnight's (1980) theory of conservative and liberal presumptions and his (1982) formulation of the personal, technical, and public spheres were enormously influential. Many other essays could be added here. Indeed a comprehensive bibliographic essay is needed or argumentation will lose its history and keep reinventing the same old wheels. Perhaps it is enough to say that a genuine intellectual revolution turned the communication field away from pedagogy, away from idealized prescription, toward description, empirical studies of actual practices. It was less a Kuhnian revolution than a velvet breakup like Czechoslovakia, for pedagogical writing still thrives.

Zarefsky's turn toward a focus on forensic practices as a source of knowledge about larger theoretical and philosophical questions was of a piece with...