Stanley Fish announced in a column this week that he would be leaving his perch as one of The New York Times’ regular columnists. Fish, an academic, was an odd fit at the Times, but was a necessary piece of the op-ed puzzle because his approach is not something we usually get from newspaper columnists. Fish was, as he states here, “typically less interested in taking a stand on a controversial issue than in analyzing the arguments being made by one or more of the parties to the dispute.” Doing so allowed him to cut through much of the noise and help at least some of his readers hone their own arguments and avoid the kinds of fallacies that have become the staple of public debate.
So he took on the public atheists and those calling for an academic boycott of Israel, not because he was a believer or because he wanted to defend the Israeli government, but because he saw the logic of their arguments as flawed and convoluted.
As someone who has been writing newspaper opinion pieces — and then blogging — for 20 years or so, I know there have been columns that I’ve written and opinions that I have held (especially early on) that would have benefited from the Fish approach. And I think that’s why I’ve slowly moved into the kind of criticism that Fish engages in. Part of this has to do with teaching argumentative writing to college students who think the phrase, “it’s my opinion,” justifies every stupid thing that comes into their head, but it also has to do with a larger rhetorical culture that rewards fallacy — Fox News is the home of the ad hominem attack, while MSNBC hosts (mostly Ed Schultz, but sometimes Rachel Maddow) can miss the fallacies built in to the larger rhetorical structures of their arguments because, like Fox, they are so focused on the end game.
But it is not enough, I think, to be right with your ultimate point. Rhetorical structure — the reasoning behind the argument — matters, as do the premises on which an argument is built. And sometimes, you have to call folks out on the form of their arguments — whether it is Bill O’Reilly or the left’s odd embrace of free-market ethos in the aftermath of the Phil Robertson suspension by A&E.
This is what Fish specializes in — and why his brand of rhetorical criticism will be missed. We can only hope that the Times has the foresight to find someone equally as adept at identifying and deconstructing bad arguments. Lord knows that we’re awash in them.
Hank Kalet 