The Voices of Rhetoric and Politics in Social Epistemology

Abstract

Although Wes Shrum advertised my critics as representing quite distinct points of view, they nevertheless managed to converge on a set of concerns that revolve around the meanings of "rhetoric," "politics," and "multiculturalism" in the project of social epistemology. Either the critics were not chosen correctly or the book under discussion is quite obviously flawed! Rather than make that Hobson's choice, I will address my critics' concerns in a way that I hope will prove illuminating to other normatively oriented theorists in the social sciences who want to take the challenge of postmodernism seriously but who also realize that postmodernism may soon become the orthodoxy, rather than the challenger, in cultural politics.