Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

W. Ross Winterowd; Wayne C. Booth

doi:10.2307/356817

College Composition and Communication Feb 1975

Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

W. Ross Winterowd ; Wayne C. Booth

Abstract

I change my What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new philosophy of reasons Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that you cannot reason about and that job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted, and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a befouled rhetorical climate in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of values becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find identity or a self. In casting doubt on doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of systematic assent, Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of good reasons many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These good reasons are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, When should I change my mind?

Journal: College Composition and Communication
Published: 1975-02-01
DOI: 10.2307/356817
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: rhetorical criticism
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Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

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