Truth cultures and rhetoric cultures

A journey from ancient Greece to the modern newsroom

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
-Dick the Butcher, Henry VI

I

Why do some groups talk incessantly without achieving anything? Why do some conversations detach themselves from facts and drift into fantasy? Why are some institutions effective while others, staffed by equally smart and competent people, are hopelessly ineffective?

There are surely a number of reasons: incentives, context, and structure all play a role. But I want to try to offer an account of the residual: the variation in effectiveness that is accounted for by the way people interact with each other, their norms, and their expectations. In short, I want to offer a cultural explanation for these phenomena.

In this essay, I'll characterize two different cultures: "truth cultures" and "rhetoric cultures." Truth cultures are common in, and best exemplified by, the sciences. Rhetoric cultures are more familiar in the law. These are two poles on a spectrum. There is no such thing, in my view, as a pure truth culture or a true rhetoric culture. Within any given group of people, conversations can themselves oscillate between exhibiting characteristics of one culture or the other. This essay, as you'll see, leans toward the rhetoric side of the spectrum.

I think this is a broadly applicable way of looking at the world. But in order to make my case, I'll need to start at the beginning.

II

Until the Scientific Revolution¹, credible knowledge of the natural world was hard to come by. Scholars relied on long-dead Aristotle as the final word on the universe's workings. There was no scientific method. The word "experiment" did not exist except as a synonym for "experience." Only since Columbus had the West begun to accustom itself to the idea of discovery; progress was an alien concept. Islamic science, once the light of civilization, had stagnated. Chinese innovation, which had flourished under the 13th-century Song dynasty, had not been maintained. At the start of the modern age, the toolbox of science was empty, and had been for centuries.

The courts, by contrast, were thriving. Thieves had always stolen chickens; men had always killed one another in drunken brawls. Authorities existed to punish and deter these crimes, but finding and judging the guilty was a challenge. Sometimes witnesses disagreed about which local malcontent had been seen fleeing with fowl in hand; sometimes there was only a muddy bootprint to attest to a murderer's presence.

People knew that this kind of information, uncertain though it was, was useful for judging the guilt of the accused. But it wasn't the same as the kind of knowledge that they used to make everyday decisions: water leaking from a thatched roof told reliably of rain; an eviscerated calf told of wolves.

To make uncertain information usable so that the guilty could be punished, medieval man had to reclaim old concepts and manufacture new ones. Among the useful concepts generated by the courts were those of "evidence", "proof", and the "fact": words to describe gradations of knowledge that, in their specificity, aided decision-making in an uncertain world. The "fact" was derived from the Roman factum, the crime or deed that a court has convened to address. In English law, it was the jury's job to decide questions of fact: a defendant was either guilty or not, but all types of evidence were acceptable, and their interpretation was up to the jury. Elsewhere, bits of evidence added up almost arithmetically: in Scotland, gossip constituted 1/72 of a proof. In Continental Europe, a system inherited from the Romans held that two eyewitnesses were sufficient for sentencing in capital causes.

Faced with uncertainties of their own, the first modern scientists co-opted the language—and the concepts—of the courts. Evidence was no longer just about the testimony of witnesses in court; now it described the testimony of nature itself. By the end of the seventeenth century, "facts" were everywhere in the infant literature of science. Though early scientists were reluctant to use the word "evidence" (it belonged to the courts), they needed the concept in order to confront the reality that scientific knowledge, like eyewitness evidence, can always be overturned by more or better data.

In a world without reliable ways of testing hypotheses—without even a stable concept of a hypothesis—science was as much a rhetorical endeavor as anything else. So fact, proof, and evidence entered the vernacular of science from the courtroom, the domain of the rhetoricians.

III

In the 5th century BCE, former exiles flooded back into newly democratic Syracuse to reclaim property that had been expropriated under the previous regime. Without written evidence of ownership, the returnees were forced to take to the courts to argue their claims. Offered the opportunity to present their cases to a jury, they discovered that the ability to persuade effectively was all that stood between them and their former homes and farms. The claimants sought the help of experts—the most skilled orators from Sicily and beyond—and classical rhetoric was born.

