Forms of authority and the real ad verecundiam

Argumentation

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 267-280

  Goodwin, Jean ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Aristotle; Authority: By command; By dignity; By expertise; Cicero; Locke; Rhetoric; Roman rhetoric

Indexed keywords

EID: 54749094425     PISSN: 0920427X     EISSN: 15728374     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007756117287     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. For a review of related speech act verbs, see Jef Verschueren, What People Say They Do With Words (Ablex Publishing, Norwood, 1985).
2. R. S. Peters, 'Authority', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 32 (1958): 207-224.
3. Round up the usual suspects; e.g., Irving M. Copi and Carl Cohen, Introduction to Logic, 9th ed. (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1994), 118-119: 'When we argue that a given conclusion is correct on the ground that an expert authority has come to that judgment, we commit no fallacy. Indeed, such recourse to authority is necessary for most of us on very many matters....The fallacy ad verecundiam arises when the appeal is made to parties having no legitimate claim to authority in the matter at hand.'
4. The Place of Emotion in Argument (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1992), 48-49;
5. A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1995), 279.
6. 'Cognitive' and 'administrative', Patrick Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority (Greenwood Press, Westport, 1983);
7. 'epistemic' and 'executive', Richard T. De George, The Nature and Limits of Authority (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1985);
8. 'epistemic' and 'deontological', Joseph M. Bochenski, Autöritat, Freiheit, Glaube: Sozialphilosophische Studien (Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1988);
9. 'theoretical' and 'practical', Richard Fox, 'Two Kinds of Authority', Philosophy in Context 1 (1972): 32-35;
10. 'an-authority' and 'in-authority', Gary Young, 'Authority', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1974): 563-583;
11. and the distinction made without technical vocabulary by E. D. Watt, Authority (Croom Helm, London, 1982).
12. Thus Fox in 'Two Kinds of Authority', Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge;
13. R. B. Friedman, 'On the Concept of Authority in Political Philosophy', in Authority, ed. Joseph Raz (New York University Press, New York, 1990), 56-91.
14. Thus Josef Bochenski, Autöritat, Freiheit, Glaube, originally proposed in the early 1960's;
15. see also the précis in English, 'On Authority', South African Journal of Philosophy 8 (1989): 61-65. 'Directives' (Weisungen) here are not a class of speech acts but rather what Bochenski calls the 'idealen Gebilden', that is, perhaps, the meanings that the directive speech acts express.
16. 'Rules for Thinking with the Church', No. 13, in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Anthony Mottola (Image Books, Garden City, 1964), 141.
17. Is it significant that Ignatius takes as paradigmatic the power to order belief in a proposition numbered among Aristotle's original sophisms (Soph. Elen. 5, 167a8;
18. Soph. Elen. 6, 168b12)
19. and carried in medieval Obligations texts (C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies (Methuen, London, 1970), 131-132)?
20. It is just this which Ignatius recommends, both in the 'Rules' and in his letter to the Jesuits in Portugal, Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. William J. Young (Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1959), 287-295.
21. Thus Richard De George, The Nature and Limits of Authority, p. 17 and . 4 for 'executive authority', c. 3 for 'the authority of knowledge and competence';
22. see also Young, 'Authority.'
23. A point made by Patrick Nowell-Smith, 'What is Authority?' Philosophic Exchange 2.2 (1976): 3-15. It should be noted that there are likely reasons to believe what knowledgeable people - including experts - say, other than the reason or complex of reasons we call 'authority.'
24. E.g. DeGeorge, The Nature and Limits of Authority, 45. Napoleon and Gandhi are also often mentioned in this context.
25. Thus Peters, 'Authority', 212-213. De George suggests the equally mysterious 'authenticity.'
26. These examples already make apparent some slippage between the paradigmatic dialogue put forward here and the actual practice of authority. At this point in the analysis, the rough sketch should suffice; ultimately, we would want to delineate more precisely who has authority, what the authority must say, and what response is required.
