Trained Capacities

Brian Jackson, Gregory Clark

Description

A collection examining Dewey's influence on effective communication in a healthy democratic practice

The essays in this collection, written by sixteen scholars in rhetoric and communications studies, demonstrate American philosopher John Dewey's wide-ranging influence on rhetoric in an intellectual tradition that addresses the national culture's fundamental conflicts between self and society, freedom and responsibility, and individual advancement and the common good. Editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark propose that this influence is at work both in theoretical foundations, such as science, pragmatism, and religion, and in Dewey's debates with other public intellectuals, such as Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Jackson and Clark seek to establish Dewey as an essential source for those engaged in teaching others how to compose timely, appropriate, useful, and eloquent responses to the diverse and often-contentious rhetorical situations that develop in a democratic culture. They contend that there is more at stake than instruction in traditional modes of public discourse because democratic culture encompasses a variety of situations, private or public, civic or professional, where people must cooperate in the work of advancing a common project. What prepares people to intervene constructively in such situations is instruction in those rhetorical practices of democratic interaction that is implicit throughout Dewey's work.

Dewey's writing provides a rich framework on which a distinctly American tradition of a democratic rhetorical practice can be built—a tradition that combines the most useful concepts of classical rhetoric with those of modern progressive civic engagement. Jackson and Clark believe Dewey's practice takes rhetoric beyond the traditional emphasis on political democracy to provide connections to rich veins of American thought such as individualism, liberalism, progressive education, collectivism, pragmatism, and postindustrial science and communication. They frame Dewey's voluminous work as constituting a modern expression of continuing education for the "trained capacities" required to participate in democratic culture. For Dewey human potential is best realized in the free flow of artful communication among the individuals who together constitute society.

The book concludes with an afterword by Gerard A. Hauser, College Professor of Distinction in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Sujets

• Communication Studies
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Calidad de experiencia
• Sophistication
• Gullibility
• Truth claim
• Persuasive writing
• Humanism
• Popular education
• Quality of experience
• Objective test
• Idealization
• The Wisdom of Crowds
• Practical reason
• Critical pedagogy
• Equal opportunity
• Reasonable person
• Self-determination
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Foundationalism
• La Sagesse des foules
• Propaganda
• Reason

