Response to Lyne, Hariman, and Greene.

• Author: Scott, Robert L.
• Position: In this issue, pp 3, 10 and 19, respectively - Special Issue: The Epistemic View, Thirty Years Later

My impulse is to say that these three can and have spoken quite well for themselves. They leave me with nothing to say, that is, nothing that I have not said already. On the lines of thought that occurred to them, they have expressed themselves cogently. I am happy that the conversation is continuing. We are far from 1967.

In particular I have nothing to say to Greene. Well, perhaps only that I have learned a great deal about myself from having read his essay. Both in terms of what went into and what has come out of my effort published in 1967, I would like to think that Greene is correct. I find in myself no impulse to correct him. I am grateful for his care in reading some essays that I have written since and finding some relevance.

John Lyne, it seems to me, has suggested quite rightly that we need to re-focus on the reality of argument - the phrase is mine and may not be one of which Lyne would approve. I believe that over the years I have made comments quite salient to Lyne's insistence, and below, please excuse the self-advertising, I shall list several essays. Nonetheless, Lyne's essential point, as I see it, is well taken.

I often describe myself as a naive realist and add that I think most people are. That is to say, I am convinced that there is a hard world out there that I cannot wish away and that often resists my wishful efforts. I also have a strong sense of myself as an agent, my agency being principally in the making of my world - my world although I seek assiduously to understand others and to share worlds with them.

Lyne leads me to affirm that although we may reject any grounding as ultimate, we do need to ground ourselves or we shall have no sense of the world and thus our arguing will be vapid. Frankly I do find uncomfortably often what seems to me to be a mindless passivity in accepting the authority of science. This passive, archaic attitude pops up in a multitude of benign guises on campus as well as in the media, but we have railed quite enough at "scientism." It is time we moved on.

Those among us who are engaged in exploring "the rhetoric of science" are not apt to show us the face of "reality per se," in a phrase an old sparring partner of mine seems to like, but they may well be helpful in showing us much more clearly how rhetoric is an active force among people, the worlds we make, and the hard realities of our living quarters.

I remain convinced that though there is hard reality that has preceded any moments I...