27. Authority which demands a reasonless or 'blind' obedience would seem to be a special case, achievable only by some unusual or 'basic' training - if it is really an authority at all: see Young, 'Authority.' Of course, when we find what the reasons are which constitute authority, it may turn out that they are bad, formally, practically or morally, and thus that authority is in some sense a 'fallacy.'
28. The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1958), c. 3. It seems an interesting feature of the appeal to authority that the reasons made explicit are as a matter of course incomplete. In fact, asking for the missing reason(s) may even be subject to criticism as a failure to follow. For example: one will get into trouble if after being pulled over one continues to inquire into the rationale for the authority of the police. This is not because there is no such rationale, but rather because demanding it is 'talking back.' The appeal to authority thus has the odd property of being necessarily enthymematic (in one sense of that term).
29. J. L. Austin, 'A Plea for Excuses', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57 (1956-1957): 1-30, 5-6.
30. The person who disobeys a command may also be acting imprudently, in that he thereby may be rendering himself subject to punishment. But he can only be subjected to punishment if he was disobedient; so the ascription of imprudence depends upon a prior ascription of disobedience. If, to borrow an example from Nowell-Smith, there were a people who dealt with tax-men just like gunmen, doing what they say only because of the probability of force, then we might want to say that these people recognized no authority of command.
31. The Place of Emotion in Argument 47.
32. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Clarendon, Oxford, 1975), 4.17.19, 686.
33. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. defer no. 6 (1686);
34. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. deference no. 2 (1643).
35. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.23, 1398b.
36. Epistulae ad Familiares ('Fam.') 11.22.1-2;
37. for other requests, see Fam. 13.42.2, 13.55.2, 15.4.16, 15.13.3.
38. Promise: Fam. 5.8.2, 6.5.1;
39. assertion: Fam. 10.6.2, 15.1.4;
40. submission: Fam. 4.11.1.
41. Pro Sulla, 3;
42. Pro Sulla, cf. 80.
43. Pro Balbo, 15, 10.
44. James May, Trials of Character (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988).
45. The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World: 300 B. C.-A. D. 300 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972), 100-101.
46. Impudentia and adrogantia (Philippicae - 'Phil.' 6.6, 5.29);
47. insolentia, superbia (8.21);
48. insolenter (9.7);
49. adrogantia (8.24);
50. impudentissimus (8.25).
51. Also apposite is Cicero's heavy irony in terming Antony's counteroffers to the Senate 'shamefast' (verecundae, 13.37). This incident and its associated vocabulary is not unique: for similar characterizations of Antony's other anti-Senatorial escapades, see Phil. 2.19, 2.99;
52. for the same terms used against another man defying the Senate, see De haruspicium responsis, 1, 30.
53. This last passage is interesting as demonstrating the precision with which Cicero insults. In short order, Cicero calls his enemy shameless for affronting the Senate, mad (furor, 2) for bizarre behavior, an animal (pecus, belva, 5) for stupidity, and accuses him of crime and audacity (scelus, audacia, 4) for upsetting a sacred rite. For similar reactions to disrespect to auctoritates other than the Senate, De domo, 132-133,
54. Post redditum ad Senatus, 12,
55. Pro Sestio, 26,
56. In Pisonem, 64,
57. Phil. 2.102.
58. Brutus 56;
59. paralleled by De haruspicium responsis 22,
60. Pro Sestio 62,
61. Pro Milone 58;
62. for a related instance of exaggerated respect paid authority, see Pro Balbo 11,
63. Pro Sestio 107-108.
64. Virgil, Aeneid 1.148-153,
65. as quoted in May, Trials of Character, 6.
66. Wilfried Nippel, 'Policing Rome', Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 20-29.
67. See generally Marianne Bonnefond-Coudry, Le Sénat de la République romaine: de la guerre d'Hannibal á Auguste (École française de Rome, Rome, 1989).
68. Or, 'a word and a nod;' see e.g. De oratore 1.38,
69. De senectute 61,
70. Pro Fonteio 27.
71. The connection of auctoritas to dignitas is a commonplace of classical scholarship; see e.g. Manfred Fuhrmann, 'Cum dignitate otium', Gymnasium 67 (1960): 481-500, 488;
72. J. Hellegouarc'h, Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la République (Paris: Société d'Édition 'Les Belles Lettres', 1963), 404;
73. Hans Drexler, 'Dignitas,' in Das Staatsdenken der Römer, ed. Richard Klein (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1966), 231-254, 242.
74. I wish to thank the conferees of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, and especially my respondent, Professor Hanns Hohmann, for their vigorous resistance to this work.