Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity: Understanding Contested Domains
How partisans engaged in debates over hot-button issues can examine the basis and nature of their knowledge claims, and recognize their duty to inquire.
Image: “Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost” (1796) by Robert Thew (1758 – 1802), (public domain).
(The following is adapted from the Afterword to my 2023 book, The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy: Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity, from Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
While it addresses the long-standing doubt and controversy over the authorship of the Shakespeare works, my 2023 book The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy: Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity, actually isn’t so much about who Shakespeare was or wasn’t. Instead—and based on a decade of interdisciplinary research—it considers and compares according to external criteria the knowledge claims in support of the two major authorial candidates, William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. My purpose was not to determine which claim is true, but rather which is the more truth-conducive according to leading theories of knowledge, justification and truth. A central concern in my analysis was the “duty to inquire” as articulated by William Kingdon Clifford in his famous 1877 essay “The Ethics of Belief,” and epitomized by the character of Hamlet who, when told by the ghost of his father that his uncle is guilty of murder, does not take the ghost at his word, but seeks to test the accusation before taking any action. Hamlet recognizes his duty to inquire, unlike some of Shakespeare’s other tragic figures like Othello or Lear.
The book is, therefore, something of a case study in epistemology, belief ethics, and rhetoric regarding controversial topics. While I undertook this analysis with a specific and topical purpose, I do believe the approach I forged in this book may also be usefully applied to other ongoing controversies and conflicts regarding entrenched and contested beliefs.
I put it to the reader that no philosophically-literate society would tolerate its leading cultural institutions—in particular, those of higher learning—defining a matter of civilizational importance according to a thought-terminating cliché or tautology about which there can be no debate (“Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare”), and then permitting the condemnation of anyone who raises questions or objections. Academic taboos should be extremely rare, and justified only on appropriate moral and ethical grounds (e.g., invasive experiments on non-consenting human subjects), and not purely ideological ones.
To begin with, making philosophy and rhetoric required courses at the undergraduate level would be an excellent start in remedying this intellectual climate; for surely if there were a more widely-shared understanding of how we come to know what we think we know—and more importantly the limits of our certainty—then perhaps many of the controversies that currently keep us so divided might be shorn of their extreme rhetoric and tribalism, thus allowing us to engage with each other respectfully as fellow human beings, and not as enemies. As I set out in the pages of this book, I propose that controversies concerning persistent and dogmatic beliefs should be examined according to the following criteria and questions:
Nature of the Belief: Is the belief the result of truth-conducive process, reproducible by any inquirer, or instead the result of motivated reasoning? Do partisans on one side hold their views with righteous conviction, or do they recognize their duty to inquire?
View of Reality: What are the underlying assumptions of this belief regarding how the world works? Does its undue idealism create friction when confronted with intersubjectively-experienced reality (i.e., Eric Voegelin’s First Reality)? Does the belief presume itself to be immune from external criteria?
Knowledge, justification and truth: Is the orthodoxy in question based on more than “justified true belief”? Does it reflect an interpretive understanding of the true nature of the evidence? Does it demonstrate continuity (or causality) between events and knowledge of those events? Is it based on a correspondence with known facts, or just a coherent belief system? Can framing truth claims pragmatically rather than metaphysically work to de-escalate tensions and soothe passions?
Ideology: Does the belief and its assertion disguise some additional, underlying belief and value structures? Can a focus on this foundation help clarify the work that the belief does in respect to knowledge production and discourse?
Rhetoric: Are key terms being understood and employed by partisans in completely different ways, with incommensurate meanings, so that people are talking past each other? Does the belief rely on mere assertion or is it supported by evidence? Are arguments dominated by logos (logic) or appeals to ethos (authority) and pathos (emotion)? Are opponents subject to ad hominem attacks, instead of critiques of the substance of their arguments? How might these rhetorical tools be identified and disarmed? How resilient would the dominant belief be in the absence of this rhetoric?
Identity and shifting the paradigm: Is the belief central to individual and group identities? Are people on one side holding their identities more “tightly” than the other? What effect does this opposing minority view have on individuals and group identities? Does the new paradigm help resolve problems in a way that was not possible before? How can identities on all sides be held more lightly?
(For more about the substance of the arguments and theories in the book, see my 2024 Heterodox Libraries Spring Symposium presentation, “Foreclosed Inquiry and Intellectual Virtues in the Shakespeare Authorship Debate.”)