Object Lesson II: Meaning, Time, and Hindsight

Robert Scott sets out to challenge the notion of truth as “prior and immutable,” qualities which have traditionally afforded humans a foundation upon which to build elaborate arguments about complex issues. This popular metaphor leads one to consider that an unstable “foundation” results in a “shaky” argument, seeming to necessitate an unmoving truth; such understandings are responsible for the demonization of rhetoric throughout human history. Thinkers as far back as Aristotle have noted that, if men make rational decisions based on universal truths, the art of rhetoric can only be “superfluous.” Ultimately, however, “men are not as they ought to be,” and this simple observation becomes the basis for Scott’s notion of rhetoric as epistemic.

Time is the key dimension for truth-making—it plays a crucial role in what Scott terms “cooperative critical inquiry.” He alludes to Toulmin’s “type shift” for emphasizing that all substantial arguments involve a “shift in time.” Only through this shift in time is one able to achieve any degree of certainty, and this sort of certainty only ever manifests after the fact. At this point, we turn to South Park:

Here, the character of Captain Hindsight is used to illustrate a point which John Dewey expresses elegantly: “Certainly nothing can justify or condemn means except results.” The difficulty which arises in human decision making comes from the seemingly irreconcilable dual-nature of truth, which Scott describes as “the demands of the precepts one adheres to and the demands of the circumstances in which one must act.” Since truth does not exist a priori, we are forced to constantly assemble it as our circumstances require; those who stubbornly adhere to immutable truths are able to propagate the illusion that facts can and should be known, such individuals strongly resembling the “superior” men who must lead the “inferior” ones described in the essay. When people use the phrase “hindsight is 20/20,” they are recognizing that, after an event, truths appear to be self-evident. The above clip satirizes those who would ascribe to “inevitable” or “certain” truths; it reveals the absurdity of attempting to apply situational truths as general principles. The dimension of time is integral to all human understanding; as put by Pierre Thevenaz, “Man acts and speaks before he knows. Or better, it is by acting and in action that he is enabled to know.”

We create truth “moment by moment” through our use of language to describe our experiences. In this way rhetoric is a sort of mechanism through which meanings come to be. Since a lone individual’s experiences are incapable of providing a complete understanding of the world, to me, it suggests that decisions which emerge through cooperative critical inquiry have the greatest potential for creating comprehensive truths that will be useful for society.

-Sam Fuller