Speaker Series 2025 January 17th

The Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric along with the PhD in Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor invite you to a talk by

Dr. Michael Regier

“Armed Neutrality”

ABSTRACT: Cognitive environments offer a compelling metaphor for understanding and conceptualizing what we know and how what we know influences our interactions. Central to cognitive environments, as they are employed in argumentation and rhetoric, is capturing the variety of pieces of knowledge and beliefs that serve as the background to discourse. It is this notion of creating a “background” which we are interested in exploring here. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, we aim to highlight how the formation of a common discursive context through socio-political narratives can be used to normalize certain ideas, beliefs and attitudes, with this normalization providing a cover of "neutrality" for those ideas, beliefs, and attitudes. Similar to the structure of cognitive environments, the structure of communal narratives in Ricoeur’s work is dialectical, where individuals are affected by shared narratives but also affect and contribute to those communal narratives. Our interest is in highlighting the intersections between Ricoeur’s narrativity and cognitive environments, and how we can use these intersections to investigate both the conflation of normalization and neutrality and how this conflation can be utilized to implicitly support injustices.

Ricoeur’s work on historiography is particularly insightful to this task, revealing how the embeddedness of historical and mythical narratives serves as a socio-political groundwork; these narratives, Ricoeur notes in his ideology critique, have the potential to distort our understanding of justice, lending support to injustices under the guise of their normalization. Absorbing these narratives into our self-narratives places the commitments entailed into the background of our cognitive environment, influencing our determinations of what is and is not acceptable to lend our support to. This renders these commitments "neutral" and to move from this position is to take a political stand. "Neutrality" obscures the innate political dimensions of socio-political narratives and obscures the values that underpin them. This is evident in any number of injustices receiving institutional support and validation: to oppose them is to be perceived to be “taking a side”, whereas uncritical assimilation into one’s cognitive environment is the expectation. We hope to illustrate how this constructed neutrality has a rhetorical foundation, and highlight how such false neutralities can serve to perpetuate political injustice.

 

January 17, 2025

3:00 p.m.

Chrysler Hall North, 1163

All Welcome