Rhetoric of Reason, Rhetoric of Passion

This article examines dilemmas of language use and interpretation, both in scholarly and vernacular speech settings, that render instrumental and normative attributions of motives problematic. These problems derive from the ambiguous status of utterances. Morally expressive and instrumental rhetorics, as used by folk actors, each may confer benefits, generate expressive solidarity, or indicate moral ends. Decision heuristics that fail to take this performative complexity into account compromise the methodological adequacy of scholarly depictions of motives and increase the risk of interpretive errors. Theorists of rational choice may discount spoken and written language as a reliable estimator of motives, thereby missing the underlying normative ideals which such rhetorics presuppose, deny, or obscure. Normative theorists may engage in the equally context-denying procedure of taking moral professions at face value, thereby missing the utilities and functions realized by normative talk. To the extent that scholarly inferences about utterances are grounded meta-pragmatically rather than empirically on a case-by-case basis, normative and instrumental accounts of social action risk devolving into rhetorical performances which signal the membership of social scientists in their respective speech communities.