Rhetoric and Engaging with Being


© Jeremy Barris. Informal Logic, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2019), pp. 70–105  

Argumentative Rhetoric and Logical Reasoning 

as Engagement with Being 
 

JEREMY BARRIS 
 
Department of Philosophy 

Marshall University 

Huntington, WV 

barris@marshall.edu 

 
Abstract: When foundational aspects of 

truth are at issue, argumentation that aims to 

establish truth or justified conviction must 

engage with the being, or the irreplaceable 

particularity, of both its audience and the 

arguer. This is what we familiarly refer to as 

who the person is. This engagement with 

being is necessary to establish not only 

contingent personal truth, but also settled 

truth about fundamental aspects of things 

and issues in general. In addition, the 

address of being requires us to suspend our 

familiar conceptual frameworks to allow 

being to emerge in its own terms. Conse-

quently, the rhetorician’s initial aim and 

procedure will be to achieve a genuine 

suspension of conviction and even of the 

appropriate concepts under which to pro-

ceed, and so to produce and inhabit a deep 

confusion. The paper outlines some conse-

quences for argumentation and also the 

structure of the process of working produc-

tively with this fundamental confusion. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Résumé: Cet article montre que, lorsque les 

aspects les plus profonds ou les plus 

fondamentaux de la vérité sont en cause, les 

arguments logiques et la rhétorique visant à 

établir la vérité ou une conviction justifiée 

doivent être en relation avec l’être du 

raisonneur et de son auditoire ou avec la 

particularité irremplaçable du raisonneur et 

de son auditoire, ce que nous appelons dans 

la langue ordinaire, être avec qui la personne 

est. Au-delà de la discussion courante sur la 

rhétorique existentielle, cet article soutient 

que cet engagement avec l’être est nécessaire 

pour établir non seulement la vérité qui 

concerne directement l’être du raisonneur et 

de son auditoire, mais aussi la vérité ou la 

justification des aspects fondamentaux des 

choses et des problèmes en général. De plus, 

cette attention à l'être exige de nous de 

suspendre nos cadres conceptuels bien 

connus, ainsi que ceux de nos destinataires, 

afin de permettre à l'être d'émerger dans ses 

propres termes. En conséquence, 

contrairement à notre conception habituelle 

de l’argumentation, le but et la procédure du 

rhétoricien est de réaliser une suspension 

réelle de la conviction et même des concepts 

appropriés pour procéder, et créer ainsi une 

confusion fondamentale. Cet article décrit 

ensuite certaines conséquences pour la 

rhétorique et le raisonnement, ainsi que la 

structure du processus de travail avec cette 

confusion fondamentale. 

Keywords: argumentation; being; existential rhetoric; confusion; argumentative incapacity  



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1. Introduction 

I shall try to show in this paper that rhetoric that aims to establish 

truth, or that aims even at the more relaxed goal of justified convic-

tion, can and sometimes must not only address its audience’s insights, 

convictions, and emotions but also engage with the being of its mem-

bers and the being of the arguer. By “being” here I mean the irreplace-

able particularity of the participants, what makes each person this 

person and no other: what we refer to in ordinary language as who the 

person is. We have sufficiently clear uses for this ordinary language 

phrase: for example, “This just is not me; I cannot do it,” or “I love 

you for who you are, not for this or that quality you have or this or 

that thing you offer me.” 

As will become clear, the same argument about truth-oriented rhet-

oric also applies to consequentially logical reasoning. It is, however, 

customary in the rhetorical tradition to include consequential logic in 

the field of rhetoric, since it is one of the standard resources on which 

truth-oriented persuasion draws, and for convenience I shall follow 

that tradition here. 

The existential rhetoric literature already considers rhetoric as a re-

lation to, and exercise of, being (for representative examples, see 

Daniel 2016; Hyde 1990; Scott 1964). But beyond the existing 

discussion, I want to show, first, that when the deepest or foundational 

aspects of truth are at issue, engagement with the participants’ being is 

a legitimate and in fact necessary part of attempts to establish not only 

truth that directly concerns or turns on their personal being, but also 

truth or justification about fundamental aspects of things and issues in 

general. Second, the relevance of our personal being does not make all 

truth provisional but contributes to establishing settled truth. Third, I 

want to bring out some peculiarities of being as a subject of address 

and exercise, and to show that because of these peculiarities the rele-

vance of being to rhetoric requires a drastic alteration of our under-

standing of rhetorical aims and of the nature of argumentative prac-

tice. 

In the course of this discussion, I shall argue that all rhetoric really 

relies on truth or truth-oriented justification, so that this address of 

being and with it the modified approach it requires are in fact the most 

fundamental responsibility of rhetoric. 