Within a century, Greece was awash in so-called "sophists", itinerant philosophers with expertise in a particular subject who—for a fee—employed the arts of rhetoric and taught them to well-heeled youth. Classical rhetoricians recognized the value of a well-structured logical argument, but also emphasized the importance of other factors bearing on successful oratory: the character, familiarity, or trustworthiness of a speaker; the tailoring of a message to its audience; the physical context in which the argument is delivered. They developed techniques for encsorceling audiences with their use of language: anaphora, the emphatic repetition of words at the beginning of clauses; chiasmus, the reversal of grammatical structures to underline a point; isocolon, the use of parallel language to communicate parallel meanings.

By the time of Plato, however, the sophists had fallen under suspicion. To Plato, sophists were mercenaries who made their living from deception, not philosophers who nobly sought wisdom. Rhetoric, in the eyes of Plato and his student Aristotle, was too often used to obscure poor reasoning. Fallacy was smuggled under the cover of linguistic flourishes. Truth was an afterthought. This is how we get the modern meaning of the word "sophistry": the use of fallacious arguments with the intent to deceive.

IV

The dark arts of rhetoric are still fundamental for trial lawyers. The most successful ones don't diagram syllogisms for the jury; instead, they impugn the character of witnesses, rehearse convincing closing statements, and even do a bit of effective theater ("if the glove fits, you must acquit"). The fundamental challenges of the courtroom have not changed significantly for hundreds of years: witnesses are still unreliable; physical evidence is still ambiguous.

Science, however, has diverged. Though argument is fundamental, rhetoric is not. Science adopted the concepts of the legal profession, but abandoned its methods. Why?

Start with the basics: the arrival of new technologies and and methods meant that disagreements could be resolved not by simply arguing but by observing the natural world, making predictions, and seeing if they stuck. The scientific revolution coincided with a revolution, of sorts, in manufacturing. The telescope arrived in 1608, the microscope in 1625. The air pump, fundamental for early chemistry, arrived in 1649.

The new tools made it possible to decisely resolve debates on matters of fact. Democritus, an atomist of the 5th century BC, reasoned from first principles that the universe was composed of infinitesimal building blocks. Parmenides, a monist, opposed him. They argued in text, from first principles. Their debate was insoluble for two thousand years. But precision balances became available in the 18th century, leading to Antoine Lavoisier's experiments and then — directly — to John Dalton's atomic theory.

Newton's calculus appeared in 1687, for the first time allowing natural laws to be mathematized to a greater extent than ever before. Mathematization allowed quantified prediction, and with it the the ability to reject theories that made incorrect predictions. The printing press enabled this knowledge to diffuse widely, and allowed scientists across Europe to propagate, attack, test, iterate, develop, and ultimately improve scientific knowledge.

These developments encouraged the development of a unique scientific culture (the so-called Mertonian norms) that encouraged the sharing of knowledge, a commitment to objectivity, widespread cooperation, and relentless skepticism. This culture is encapsulated well (though not completely) in what the philosopher Michael Strevens has called the "iron rule of science": like lawyers, and indeed like anyone else, scientists can believe whatever they want, for whatever reasons — but they must argue in strictly empirical terms. Like lawyers, they make their case. But they must make it with facts alone.

V

Idealized scientific norms are the purest example of what I call a "truth culture": a community of practice whose members share a set of norms, processes, and assumptions that lead them to a similar understanding of the truth. Members of a truth culture are forced to accept truths simply by applying these norms. Truth can still be mutable and contingent, as it is in science. And disagreements are still possible, because methods and conclusions are always subject to debate. What members of a truth culture share is the idea that, in the ideal case, people adhering to community norms in good faith, correctly applying agreed-upon processes, and sharing certain important assumptions should arrive at similar conclusions.

I contrast this with a "rhetoric culture", in which participants recognize that—and behave as if—there is no reliable, systematic path to truth. Evidence must be synthesized from a dramatic variety of sources, the vast majority of them inconsistent and unreliable. The accumulation of evidence is a strictly mercenary endeavor. Contenders for the mantle of truth must marshall evidence however possible, and then subject it to cruel discipline in the marketplace of ideas. In a rhetoric culture, the most you can hope for is to convince people, and you are encouraged to do so by any means necessary. The existence of a rhetoric culture assumes something like the wisdom of the crowd: error, deception, malfeasance, and sophistry cancel out; on average, we get the truth.

