Peter Elbow’s believing game is, I think, one of his most original contributions to our intellectual life. It is a disciplined method designed specifically to counteract the weaknesses that Elbow perceives in the preferred academic method of radical skepticism, which he characterizes as the doubting game. Whereas skepticism requires the extirpation of self-interest, the believing game acknowledges that self-interest is ineradicable, and so, as Elbow explains, “you are given constant practice in trying to get the feel of your own self-interest and to adopt the self-interest of as many other people as possible” (172). Whereas skepticism attempts to remove all effects of “projection” of already held beliefs and practices onto newly encountered material, the believing game treats projection not only as inevitable, but as a valuable intellectual tool, whereby one learns to articulate the new with one’s current mental categories, not distorting the one but enlarging the other. Elbow would like to see both intellectual methods employed in the academy, but only the doubting game still prevails, in spite of all post-modern anti-foundationalism can do to dislodge it. Imagine, then, a hypothetical academic. I flipped a coin to determine his gender. The academic is a highly specialized creature, expert at using reason to solve problems. Logical argument is his trade, and he has been trained to be extremely difficult to convince–indeed, the more difficult, the more rigorous and intellectually respectable he is. He is the master of the doubting game. For the skeptical academic, emotions are comparable to grit interfering with the operation of a delicate machine. They are to be kept out of academic argument to the highest degree possible. Ditto, therefore, those aspects of human experience that tend to give rise to emotions, such as one’s gender, sexual orientation, physical condition, family situation, race, ethnicity, and religion as these are socially constructed. The academic can play the believing game up to a point. He can understand the concept of accepting the fundamental premises of a position and then tracing how logical consequences flow from them. For example, he can temporarily inhabit the discourse of a theoretical position with which he disagrees; indeed, he must have the ability to do so in order to argue against it effectively, as rhetoricians have always known since the ancient Greek Sophists promulgated their dissoi logoi. But what if he is asked to inhabit a position that arouses emotion in him? This is disturbing, by the very fact that emotion of any kind is being aroused– emotion is taboo–but even more so if the emotion is repugnance or fear. Yet the