 

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To show that an engagement with being requires a re-conception of 

rhetorical aims and procedures, I shall argue that in order to engage 

with the audience’s being (I shall come to one’s own being shortly), 

and in fact as part of engaging with it, one first has to establish what 

that being is, and that this means allowing it to emerge in the light of 

its own standards. These standards are not necessarily those of one’s 

own framework or even those of the addressee’s everyday, taken for 

granted conception of her/himself. As a result, one has to aim not at 

producing conviction, but at suspending both one’s own and the ad-

dressee’s taken for granted convictions and other relevant taken for 

granted conceptual resources so that her/his being can emerge free 

from the interference of preconceptions. The rhetorician’s initial aim 

and procedure, then, will be to achieve a genuine suspension of con-

viction and even of the appropriate concepts under which to proceed, 

and so to produce a fundamental confusion for both her/himself and 

the addressee. I shall explore the character of this confusion or inco-

herence and argue that, while it is fundamental and inescapable, it is 

self-resolving. This confusion provides the conditions in which the 

rhetorician and the addressee together can then find ways of establish-

ing and speaking from and to the addressee’s being. 

As this account already implicitly suggests, the emergence of the 

rhetorician’s own being is part of this process: if we aim to engage 

with another’s being, we can only do so through or from our own 

being. We cannot engage with another’s depth if we do so shallowly. 

Importantly, for that matter, the rhetorician and the addressee can be 

the same person. In the contexts of engagement with being, then, 

rhetoric or reasoning is not only an engagement with the addressee’s 

being, but also an engagement of the rhetorician’s being. And as in the 

case of the addressee, the rhetorician’s or reasoner’s taken for granted 

conceptual resources may not be adequate to express her/his own 

being, and s/he will consequently need to aim to suspend them as part 

of argumentative procedure in this connection too. 

In the first section, I shall try to show that rhetoric can and most 

fundamentally must engage with the being of its addressees and prac-

titioners. I shall then argue that this involves a very different concep-

tion of rhetoric and reasoning from the received understanding. I then 

explore some specific consequences for our understanding of the aims, 

practice, and scope of rhetoric and reasoning. Finally, I outline the 



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structure of the process of deep argumentation in the light of the fun-

damental and self-resolving confusion that provides part of that struc-

ture. 

2. Rhetoric as engagement with being 

I will approach the issue of rhetoric as engagement with being via a 

critical reconsideration of some familiar elements of contemporary 

thought about rhetoric’s relation to truth. Against the emphases of 

formal logic, the contemporary revival of scholarly interest in rhetoric 

has insisted on the relevance to argumentation of context, concrete 

circumstances, and effectiveness. This emphasis has led to proposals 

that concepts like truth be replaced with concepts like justification 

(Rorty 1998) or, for another example, acceptance by a universal audi-

ence (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969). I have argued elsewhere, 

however, that while this criticism of formal logic as inadequate in 

these respects is valid and crucial, the relevance of circumstance and 

effectiveness itself depends on a concept of truth and, what is more, 

on truth as involving something of the nature of formal consequence 

(Barris 1996). I shall give a very brief sketch of that argument here, 

and I shall argue that this necessary combination of informally rhetor-

ical and formally consequential elements of argumentation in turn 

allows us to see that and how rhetoric concerned with the truth of 

fundamental issues addresses the being of the addressee. 

First, as the rhetorical revival has shown, there is good reason to 

think that we cannot establish either truth or justified belief if we 

neglect the particular circumstances and audiences in whose context 

we try to establish them (Perelman 1979; Willard 1989). Practically, 

different audiences disagree even about what is self-evident, and this 

makes it very difficult if not impossible to establish which audience—

including ourselves or our own reference groups—is right, and so to 

establish truths that are independent of particular audiences (Perelman 

1979, 49). And theoretically, truths, justifications, and even conse-

quential connections are expressed in culture-specific language 

(Mailloux 1989, e.g., 15). When it comes to meta-reflection on the 

bases for truth and justification themselves, then, there is no neutral 

ground on which to stand, no “given” on which we can rely to adjudi-

cate between the legitimacy of, say, different languages. We do not 



 

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even have such a ground, for that matter, between different symbolic 

and other formalizations within a single language (for example, Ryle 

1960, 123-24).  

On the other hand, however, there is also good reason to think that 

we cannot do without the concept of formally or logically consequen-

tial truth: that is, truth that is in some sense independent of particular 

circumstances and context. If we rely on relevant circumstance and 

aim for effectiveness, we need to do so in ways that successfully 

identify those circumstances and work towards those aims. In other 

words, we need to establish those circumstances and aims themselves 

without sheer arbitrariness, that is, without taking them in ways that 

need have nothing to do with them. This means we need the kind of 

check that would ensure that what we take to be the relevant circum-

stances and what we take to be our aims have something to do with 

the actual circumstances and the aims we are actually carrying out. In 

order to ensure that what we are working with is not completely dis-

connected from those circumstances and aims, this kind of check 

would have to rely on something inherent in or internal to them. In 

other words, it has to rely on something that belongs essentially to the 

reality it deals with, that is part of something like its nature or mean-

ing. This is one kind of what is meant by a formally or logically con-

sequential connection. 