VI

The point, in general, is that different contexts reward very different kinds of behavior. In a truth culture, you advance in achievement and status by being effective at finding the facts or making accurate predictions. In a rhetoric culture, you advance by demolishing the other side's arguments or convincing your audience. The skills called for by each culture are dramatically different. But if you are reared, trained, or conditioned in one culture, it's hard to leave behind.

Outside of the sciences, you find truth cultures in a variety of settings. The best capitalist enterprises have truth cultures, since profits are the ultimate measure of which decisions are right and which are wrong. Rhetoric, in business, is time-wasting. Medicine is a truth culture: opinions that don't keep the patient alive are worthless, and a doctor is never afraid to tell you so. The effective altruism community has a strong truth culture. Athletes and their coaches form a truth culture, since winning and losing allow them to test their ideas.

Needless to say, sports fans have a rhetoric culture, since they're not the ones taking the hits.

Rhetoric cultures, in my view, are much more common. In conversations at conferences or over Thanksgiving dinner, it's rather more common to treat discourse as combat than as a cooperative truth-seeking enterprise. Each such conversation is a microcosm of rhetoric culture. Public intellectuals swim in a rhetoric-cultural pudding, since a surfeit of content means that their statements are never evaluated after the fact. Nonprofits and activist groups often have rhetoric cultures, since they are rarely judged on efficacy, and since they have to compete for scarce foundation funding in at atmosphere in which PR and marketing—rhetoric—are more effective for fundraising than actual impact.

Consider some cases on the margin. Analytic philosophy, which takes its cues from math, is a truth culture. Moral philosophy, which can't do so (yet), is a rhetoric culture. Macroeconomics, which makes grand predictions from limited data, is a rhetoric culture. Development economics, which has the luxury of field experiments, is a truth culture. A young pastor's sermon is an instance of rhetoric culture. His work as a doctoral student in divinity studies is (if it's any good) a work of truth culture.

What kind of behaviors do these cultures generate? Truth cultures encourage participants not just to be skeptical of others' assertions, but to respond positively when their own statements are questioned. Critique is meaningfully distinguished from attack. Authority is earned by accuracy. Even the most obvious claims must be supported by a mountain of evidence.

Rhetoric cultures privilege completeness: if there is a hole in your argument, the entire edifice appears to wobble. This incentivizes deliberation. Authority can be appealed to, but it can also be toppled in a heartbeat. To make a point badly is to provide evidence against it. To make a point well is to support all future arguments by illustrating the strength of your reason. Rhetoric cultures have a clear virtue: as if by magic, they enable an approximation of truth to emerge from a fog of partisanship.

VII

So this is clearly not as simple as "rhetoric culture bad, truth culture good." The most prominent new truth culture, to my eye, is QAnon, a movement which performs a kind of kabuki science: immense attention to detail, ceaseless production of a huge variety of explanatory theories, an interest in causation and a drive to reinterpret anomalous data.

QAnon starts with real facts, such as John Podesta's emails, for instance. But, lacking any consensus mechanism or consistent set of norms for turning those facts into actual knowledge, QAnon devolves into a battle of equally implausible narrative explanations that can only be litigated by purely rhetorical means. The shitposter known as Q planted this seed: his prognostications, such as they were, were arguments from authority. Then he disappeared. The movement has stacked fallacy upon fallacy every since. QAnon is a whole subculture composed of people making a category error: a truth culture, but without the tools to justify it.

This scenario has a horrible mirror image: a rhetoric culture that persists even in the face of tools that would accommodate a truth culture. I'm talking, of course, about politics.

VIII

Politics is the jewel in the crown of rhetoric culture. Throw a stone in the US Senate and there's a roughly 60% chance you'll hit a lawyer. On one level, this makes sense: Congress makes laws. Since making laws is hard technical work, and since there are lots of complicated details involved in writing a good law, you surely want lawyers involved.

In fact, this makes no sense at all. Legislators don't actually write laws themselves; they have staff to do that for them. Elected officials are supposed to evaluate meaningful empirical claims about the world. Will this bill raise or lower the deficit? Will recognizing Taiwan's sovereignty increase the risk of war with China? Is it more dangerous to increase the size of our nuclear arsenal or to decrease it? These are difficult questions studied relentlessly by experts. On some issues—nuclear policy surely among them—these experts are themselves biased, partisan, or otherwise compromised in their neutrality.

