Stanley Fish is not a Sophist: The Difference between Skeptical and Prudential Versions of Rhetorical Pragmatism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essay argues that no substantial connection exists between Stanley Fish's work and the tradition of sophistic rhetoric. The purpose of this argument is to show that Fish's work undermines and weakens the development of a rhetorical pedagogy that focuses on the role of language in the formation of beliefs. I contend that Fish's book, Doing What Comes Naturally, is actually hostile to most forms of a classical rhetorical education and can only issue from theoretical grounds that misunderstand the rhetorical tradition. Thus this essay seeks to critically examine one of the foremost defenders of rhetoric over the last twenty years by contextualizing his work in classical rhetorical theory. Fish produces a thin account of rhetoric that disassociates the language arts from citizenship in contemporary democracies. Such a move shapes his highly disciplinary and epistemological understanding of the function of higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".