Pornography and Rhetorical Strategies - The Politics of Public Policy

Abstract

The role of rhetoric in social science has become a subject of renewed interest in recent years. Although a general concern with language has been a hallmark of what is often described as the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, an explicit concern with rhetoric and its relationship to social science has, until recently, tended to be under-examined. In some respects this neglect might well reflect a lasting uneasiness as to the relationship between science and rhetoric. To what extent is rhetoric a legitimate part of social analyses? A prevalent claim in contemporary social theory is that all we have are different rhetorical strategies, that there is nothing more than this. This article seeks to challenge this view, arguing that while rhetoric is an inescapable aspect of social analysis it is still important to distinguish between good/bad, better/worse rhetorical strategies. In order to do this I focus upon the rhetorical strategy adopted by a group of writers who have sought to defend the powerful claim that there is a corrupting causal relationship between pornography and its male audience. In so doing I show that there are grounds for evaluating rhetorical strategies in social analyses and, more than this, that it is important that we do so for both the ethical and epistemological status of social science.