It is therefore necessary to combine the relevance of circumstance 

and effectiveness with that of logical consequence. If we do so, I 

suggest that we get something like what Wittgenstein (1958) means by 

a concept: a meaning that is embodied in and in fact constituted as 

social interactions with the circumstantially contextualized things of 

our world. The concept of a chair, for example, involves a specific 

concept of sitting, unlike, say, always sitting cross-legged on the 

ground or on a low pallet. This concept of sitting, in turn, involves a 

culture in which we interact with others, first to learn how and when 

to sit on a chair, and then in appropriately performing many of the 

activities for whose sake we sit in chairs. These further concepts and 

activities, in turn, are constituted by and as their relations to other, 

also contextualized concepts. In short, meanings are parts of specific 

“language games” that are in turn parts of “forms of life.” We do not 

understand the concept of a chair, then, if we do not understand as 

relevant and know how to perform many socially standard activities in 



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connection with its referent. That is, the activities and their potential 

performance are part of the meaning of the concept. 

As a result, meanings are not fundamentally abstractions from or 

representations of their circumstantially situated referents. Instead, in 

an important sense, meanings, our handling of them in social interac-

tions, and their contextualized referents are parts of each other, or each 

is part of the same thing of which the others are part. Working with 

meanings is, then, inherently in some way also working with the 

reality of the world to which our words refer, or, in other words, with 

being.1 

Since meanings are constituted by and as their relations with other 

meanings, each of these meanings is also internally connected with 

others, which in turn inherently involve working with the world. As I 

have noted, these essential or internal connections between meanings 

and, with them, between world-engaged activities, comprise one kind 

of what is meant by logical connections. In other words, logical con-

nections, like meanings, are already inherent in particular contexts and 

circumstances, or, in general, in being. 

Now, our own particularity is part of the contexts and circumstanc-

es in which we pursue truth or justification. We are, for example, the 

audience for whom the relevant questions and issues have their specif-

ic meanings, and often we are also part of the subject matter of the 

enquiry. And on the basis of what I have argued so far, our particulari-

ty, like the other elements of the relevant contexts, is not just an item 

indifferently juxtaposed to the other items in those contexts but is part 

of the context of social practices and relations which constitutes their 

meanings as the items they are. What we as particular individuals in 

fact do on specific occasions constitutes the practices which partly 

establish the meanings of the items we interact with. As a result, our 

particularity, our individual and social being, is part of the meanings 

or concepts of the realities we explore. That is, the truth about our-

selves as the particular beings we are is logically or conceptually 

                                                 
1 In a different area of concern, Michael Thompson gives a very helpful discussion 

of how certain aspects at least of human life have to be thought of as simultaneously 

both “general” and “actual” (2008, e.g., 158-161). 



 

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connected with the truth of the situations, events, and things into 

which we enquire.2 

That our particularity is internal to the reality and truth of the larger 

situation of which it is part is not only a Wittgensteinian notion. J. L. 

Austin, for example, points out that “descriptions, which are said to be 

true or false . . . are selective and uttered for a purpose. It is essential 

to realize that ‘true’ and ‘false,’ like ‘free’ and ‘unfree,’ do not stand 

for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a 

right and proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these 

circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these 

intentions” (1962, 144). And F. C. S. Schiller, the British pragmatist, 

offers a similar line of argument that “The impetus given to inquiry by 

desires and wishes can hardly be pronounced entirely irrelevant to a 

logic that concerns itself with actual knowing. . . . [W]e find that truth 

and falsity are incidents in cognitive inquiry; and this is far too much 

of a whole to make it . . . possible, to restrict the predicates ‘true’ and 

‘false’ to a single portion of it” (1930, 117).3 

It is true that in many contexts in which we enquire after truth, the 

particularity of our own being is irrelevant to the questions we ask. 

For example, it may be that the particular internal connections we as 

particular persons have with the situation are irrelevant to those that 

come into the specific question we are asking. Or it may be that the 

ways we are internally connected with the situation are the same in all 

of the possible outcomes to the enquiry, and so make no difference 

                                                 
2 This has implications for our rhetorical address of the inanimate world; for exam-

ple, what we often think of as the purely physical world. 
3 See too Bernard Williams, who makes the related point that “the point or point-

lessness of making a given assertion to a given person in a given situation can help 

someone in picking up the content of that assertion. For some purposes, such as the 

theory of deductive inference, the content of assertions can be treated in abstraction 

from their appropriateness, but basically there is no understanding of the one without 

the other” (2002, 48). And C. I. Lewis notes, more generally, “This experience of 

reality exists only because the mind of man takes attitudes and makes interpreta-

tions” (1929, 30). 

