Kevin Porter's Meaning, Language, and Time is a fine contribution to scholarship, well worth reading, for a number of reasons. It is well worth reading if only because in the fields of rhetoric, communication, and composition, books that explore fundamental concepts and premises—particularly books that put such concepts and premises into historical perspective and into relationships with alternative theories—have become far too rare. But Porter's book is also well worth reading because the concept it explores is arguably the one most fundamental to rhetoric, communication, and composition—the concept of “meaning.”

Forensic, dialectic, or scientific discourse cannot induce the desire to create novel beliefs, but deliberative discourse—a procedure for determining rules for future actions for which the interlocutors as yet have no determined rules—may induce such desire when interlocutors accept what Donald Davidson has called "the rule of charity," the rule that interlocutors must assume that what their counterparts say is mostly true. The need, and therefore the desire, for new belief emerges only once the possibility of resolving the problem using currently held beliefs exhausts and the need to reconceive the original problem presents itself.

Abstract Postmodernism typically questions metaphysical foundations and then assumes that because no common ground beyond linguistic and cultural codes can be discovered, discursive agreement is necessarily contingent. Questioning the efficacy of such codes, causal theories erase the distinction between words and the worlds, and so invent strategies to direct interlocutors’ attention toward causal conditions they can share rather than find codes they already share. A comparison of two proponents of causal meaning, St. Augustine and Donald Davidson, reveals a common set of logical and attitudinal constraints to interpretive understanding that rejects linguistic and cultural incommensurability and therefore inventive contingency.

Abstract: Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, used two different and conflicting rhetorical stiategies in her novel's appeals to end slavery. To elicit sympathy for the slaves, she used persuasion, a process relying upon the perception of a sameness of substance among persons. To induce fear of damnation in Northerners who condoned or passively accepted Southern slavery, she used conversion rhetoric, a process relying upon the conviction that personal identity and value are derived entirely from the moral and social “system” that produces the individual. Because the novel projects Northern and Southern whites as belonging to the same system, and since its persuasive processes, by eliciting sympathy for slaves, bring them into the system, their suffering proves the system's corruption, whlie the Southerners' lack of sympathy proves their difference of substance—their lack of humanity. Since the logic of conversion requires condemning the corrupt self, the novel ultimately prepared Northern readers to condemn Southern whites, even though such condemnation went against Stowe's intentions.