This is what makes it so important for legislators to be able to sift through the evidence and evaluate it dispassionately. Their job is to make laws with real consequences in the world, so understanding—actually understanding—what those consequences might be is fundamental to the job. But lawyers are not trained to uncover the truth. Instead, they are educated, encouraged, and ultimately compensated for their ability to argue on behalf of their clients' interests, whatever those interests may be. This, after all, is how lawyers serve society in an adversarial court system— a context in which no "iron rule" can apply, because the facts themselves are so often in dispute.

Public policy, however, is not such a context. We are drowning in facts. In the US, we have raw data about everything from what people buy to how they feel, and we have government agencies devoted to estimating the budgetary effects of policy and encouraging rigorous experimentation in government. We have independent organizations devoted to doing high-quality social science about public policy, and fifty laboratories of democracy in which to test our hypotheses. Public policy targets outcomes about which we have heaps of data.

Interpreting these facts is the domain of social science, a set of disciplines lately plagued by scandal. Bad science is everywhere. But the label of bad science presupposes the existence of good science; it assumes that there are better and worse methods for establishing truth. This assumption is a sufficient condition for a truth culture. Yet politicans persist in treating public policy as a domain not of unknowns but of unknowables.

IX

They're not alone.

Even in the social sciences, there is sometimes confusion about what, exactly, the whole enterprise is about. An important recent paper argues that even sophisticated psychological research falls into a subtle trap: many experiments seem constructed not to assess substantive hypotheses but to illustrate grand claims. The statistical methods used in such research, writes Tal Yarkoni, are "essentially just an elaborate rhetorical ruse used to mathematize people into believing claims they would otherwise find logically unsound."

I often worry that a rhetoric culture persists in journalism, even though two centuries of development have resulted in a robust set of truth-finding norms and methods. After science, contemporary journalism is one of the most robust truth-finding enterprises that exists. This is not just because of explicit procedures like double sourcing, the publishing of corrections, and the careful provision of context. It's also because of the truth culture that developed around—and was, in turn, reinforced by—these norms. This is the culture that led the Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers under the threat of prosecution, that allows The Economist to publish the code behind its election forecasting model, and that propels photographers and poorly paid reporters into war zones, risking their lives to report the facts in conflict after conflict.

Propaganda predates journalism, and the earliest American papers were explicitly aligned with political parties. Newspapers have co-evolved with openly ideological magazines, journals, and rags. So it should not be a surprise that a rhetoric culture exists at all in journalism. What is a surprise is that, despite the incredible success of journalism as a truth-seeking operation, rhetoric culture seems to be gaining ground. In an ideal world, every journalist is a kind of scientist; these days, it seems like more and more journalists see themselves as lawyers.

There are standard explanations for this: the death of the classifieds, the nationalization of politics, the consolidation of the media. In closing, I'll offer part of an alternative explanation.

X

Rhetoric culture is the dominant heritage of the American elite. For all of its talk about STEM and data science and coding boot camps, the real currency of the American educated class is the five-paragraph essay. From an early age, promising American children are drilled in the art of proving their point. They are graded on structure, grammar, and the proper use of MLA style. They are lauded for the novelty of their arguments. They are applauded for their vocabulary. The structure and presentation of the argument is what matters. Its substance—its truth—is beside the point. This, in a single word, is sophistry.

To get ahead, these children need to write essays persuading colleges to let them in; once in the ivory tower, four years of expository writing await them. After college, they will be asked to apply for jobs by arguing their case in a cover letter, and then again in an interview. Once in the workforce, they will be praised or condemned for the persuasive virtue of their e-mails. This is a process that selects for the individuals who have most successfully absorbed the norms of rhetoric culture.

Of course, some individuals have rarified abilities (arithmetic, Japanese, trombone) that obviate the need for rhetorical skills. As journalism has become more and more poorly paid for the aforementioned structural reasons, it has become less and less attractive to these people relative to their other options. Those with nonrhetorical skills don’t go into journalism anymore. So who does?

Why, the rhetoricians, of course.

1. Every single claim I make about the history of science in this post, unless otherwise indicated, I have drawn from The Invention of Science, an incredible recent book by David Wootton. Any errors or misreadings are mine alone.