 



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(they “divide through”). But there are contexts in which our particu-

larity is relevant to the enquiry.4 

One kind of case is that in which we need to establish the sense 

and/or legitimacy of a conceptual structure in contrast with a very 

different conceptual structure. This can be an entire conceptual system 

or framework, along the lines of what Kuhn (1970) called a paradigm, 

incommensurable with other such paradigms, or it can simply be a 

concept, belonging to a language game whose “rules” or criteria for 

meaning are not those that give the sense of the other concepts with 

which we contrast it. 

We can have this need to establish the sense and/or legitimacy of a 

framework or concept either in coming to understand it (as when we 

acquire a new concept or gain entry into a new framework) or in 

pursuing its legitimacy once we have already understood it (as when 

we explore a concept or framework for coherence or other kinds of 

adequacy, or for its comparative adequacy over another concept or 

framework). In either case, we need to approach or reflect on the 

concept or framework itself, as distinct from the content it frames, and 

this implies a perspective on it from, as it were, outside it, and so in 

contrast to a different possible concept or framework. Without that 

contrast, the conceptual order is not identifiable as a particular concep-

tual order among others but is simply all that we can relevantly con-

ceive, and any attempt to reflect on it simply presupposes it rather 

than being a genuine reflection on it that might grant further insight. 

Since this contrast is precisely between concepts or sense struc-

tures, they do not, by definition, make comparable sense of the same 

things. They are incommensurable with each other. 

Now, first, in this kind of context, where the sense itself of the 

framework or concept is not yet established and is incommensurable 

with our familiar sense structures, the internal relations of our own 

person to the issues that the concept or framework frames cannot be 

ruled out in advance as irrelevant to the objective sense of those is-

sues. In this case, this is true even of relations that our pre-existing 

conceptual structures might demarcate as purely subjective. The struc-

                                                 
4 As Raimond Gaita (2004) says of moral decisions, for example, “if I am deliberat-

ing about what morally to do, then I cannot pass my problem over to anyone else. It 

is non-accidentally and inescapably mine” (103). 



 

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ture of objective sense in this context is unfamiliar, and we simply do 

not know at this point what about our particular circumstances, char-

acteristics, and commitments will turn out to be relevant to it. 

Second, we cannot turn to the content framed by incomparable 

frameworks of this kind to help in coming to understand them or in 

evaluating or deciding between them, because, by definition, this 

content itself has an incompatibly different meaning within each 

framework or conceptual system. The content of one is necessarily not 

applicable to the other. As a result, it may be that the particular nature 

of the decider, as that which inhabits and so is relevant to both frame-

works or concepts, is not only a legitimate resource but is the only 

legitimate resource that can help to establish or evaluate the new sense 

or to make a decision between the two forms of sense. This is a view 

that Henry Johnstone (1978), for example, proposes.5 As I have ar-

gued, this decision on the basis of the particularity of the decider’s self 

is not external to the relevant issues, arbitrarily imposed on them: the 

essential particularity of the decider is conceptually, logically, con-

nected with the content of the issues in either conceptual framework. 

So, for example, in deciding between a current and an emerging, 

incommensurable scientific paradigm, or between a scientific world 

view and a religious one, or between two comprehensive but mutually 

exclusive philosophical perspectives, it makes unforced, conventional 

sense to say that no one can decide for us or provide the conclusive 

materials of the decision for us, and that we have to wait and see 

where we find ourselves standing. This kind of decision is partly a 

matter of finding out what we cannot help but think and what we 

cannot help but be committed to; that is, it is partly a matter of finding 

out something of who we honestly are. 

Because, as I have argued, we are part of the meaning and reality of 

the situation, if we are honest about ourselves, we bring this part of 

that reality and its contribution to sense to the fore. That is, in these 

contexts honesty is central to truth itself and not only to character. 

There is a strong element of incoherence in the proposal that the 

decider inhabits incomparable frameworks or concepts. On the one 

                                                 
5 Johnstone, however, does not argue, as I have done, for the conceptual continuity 

of the deciding self with what it reflects on, but offers a different account of the 

legitimacy of the self’s involvement. 