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173192
• Langue: English

Extrait

TRAINED CAPACITIES
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice
TRAINED CAPACITIES
Edited by
Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark
Afterword by Gerard A. Hauser
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trained capacities : John Dewey, rhetoric, and democratic practice / edited by
Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark.
pages cm.-(Studies in rhetoric/communication)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-318-5 (hardbound : alk. paper)- ISBN 978-1-61117-319-2 (ebook)
1. Dewey, John, 1859-1952. 2. Rhetoric-Philosophy. 3. Democracy-Philosophy. I . Jackson, Brian, 1932- editor of compilation. II . Clark, Gregory, 1950- editor of compilation.
B 945. D 44 T 58 2014
191- DC 23
2013028736
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: John Dewey and the Rhetoric of Democratic Culture
Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark
PART I
Dewey and Democratic Practice-Science, Pragmatism, Religion
Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric
William Keith and Robert Danisch
John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric
Scott R. Stroud
Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community
Paul Stob
PART II
Dewey and His Interlocutors-Thomas Jefferson, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, James Baldwin
Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War
Jeremy Engels
John Dewey and Jane Addams Debate War
Louise W. Knight
John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a Rhetoric of Education
Keith Gilyard
Walter Lippmann, the Indispensable Opposition
Jean Goodwin
All safety is an illusion : John Dewey, James Baldwin, and the Democratic Practice of Public Critique
Walton Muyumba
PART III
Dewey as Teacher of Rhetoric
Rhetoric and Dewey s Experimental Pedagogy
Nathan Crick
The Art of the Inartistic, in Publics Digital or Otherwise
Brian Jackson, Meridith Reed, and Jeff Swift
Dewey s Progressive Pedagogy for Rhetorical Instruction: Teaching Argument in a Nonfoundational Framework
Donald C. Jones
Afterword: The Possibilities for Dewey amid the Angst of Paradigm Change
Gerard A. Hauser
Contributors
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
In Trained Capacities , editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark have brought together a group of leading rhetorical scholars to consider the contexts of John Dewey s work as it contributes to rhetorical theory, rhetorical practice, and rhetorical education. The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) has long been of interest to teachers of rhetoric and communication. The essays in Trained Capacities explore broad themes of Dewey s reflections on science, religion, pragmatism, war and peace, education, knowledge, theories of the public, and democratic practice.
A key feature of the book is found in essays exploring Dewey as compared with and in conversation with other thinkers on these themes-some of them his contemporaries, some not: Kenneth Burke, William Jennings Bryan, Randolph Bourne, Thomas Jefferson, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, and James Baldwin. The contributors also examine the reception and interpretation of Dewey by his successors and offer a balanced and informative introduction to recent scholarship on the work of John Dewey by rhetorical scholars.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We acknowledge our debt to those who authored the essays in this volume for their interesting and insightful work. We have learned much from them in the process of completing this project.
We also acknowledge the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University and express gratitude for the support and encouragement they have provided as the project moved along. We are grateful to the people at University of South Carolina Press and those involved in the production of this volume whose work has been both essential and encouraging.
Introduction
John Dewey and the Rhetoric of Democratic Culture
Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark
Every once in a while, long-dead and oft-forgotten philosophers rise from their graves and walk their way into public conversations. Take John Dewey, for instance. In the spring of 2010 a group of concerned parents in a school district not far from where we both live gathered to oppose what they thought was a socialist education philosophy, expressed in the mission statement of the school district. They called it a poison agenda, one conceived by none other than John Dewey (Warnock).
Though he may be considered the patron saint of U.S. education, it is not every day-alas-that local school board meetings debate John Dewey s ideas. Even academic interest in Dewey comes and goes. It died out after World War II, rose again in the early 1990s, and then waned again. Once presidential candidate Barack Obama worked in the Senate to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to help a crippled economy, we began to hear strains of that perpetual national debate about the proper role of government in the United States, strains that summon Dewey s key ideas even if his name is not mentioned.
Dewey s post-Obama resurrection has been explained by the conservative political scientist Tiffany Jones Miller, who argues that Dewey did more than anyone to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding (Miller). Unlike the Founding Fathers, who argued for limited government and individual liberty against government encroachment, Dewey did indeed advocate an explicitly positive reading of the concept of freedom-as freedom to rather than freedom from. For him, freedom offers individuals opportunities to develop their own capacities, opportunities that are often provided most reliably by the democratic state. Consequently by asserting that Dewey s work represents a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the American way of living, primarily by means of the positive state, Miller identifies a political ideology that has been contested in the United States since the Progressive Era. Indeed to many-such as those who object to the idea that public schools might be enculturating the young into a social and political democracy, a phrase that used to hang in the halls of the school district offices just north of us-such a positive state looks precisely like the enemy.
But this is not a book about political theory, nor even about democracy. Rather it is a book about the essentially rhetorical way of life-one we are calling here democratic culture -that we believe Dewey imagined in his work. For us, democracy describes the kinds of human interaction that must follow when individuals or groups choose to, or discover that they must, treat each other as equals. This assumption, or presumption, of mutual equality renders interactions within a community of equals necessarily, though often not happily, cooperative. Democracy extends well beyond government systems to include the prior and fundamental work of ensuring that all adults are free to chime in, to join the conversation on how they should arrange their lives together, in the words of the philosopher Paul Woodruff (3). A democratic culture comprises the sum total of the values and attitudes as well as habits and behaviors that enable people to practice what amounts to responsible expression. Such a practice is inherently rhetorical, in the sense of requiring both assertion and response to be accountable to others with whom one is engaged.
Rhetorical practice is the kind of practice that Alasdair MacIntyre described in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory as foundational to community and culture: By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and the goods involved, are systematically extended (187).
Persuasive communication is one of the most essential practices constituting democratic culture-one in which individuals are expected to express themselves constructively within a community and at the same time to judge rigorously the expressions of others on those same constructive criteria. When rhetorical practice enables people to solve particular problems or advance particular projects, they succeed in achieving what MacIntyre would consider external goods, such as material prosperity. But rhetorical practice also establishes, and emerges from, the goods internal to democratic practice, such as the values, attitudes, habits, and behaviors that serve as the normative forces behind practice.
It has become commonplace in rhetorical studies to say that a vibrant, progressive democratic culture-the kind MacIntyre imagined was necessary for achieving excellence -depends on rhetorical engagement by individuals, and by as many individuals as possible. Nearly a century before John Dewey s richest work on democratic culture, Alexis de Tocqueville addressed the engagement problem for American democracy in prescient language: When social conditions are equal, every man is apt to live apart, centered in himself