Rhetoric and Demagoguery by Roberts-Miller Patricia;

Author:Roberts-Miller, Patricia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780809337132
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

If an inconsistency of commitment is challenged by the other party, the party who has been challenged needs to resolve the issue one way or the other. A participant may need to retract commitments. It is taken to be an indicator of rational argumentation in a persuasion dialogue if a participant makes a decision to retract one of a pair of inconsistent propositions she had previously been committed to, once the inconsistency of commitments has been pointed out by the other party. (Witness 167)

Grant did add sources in later editions, and he did make some revisions, but his sources and citations didn’t solve the logical problems, especially not the major ones. He was aware of the criticism, but didn’t respond rhetorically; instead, he tried to get Boas fired. Grant wasn’t engaged in argumentation.

Grant’s rhetoric was oracular, and the important impact of his book on readers was not that he moved them to believe specific claims about races (to which many readers who praised the book didn’t assent) but that he confirmed the perception that their preferred racial hierarchy (about which they didn’t necessarily agree with Grant) was both eschatologically and ontologically grounded. The pleasure of Grant’s book comes not from specific propositions (most of which were incoherent) about the passing of any supposed race, but from his confirmation of a pleasing epistemology, eschatology, and ontology. Thus, like Cleon, Warren, or the Supreme Court justices, all of whom presented themselves as sources of authority because they, unlike their opponents, were submissive to the authority of reality, so Grant models an intellectual authority and submission at one and the same moment.

Positive Responses to Grant

If the argument was so flawed, and rejected by experts in the discipline from which Grant was drawing, why did it have such a positive reception? The positive reception among racialist science is puzzling since, as Spiro says, “almost nothing in The Passing of the Great Race is new” (157); it “is a compendium of the work of other scholars, and almost every paragraph can be directly traced” to other racialist authors (157). Even positive reviewers noted its lack of originality: “The book contains little with which the specialist in all these fields is not already familiar” (Hyde 24). The very positive anonymous review in the Journal of Heredity says that “the book contains little with which specialists are not familiar” (“The Great Race Passes” 34). William Gregory’s review of the second edition says in regard to the first, “No doubt those who were familiar with Ripley’s The Races of Europe, were not altogether unprepared for these conclusions” (135). Others noted that his “theories of race” (Theosophical Quarterly 385) and “conclusions” (Nye) came from elsewhere.15

Yet, even reviewers who noted that the argument was not new also claimed it was. Hyde called it “novel.” H. F. Osborne, in the fawning preface to Passing, says “European history has been written in terms of nationality and of language, but never before in terms of race,” and he describes the argument as “wholly original in treatment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.