ABORTION AND THE HALAKHIC CONVERSATION

accept a rule if following it will be satisfactory to the relevant goals and purposes of the legal system."'*

How are those goals and purposes to be identified? And what constitutes an argument"satisfactory" toward their attainment? These questions point to the centrality of rhetoric in law, to its definitive role in the shaping of legal argument. By"rhetoric" I do not mean merely the eloquence or ornamental style with which a message is expressed, although such is the common sense of the term. I refer instead to the more classical understanding whereby rhetoric includes all the means by which a writer or speaker attempts to persuade an audience, to elicit its"adherence" to the rightness of a proposition. In this sense, rhetoric is equivalent to argumentation itself.'” Its province encompasses every intellectual discipline whose discourse does not admit of"proof" in the mathematical or hard-scientific sense. It denotes the methods"by which people who are not credulous form beliefs about matters that cannot be verified by logic or exact observation."'* By this light, the humanities are all"rhetorical disciplines," since demonstrable validity lies beyond the reach of humanistic inquiry. More than that: the contemporary philosophical revolt against what is called"objectivism" or"foundationalism" - the positivistic outlook which holds that truth is discoverable by means of rule-bound scientific method- has produced a growing conviction that all inquiry is at least to some extent rhetorical. That is, what constitutes"fact" or "logic" in any discipline is socially constructed and mediated, the product of a community of researchers which in defining its manner of inquiry determines the kinds of questions asked of the material.” If Thomas Kuhn can argue that even the hard sciences reach their conclusions on the basis of paradigms, conceptual maps of the nature of physical reality whose transformation causes "scientific revolutions,"'® it is no wonder that the social sciences are being stripped of their objectivist pretensions and reconfigured as disciplines resting upon procedures that are in essence interpretive, narrative, and rhetorical rather than"scientific."'”

Legal theoreticians, too, have recently begun to consider the extent to which law ought to be regarded as a literary and interpretive activity as

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