Against Method 49

of praxis, or what we might call situated knowledge. The starting points of our reasoning are contingent, rooted in our cultural traditions, the product of“our heritage from, and our conversation with our fellow-humans.”''’ An intellectual discipline, an organized way in which we seek to gain knowledge, is therefore a communal(as opposed to an objectively rational) enterprise. It“is not a body of objective information, or a set of techniques for discovering such information, but a practice; a system of socially constituted modes of argument shared by a community of scholars.”'"! Inquiry, in this view, is more rhetorical than logical, proceeding and succeeding by way of a conversation carried on among practitioners, a persuasive argument addressed to a particular historically and culturally situated audience. The“critique of methodology,” in other words, is much more than the critique of rationality; it is a broad-based effort to identify a different kind of rationality, one that is rooted within communities of interpretation and practice, a rationality that tests its propositions through rhetoric and argument rather than through“a Method claiming neutrality and universality.”''? The goal of inquiry is to prove its propositions through“normal discourse,” the attainment of consensus by way of a conversation among practitioners.“Truth ” is conceived in“intersubjective” rather than in“objective” terms, and it is measured in the extent to which communities of interpretation and practice gather around and give assent to propositions. Is consensus a sufficient guarantee against radical skepticism? It certainly would not suffice for a Descartes or a Kant or the logical positivists. Yet more and more thinkers are coming to the conclusion that its very rootedness within community is the guarantee that inquiry will not degenerate into pure subjectivism or irrationality. When even the so called“hard” sciences, hardly bastions of irrationality, have now been described as communities of practice in which argument and conversation assume a major role in determining truth,""* it would seem that we need not fear that we are standing over the abyss of nihilism.