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hand, the relevant content of the decider’s particularity, like every-

thing else in the situation, is itself framed differently and so means 

something incomparably different in each framework or in each (less 

comprehensively relevant) conceptual structure. In this respect, the 

decider’s relevant being is no better off than any other content to help 

make the decision between the frameworks. On the other hand, how-

ever, it is also true, nonetheless, that the decider is able to inhabit both 

incompatible sets of meanings simultaneously. This is why we can say 

that we have learned a new language, or come to understand a differ-

ent culture, or learned a new concept, without saying that we have 

simply become someone else or that someone else has achieved this 

learning or understanding. 

These considerations together suggest that the decider’s being 

necessarily comes to mean incompatible things while nonetheless 

remaining the same being. (I discuss the legitimacy of this conception 

of “sameness” across incompatible sense frameworks further in sec-

tion 5 below.) Johnstone (1978) argues for the reality of this contra-

diction. A philosopher, by the nature of philosophy, “stands outside 

his own view,” and since, as Johnstone argues, a philosophical view is 

all-embracing (that is, it is the kind of view I discuss in this essay), the 

philosopher is consequently capable of being “both totally immersed 

in his point of view and not totally immersed in it.” This, in turn, is 

possible because, as that capability itself shows, a human self is “a 

being which in its being is what it is not, and is not what it is” (121). 

Johnstone argues that the contradiction can and must be resolved, but 

this resolution consists in a permanent ongoing dialectic of attempted 

resolutions and further contradictions (122-23). 

I suggest, instead, that we need to recognize that the incoherence is 

ineliminable, but that it is not the whole story. 

There is an extensive literature that rejects this idea of simultane-

ously grasping incomparable frameworks altogether, arguing, for 

example, that if we can, without complete incoherence, claim to move 

between “incommensurable” frameworks, then this entails that they 

are not incommensurable in the first place (most influentially, Da-

vidson 1984; Rorty 1991; and, in argumentation theory itself, for 

example, Siegel 2013). There is also, however, an extensive literature 

that defends the possibility of simultaneously grasping genuinely 

incommensurable frameworks (for example, MacIntyre 1988, 374; 



 

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Putnam 1990, 104; Winch 1964, 318; and, in argumentation theory, 

supporting the possibility of such positions, seminally Fogelin 1985; 

Kloster 2018; Zarefsky 2014, chapter 15). MacIntyre, for instance, 

argues that coming to grasp the meanings of another framework or 

language cannot be tied to its having common meanings with our own, 

since we have all learned a first language when we had no language to 

translate its meanings into (1988, 374). 

This second literature, on the other hand, also differs from my own 

view, in that it does not see any incoherence at all in the idea of this 

simultaneous grasp. As I have tried to show, however, this cannot be 

the whole story either, and there are reasons to think that this grasp is 

both possible and yet also involves a necessary element of incoher-

ence. 

In any event, I take the undecided state of the issue of grasping or 

inhabiting incommensurable frameworks in the literature as additional 

warrant at least to explore the possibility of this kind of grasp, and 

with it the possibility that there is some workable degree of coherence 

in the idea that a not unequivocally or straightforwardly divided “self” 

can inhabit and reflect on incompatible frameworks simultaneously. 

In further support of this suggestion of inescapable but non-

catastrophic incoherence, there is also a growing literature defending 

the legitimacy of elements of incoherence or contradiction in both 

formal and informal contexts of thought. This literature argues, inter 

alia, that contradiction need not, as traditionally thought, “explode” 

into undermining the sense of anything else that can then be said (on 

informal contexts, see, again, Johnstone 1978, 45; on formal contexts 

see, for example, Bremer 2005; Priest 2001). 

In the following sections I shall offer an account of my own of the 

character and functioning of the particular type of incoherence or 

contradiction at issue here that, I hope, will show that it is self-limiting 

in a way that makes it logically manageable. 

Returning to my main line of thought, then, in contexts where we 

are assessing or deciding between incomparable conceptual structures, 

the essential particularity of the decider—or addressee, whether an-

other person or ourselves—is the crucial deciding factor. In these 

contexts, the irreplaceable particularity of the decider, including, for 

example, her/his deep personal commitments, consequently needs to 

be addressed in establishing the truth of or justified beliefs about the 



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situation. More precisely, what is truly the case about her/his essential 

particularity or deep personal commitments needs to be addressed. 

This is another way of saying that her/ his true nature, or being, must 

be addressed. 

Because in these contexts conceptual structures or frameworks for 

sense themselves are under scrutiny, it is the foundations for sense—

the sense, as it were, of sense itself—that is at issue. As a result, these 

contexts are also the most fundamental with respect to the underpin-

nings of truth, and so with respect to the concerns and responsibilities 

of any truth- or justification-oriented rhetoric. Further, even rhetoric 

that manipulates the truth or tries to persuade its audience of 

falsehoods must rely on these underpinnings in order truly and 

effectively to be doing what it takes itself to be doing (and in fact even 

to have the concept of genuinely doing, and so to be able to aim 

genuinely to do, what it takes itself to be doing). All argumentative 

rhetoric, then, ultimately depends, even if often very indirectly, on 

rhetoric that addresses the being of the decision-maker or inquirer. 

