Applying interactionist discourse theory to show how we create novel beliefs ""

"Inventive Intercourse: From Rhetorical Conflict to the Ethical Creation of Novel Truth "offers a theory of discursive interaction, illustrating how we can understand human communication without resorting to the notion of language. Using the perspective of interactionist discourse theory, author Stephen Yarbrough investigates how we create novel beliefs, beliefs we could not have inferred from our established beliefs.

The volume considers a central dilemma of post-modern thought: If language is a system of conventions and rules that limit what we can say and think, how can we deliberately produce anything truly novel? While postmodernism concludes that linguistic and conceptual change within our incommensurable worlds is driven by contingency and blind mechanical forces, Yarbrough argues that this view is wrong because the notion that language mediates our perception is wrong.

Beginning with philosopher Donald Davidson's assertion that "there is no such thing as language" in the sense of a system of conventions and rules, Yarbrough develops an interactionist theory of discourse and uses it to revise the major elements of Aristotelian rhetoric to explain how we deliberately invent novel concepts that we come to believe.

Yarbrough suggests that all conceptual change is initiated by a shift in our ethical apperception of elements of a situation and that an ethical change will have emotional consequences. Changes in our emotional responses to things will change the ways we interact with them, he says, and changes in our interaction with things will create new technical relations which we can communicate to others only by altering our habitual shared way of using signs, metaphors, and other tropes.

In analyzing Jonathan Edwards preaching in eighteenth-century colonial America, the authors demonstrate how his rhetoric distinguished between conversion and persuasion. The authors delineate the basic tenets of Puritan theology, place Edwards' noted sermons within an historical framework, and show how his psycho-spiritual ideas have had lasting impact on American literary, religious, and intellectual history. This reference provides a critical analysis, speech texts, chronology, and bibliography. Students and teachers of rhetoric, American history, literature, philosophy, and religion will find this in-depth study of an enigmatic great American orator pertinent for various uses.

The reference defines Edwards' doctrinal stance on key religious issues of the times, describes his methods of preaching and efforts to convert sinners into saints, and assesses his influence in the eighteenth century and later. The volume covers his life, his youth and education, his revival and role in the Great Awakening of religion in America, his church's rejection and his exile. This scholarly study relates his ideas to complex theological roots in European thought, to Christian and Enlightenment discourses, and it points to the enormous effect that he has had on thinking until the twentieth century. Texts of key sermons dealing with central concepts such as divine light, sinners, and true grace are provided.

Aware that categorical thinking imposes restrictions on the ways we communicate, Stephen R. Yarbrough proposes discourse studies as an alternative to rhetoric and philosophy, both of which are structuralistic systems of inquiry. Discourse studies, Yarbrough argues, does not support the idea that languages, cultures, or conceptual schemes in general adequately describe linguistic competence. He asserts that a belief in languages and cultures ""feeds a false dichotomy: either we share the same codes and conventions, achieving community but risking exclusivism, or we proliferate differences, achieving choice and freedom but risking fragmentation and incoherence."" Discourse studies, he demonstrates, works around this dichotomy. Drawing on philosopher Donald Davidson, Yarbrough establishes the idea that community can be a consequence of communication but is not a prerequisite for it. By disassociating our thinking from conceptual schemes, we can avoid the problems that come with believing in an abstract structure that predates any utterance. Yarbrough also draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism to define how utterances operate in life and to show how utterances are involved with power and how power relates to understanding. His discussion of Michel Meyer's problematology treats the questions implied by a statement as the meaning of the statement. Yarbrough introduces readers to a credible theoretical framework for focusing on discourse rather than on conceptual schemes that surround it and to the potential advantages of our using this approach in daily life.