Part 1

The torrential rain and wind was, in an understatement, “unusual for this time of year,” an explanation offered to me by a graduate student while I sat waiting for my pants to dry from the torrential storm outside. Thankfully I had listened to my partner and packed my rain jacket even though I thought I wouldn’t need it. The conference was slow to start because of the weather and many people who were supposed to come couldn’t make it on time – or ever – from their flights or trains.

The morning train from The Hague was a welcome respite from the “sideways rain” – as I often called it in the past because it brings up an immediate context for the kind of weather it is; we’ve all experienced it. The announcements from the train conductor needed no translation for me as I saw the faces of my fellow travelers switch from concern to grim acceptance. As a veteran of the NYC transit system I knew exactly what was being said. Arriving at the Leiden train station I was drenched in people this time, slowly milling, eating bananas, cheese on baguette, sipping coffee, and staring with great hope at the red text on the screens.

I’m moved to make this storm and soaking a large metaphor for the conference, but I’m really not sure how to do it. I feel the conference didn’t live up to the storm I had in my mind – interrupting, drenching, and de-centering your own authority and abilities to ‘get around’ – all good things that I believe academic work should do to us when we are listening to the work of our colleagues.

Maybe I’m just over conferences, but I found the 2023 ISSA to be extremely conservative. That’s the word that kept coming up in my mind as I listened to various presentations. Most of the papers were not bad in any sense, just cautious – the kind of academic work that is made to sort of confirm the theories we have or perhaps to confirm that the theories work the way we think they do.

The two keynotes I saw (I skipped out on day three to go to the ICC and check it out) were great examples of this. The first day, Isabella Fairclough presented a keynote that attempted a case-study of what happens when we engage in argument and assume we need a common starting place to do so. Her example was the gender identity ‘debate’ which I put in scare quotes because of the fact, ignored in the keynote, that many think this isn’t an appropriate subject for debate or argument at all. Fairclough seems to think that Karl Popper’s idea of critical rationalism – the idea that we advance in what we know without solid, incontrovertible proof for our beliefs, is something we have to accept in philosophy of argument. This assumption comes with a number of really good ideas – thoughts that we should always engage one another even if we face deep disagreement, we should strive to alter and change the articulation of our position as people push back on it, and that we don’t need to share assumptions before we can start arguing.

From there, the talk became somewhat epidictic in the praise of those who accept the “reality” of sex based gender (organizations like Sex Matters in the UK), and blame of those “militants” who refuse to have discourse with those who take such a position. It then became a critique of the new leftist movement who write popular press books about reason, rationality, and conversation and dismiss common assumptions about gender and politics that a lot of people hold. In her view, these new leftists are not leftists at all because they dismiss the working class as idiots – unable or unwilling to travel internationally seems like one of the claims of these books – and argues that critical rationalism has more in line with traditional leftist thought than any of the new “creative class” thinkers (my term for it in my notes, not hers).

It was a really strange keynote not just for its conservativism, but also for it’s idea of a correct way to argue. The absence of the rhetorical in the talk was really troubling. There was no other position to take in order to engage in critical rationalism other than to accept the ‘reality’ of biological sex. I didn’t think this was controversial for most trans-rights and trans-advocacy groups. And I also wonder why that is the reality that must ground the critical discussion. Why not the reality of violence against non conformists, something that has a much longer historically documented reality than “sex equals gender?” Why must the discussion be focused on that reality rather than some other one?

There was also some rhetorical mistakes made in the presentation of trans advocacy as violent or militant in the words of Fairclough. The evidence for this were signs calling for the murder or harm to those who do not support trans rights (mainly TERFS, if you are familiar with that acronym). She dismisses this as refusal to engage in proper critical rational discourse. However, rhetoric would teach us that these signs are an expression in the context of a protest to get attention and notice – like many other protests – and do not reflect a position or complete attitude at all. It might be rhetorically saavy when those in power, such as governments and scientific organizations are calling for your non-existence to call for theirs in order to shock or surprise audiences into seeing what it means to claim sex and gender equivalency. One groups facts and reality might not be acceptable to those it, either directly or indirectly, claims should not exist.

I think the talk would have been better if it hadn’t been after the truth, something that in argumentation I feel we should be moving away from. Instead, argumentation studies should be looking at how to help others engage in argumentation. This keynote almost did that, but like many academics, there’s little interest in teaching people how to be better, do better, or offer alternatives on how to strive toward some different practices. Instead, we call upon a big theory to show that one side is “doing it wrong.” I wonder if it could be more instructive to take the UK government debate over this, or the Sex Matters discourse and use it to show the value of a critical rationalist approach. But that would mean we have choices in how to speak that we can move between – adaptation – something that philosophy is still hard-pressed to accept.

This talk was not only politically conservative (lots of talk about the problems with the woke university were there beneath the surface) but academically as well. Popper has this idea – here’s how it works – here’s a contemporary situation – here’s how Popper’s theory applies. There really wasn’t anything new here, or anything that really sparked or inspired the audience to rethink their position on argumentation in the world.

By the afternoon the storm had cleared and things were quite nice in Leiden. The keynote was something everyone wanted to chat about here and there, wondering what it was about. Was it a defense of TERFS? What was going on there? I think the rhetorical framing of the talk was missing – it was an investigation into how to argue “the right way” according to critical rationalism. It would have been a lot more insightful with more than one example – not just gender politics – but something else to help show the influence and perhaps resonance of Popper today. But that’s me as a rhetorician thinking and talking. Perhaps this kind of talk is normal and appropriate for philosophy where the rules of how to make valid arguments – even after all this time – are still front and center no matter the context, situation, or stakes of those involved in the argumentation.

In the next post I’ll talk about the other keynote and some of the other papers I heard.