It is worth noting, too, that this kind of inquiry into the sense of 

conceptual structures and of comprehensive sense frameworks is what 

is distinctive of philosophical inquiry. Philosophical thought, then, 

essentially and immediately consists in the kind of rhetoric that en-

gages with the being of the arguer and the audience, and consequently 

shares the characteristics for which I argue below. 

If we are to address a person’s being, we need to do so in appropri-

ate ways. I shall explore what this kind of address involves in the next 

section. 

3. The nature of a rhetorical engagement with being 

I have argued that the kinds of context in which one addresses the 

being of the participants are those in which the sense of the situation 

and its elements is not yet established. I have also argued that these 

elements include the irreplaceable particularity or being of the partici-

pants. In order to address the participants’ being, then, we first have to 

establish its sense. In other words, the conditions that make it relevant 

for us to address being also make it essentially unclear what it is that 

we are addressing. As a result, since it is the very sense, or most basic 

nature, of this being that is unclear, we are not only not in a position to 



 

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have opinions about it on which we can act in addressing the person, 

but we are not even in a position to know how to proceed in establish-

ing the relevant opinions. 

Further, as I have argued, in becoming aware of a conceptual struc-

ture as a whole, we do so at least implicitly in contrast with a different 

conceptual structure. Since each conceptual structure redefines the 

very meaning of the issues defined by the other, what is said about the 

issues in the terms belonging to one conceptual structure is literally 

either meaningless or on a different topic from what is said about them 

in the terms belonging to the other. This means that in becoming 

aware of a conceptual structure as a whole we are necessarily in a state 

of conceptual confusion, holding two incompatible concepts of the 

“same” thing simultaneously. And since they comprise whatever sense 

we have of the issues at all, we are unable to reject them despite their 

contradictory character. 

As a result, in those contexts where the being of the participants 

becomes relevant to our establishing of truth or justified belief, we do 

not have relevant certainties on whose basis to proceed, either about 

the issues or about the appropriate kinds of procedures themselves. 

We are also fundamentally confused, in addition to being at a loss 

with respect to the sense of the situation, and we are so not simply 

because of our incapacity, but because this incapacity reflects the truth 

of the situation. The sense of the situation is in itself indeterminate 

and confused. As Dewey, for example, argues, “indeterminate situa-

tions . . . are disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, confused, full of conflict-

ing tendencies, obscure, etc. It is the situation that has these traits. We 

are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. . . . The 

notion that in actual existence everything is completely determinate 

has been rendered questionable by the progress of physical science 

itself. Even if it had not been, complete determination would not hold 

of existences as an environment. For nature is an environment only as 

it is involved in interaction with an organism, or self” (1938, 105-

106). 

The procedure for the rhetorician or reasoner which is appropriate 

to this kind of context, then, is to be lost and confused with respect to 

the fundamentals of the situation. That is, she should proceed not by 

asserting her competence or attempting to establish truth or convic-

tion, but by waiting for the sense of the situation to emerge, for it to 



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show, for example, the criteria by which she can judge what the ap-

propriate approaches to it might be. 

How can it help to wait while being at a loss? The state of funda-

mental uncertainty allows the participants’ being to assert itself 

uninterfered with by preconceptions. This uncertainty is not just a 

psychological state, but is the result of having established that the 

sense of the situation itself is unclear and confused. That is, it is a 

carefully achieved recognition of the logical fundamentals of the 

situation, and so genuinely unsettles the relevant preconceptions 

themselves. 

It is true that the participants’ being will be freed from interference 

only with respect to those particular preconceptions. But those are the 

respects in which their being is relevant to the issues with which those 

preconceptions deal, and those are the issues at hand. 

More than this, however, the kind of incoherence that this funda-

mental uncertainty reflects and expresses is self-limiting, in such a 

way that it resolves itself into coherence and clarity.6 It does so, para-

doxically, because it is so comprehensive with respect to relevant 

sense that it undermines its own conditions. In the contexts we are 

discussing, in which we are as it were between incompatible concep-

tual structures or, equivalently, approaching the relevant conceptual 

structures from the outside, we have no established relevant sense to 

rely on, and all relevant sense is in question. This includes the sense of 

incoherence and coherence themselves. After all, even simple contra-

diction does not have a meaning that can be presupposed without 

being established but is given its meaning by further context within a 

broader conceptual structure. This is true even in purely symbolic, 

uninterpreted systems, in which its meaning is established by the 

particular system. In this context, then, where relevant sense has not 

yet been established, the sense of incoherence itself is not yet given, 

and so need not unqualifiedly exclude what we might otherwise un-

derstand as coherence—whose sense in this context is also not yet 

given.  

