What if there were no science?

Does anyone feel, after reading the introduction to Enlightenment rhetoric, like you are either on a roller coaster or watching a ping pong match? I mean, yes – there is a lot of movement in one direction: nationalism is driving language from the universal Latin to the particular [national] vernacular, more and more emphasis on the new science of psychology as a way to understand all other fields (including science as much as rhetoric), and of course the growing supremacy of empiricism and science (making, for example, literary examples the best source of “good taste”).

But the issues ornate versus plain style, absolute versus contingent knowledge, and, in general, the whole question of rhetoric’s place in the world (Is rhetoric in or out of society’s good graces? Is it good or bad?)… these questions just keep coming up. And the more I read the history of rhetoric, the more I feel like these questions are never going to resolve. Maybe that means we ought to resign ourselves to complexity in order to get on the business of life. But, then, heheh – that sounds like a very classical rhetorical view of things!

I liked Campbell’s insight that “the difference between moral and scientific knowledge is a question not of certainty versus probability but of the degree of probability; and the real differences therefore lie only in subject matter” (808). Campbell was partly responding to Hume’s rejection of knowledge based on revelation or even on discourse or community. But this is a great counter-statement to Descartes as well. Descartes wanted to take knowledge (and anything of intellectual value) and base it solely on those few thoughts that we as individuals can come up with that are beyond doubt (e.g., “I think, therefore I am”). Both Hume and Descartes made knowledge very individualistic, but also very presumably universal – because both saw the individual as able to come to universal knowledge through empirical evidence / experience (Hume) or pure and “certain” thoughts (Descartes). Anyway, I like how Campbell comes along and says, “Nope, boys. Can’t have it that way. It’s all on a continuum.”

Giambattista Vico was also a smart guy, too. I like how he came along and said, “Whoa! We can’t be assuming that Descartes’ certainty is the end-all and be-all of education: ‘If the merely probably is left out, what happens to law, ethics, politics, history, and even medicine?’” (800) But, then again – that protest brought up the question in my mind: Was Cartesian-style education ever very likely to take over as a pedagogical model? Did I miss B&H talking about that? Or ?

Oh, and did anyone feel as repulsed as I did by Swift’s characterization of what we might today call personal writing? B&H say that he “pictured modern writers – those who felt that experience along could reveal true knowledge – as spiders spinning filthy webs out of their own guts” (805). Swift sounds a little bit like the David Bartholomae of his time (at least, in Bartholomae’s frustration with personal writing).

Questions for discussion:
I know this may be hard to imagine, but I wonder what would have happened to rhetoric, how might it have worked differently, been viewed differently, by the 17th and 18th centuries, had empirical science never been invented/discovered. There probably wouldn’t be such a big issue with ornate versus plain style or Wilkins’ desire to find a one-to-one correspondence between words and things. But what else might have been different?

What would happen to the concept of literacy and/or the teaching of writing if suddenly we did have a language that was non-symbolic and which had a one-to-one correspondence with things?