The utterance and its relation to belief

I spent a lot of time watching these nomination speeches and votes in the House and found none of the speeches particularly compelling or interesting from the perspective of a sophist.

There’s not a lot to teach here, but one comment that Kevin McCarthy said after vote six really caught my attention:

“We have 90% of the votes,” McCarthy added. “I’ve never seen a body where 10% is going to control the 90%. It just doesn’t happen that way.”

This is such an incredibly wrong argument, and like all incredibly wrong arguments, it depends on the context to find it oh so wrong. Sophistry is the art of engaging argumentation and reason from the perspectives of the situation, the audience, and what counts as reason in the moment. Reason, often touted as a safe harbor, often depends on the wind and waves, and can offer varying degrees of safety. To be sure we are in a good place, we need a large resource of questions to pursue when we encounter claims.

Some would argue that the Republican party supports this idea as part of their party platform – that only the wealthy should control what happens to the rest of the population. Or that the moral and religious views of a minority of interpreters should govern what people can or cannot do with their lives and bodies.

We could also say that the military is a body like this, and without much controversy at all compared to the previous paragraph. This is how it should be – the officers should say what the soldiers should do, and they should do it.

This is also very much like where I work, a university, where the vast majority of people there have no say about what courses they need or have to take, and a small minority of folks at the university tell them what they need.

But McCarthy is deploying this very strange argument in the context of democracy and voting. Although the House of Representatives is not really a democracy, per se – there are all kinds of previous restrictions on what can be argued there, brought up, and who can participate – the sense that the House is a place for open debate and argument and that the majority of votes should win after an issue is handled – resonates well with his audience that he’s trying to reach.

It just makes sense that 90% should overrule the 10% doesn’t it?

But where does that sense-making come from? I believe it comes from the context. There are many contexts where one wouldn’t want to deploy this argument at all.

When we see this sort of argument deployed, it’s multilayered to be sure. Who is in control? Who should be in control? What’s the support and evidence behind this claim? All these questions are very important ones to start with to engage what McCarthy said.

However what is often left out of such analysis is that the context of where and when he said it – what Kenneth Burke referred to in his theory of human motives as “scene” – overdetermines how these other questions can be asked. It also leaves out a very important line of questioning: Does McCarthy understand the scene he’s referring to?

Is the House of Representatives an open democracy? Is majority rule the way of the United States? Is that the way of a healthy deliberative body? What about the context, situation, and reasons why holdouts are holding out? These questions are important starters not only for engaging what he said, but the ideology behind it. His very conceptions as to how democracy should work are on the table after one starts to chase these questions.

Although no closer to determining if he will become Speaker, these sophistic modes of engagement with a statement open up a much more important line of reasoning: What are the appropriate conceptions of democracy, and does this candidate adhere to them? If not, is it close enough to the ideal for us to compromise our beliefs and values to support him?

Without detailed contextual lines of questioning, democratic governance becomes impossible, or at least difficult. Without context, one exists only in strict ideology where there is truth and fiction. And no compromise is possible. Without that, there is no chance for shared governance.