What is more, in this context where it is the totality of relevant 

sense which is confused or incoherent, the nonsense of incoherence 

                                                 
6 For extended accounts of the sense and legitimacy of the type of self-resolution I 

am about to discuss, see Barris 2003; 2012; 2015a. 



 

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must include some element of sense or coherence. Otherwise, we 

could not identify it as nonsense or incoherence in distinction from 

sense or coherence. In that case, we could not, in this context of con-

sidering all relevant sense, mean anything by calling it incoherence. 

This has the same structure as a liar’s paradox: if it is true, it is 

false, and if it is false, it is true.7 Similarly, a successful reference to 

the incoherence of all relevant sense automatically attributes coher-

ence to it precisely by distinguishing it cleanly from coherent sense. 

And since this is a global reference to all relevant sense, both charac-

terizations apply to it in the same respect, that is, to the same whole of 

relevant sense. As in the case of the liar’s paradox, then, if what is 

referred to here is truly incoherent, it is truly coherent, and if it is truly 

coherent, it is successfully characterizable as truly incoherent. As a 

result, in this kind of context, when we are talking about sense in 

general, and so about every relevant meaning, “incoherence,” precise-

ly as meaning what makes no sense at all, necessarily also partly 

means what does make sense. 

Along the same lines, with respect to the state of confusion, pre-

cisely because a global confusion is nothing but confusion, it must 

also include some element of clarity. Otherwise, it could not be whol-

ly confusion, which requires it to be wholly or clearly distinct from 

clarity. Similarly, again, in using the language of being “outside” 

relevant conceptual structures or frameworks, the very sense of being 

“outside” is, precisely, a given sense, and so is inside the relevant 

sense framework. Consequently, being entirely “outside” sense 

frameworks or conceptual structures itself also means being “inside” 

them. Successfully or correctly meaning “entirely outside a sense 

framework” is meaning something like “being partly outside and 

partly inside a framework.” While we may quarrel with using this 

language at all, it is at least arguable that some equivalent of it is 

necessary. As the debates about simultaneously grasping incommen-

surable frameworks mentioned in the previous section illustrate (at the 

very least because they exist as, arguably, meaningful debates about 

this issue), it is arguable that we can meaningfully talk about reflect-

ing on sense frameworks as a whole, and so in some sense about being 

at a distance from a sense framework as a whole. 

                                                 
7 On the validity of this kind of paradox, see, for example, Sainsbury 1995, chap. 6. 



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In other words, then, in this kind of context, part of what incoher-

ence is is the alternative to itself. It itself necessarily or inherently 

makes room, by its own character, for clarity or sense. And this is also 

true of the confusion that grasps and reflects this incoherence. 

In particular, and crucially, in the self-canceling moment of inco-

herently stepping outside relevant sense and so simultaneously estab-

lishing relevant sense, this incoherence, precisely because it is inco-

herence and so not constrained by the original sense of its framework, 

makes room even for sense that the original sense of its framework 

excludes. That is, because this kind of incoherence has a peculiar self-

undoing character, it can successfully allow the uninterfered-with 

sense of being to emerge. 

Further, with respect to the deciding self discussed in the previous 

section, this element of self-undoing incoherence allows us to con-

ceive how a self can be fundamentally self-contradictory in a way that 

itself makes room for it also to be in some sense fundamentally con-

sistent with itself. 

In these contexts, then, waiting while being at a loss is not just re-

maining static, but consists in the unfolding of a self-resolving pro-

cess, a process both of the objective sense of the situation and of the 

confusion that is the grasp of that sense. And both this sense and this 

confusion are partly constituted by the participants’ irreplaceable 

particularity or being. As a result, the way the participants make sense 

of the issues, including of their own being, occurs partly through and 

as the unfolding process or emergence of their being. 

This means, for example, that the rhetorician or reasoner is no 

longer simply addressing the being of the addressee, but engaging 

with it in the medium and through the exercise of her own being.8 The 

emergence of the sense and consequently the truth of the issues, then, 

is in part an activity of the being of the participants. The contributions 

and relation of their being to the other elements of the situation are 

part of what make the situation’s sense and therefore its reality as the 

situation it is. Its sense emerges with and in part as their being. 

                                                 
8 This is also true of the rhetorician’s relation to all the other elements of the situa-

tion. I mentioned in note 2 above, for example, that this issue of addressing being 

has implications for our address of the non-human, including the physical, world. 

 



 

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As I have argued, the lost confusion that allows this emergence of 

being and with it sense and truth is not simply incapacity but a rigor-

ously achieved grasp of the confused sense of the relevant situation. 

Consequently, as an incapacity, this lost confusion is in fact a making 

sense and a knowing. In this respect, in the context of addressing 

being, the problem is itself already partly the solution: the inability to 

make sense is both already the emergence of sense (in this case the 

sense characterizing a state of confusion) and, as a nontrivial grasp of 

the relevant issue, also the means by which further, resolved sense 

emerges. 

Looking at this in the reverse direction, if one’s goal in the first 

place happens to be to address or establish the addressee’s being, then 

it follows that the appropriate procedure is to go about achieving the 

genuinely and fundamentally lost and confused state in which that 

being can emerge. For example, we may want to make a space in 

which someone can be herself, or we may want simply to 

acknowledge and explore the relevance of her being to the issues at 

hand, as the current existential rhetoric literature generally does. The 

way to do that, in turn, is to achieve a reflection on the conceptual 

structure of the current context as a whole. I suggest that this is the 

procedure that Socrates undertakes in many of Plato’s dialogues. 

It is a goal that is extremely important in its own right: to help, or 

in the interests of justice or love to find ways of not inadvertently 

preventing, someone’s being to emerge. So, for example, someone 

who takes it for granted that people are motivated by conventional 

ambition may consistently fail to take seriously or even to hear the 

self-explanations of someone for whom conventional success is not 

meaningful or even counts as failure. The ambitious person may even 

consistently try to “help” the other person to succeed conventionally 

and sympathize with her when she does not. The problem in this case 

is only partly the would-be helper’s misguided interference in connec-

tion with particular undertakings; it is also and more fundamentally 

that the “helper” is relating to the person as someone she is not. That 

is, the “helper” is dismissing or neglecting the person’s very being and 

so leaving her fundamentally isolated, while bewilderingly appearing 

to confirm that he or she is doing the opposite. As a further result, the 

“helper” is also constantly requiring the person to behave as though 



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this deep unreality were what is real, and so putting constant pressure 

on her sense of reality. 

The recognition of the possibility of this kind of situation, and the 

ability to pursue the kind of procedure that allows one to come to be 

deeply and appropriately baffled by the other person would allow this 

kind of situation to be remedied or perhaps sometimes not to arise. 

Since we do necessarily take our basic ways of making sense for 

granted, and there are often differences in basic ways of making sense, 

such situations do necessarily often arise. 

In this paper I have been concerned more broadly with the rele-

vance of the addressee’s being to rhetoric that aims at truth or justified 

conviction about fundamental aspects of things and issues in general, 

and not only at truth that directly concerns or turns on the rhetorician’s 

and audience’s being. If, however, all truth is underpinned by sense 

which is established in the way I have argued, then it will sometimes 

happen that rhetoric in pursuit of fundamental truths in general too 

will need more than simply to be receptive to the occurrence of this 

state of incapacitated waiting for the being of the persons involved to 

emerge. Rhetoric in pursuit of fundamental general truths will 

sometimes also need to go about actively and directly achieving this 

state in the way I have just discussed. This can be the case at times 

even with rhetoric in pursuit of everyday general truths, when 

circumstances bring the sense of the relevant issues into question. 

So, for example, someone may be unresolved about whether 

abortion is morally right, where, for instance, the sense of “life” is 

unclear and is differently decided by different frameworks both of 

which the person grasps and finds relevant. The person may then need 

to find out what she can honestly live with—who she is in relation to 

this issue—before she can take further steps to make a decision. The 

appropriate procedure will then involve reflection on the relevant 

conceptual structures each as a whole, not in order to yield clarity 

about the issue, but with the aim of actively achieving the recognition 

of confused and incompletely given relevant sense, so that her rele-

vant being can emerge uninterfered with by the pre-given sense of 

these issues in either framework. 

In fact, this kind of reflection is already a familiar procedure in the 

literature on argumentation, though there it is generally understood 

that showing that an argument involves inadequate relevant sense or 



 

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conceptual confusion is already the result or answer, and in fact a 

negative one. One has succeeded in showing that the position that 

produces this result is mistaken or otherwise inadequate (for example, 

van Eemeren 2018, 5, chapter 4; seminally on category mistakes, Ryle 

1960). Here I am proposing that the state of rigorously achieved fail-

ure of sense and conceptual confusion is instead potentially the posi-

tive beginning of reaching the required result or answer. 

Valuing and even aiming at an incapacity to opine or to proceed is 

of course already a very drastic revision of our understanding of the 

methods and goals of rhetoric and reasoning. The achievement of this 

kind of goal involves its own appropriate attitudes, procedures, ca-

pacities, and process. I shall explore these in the next two sections. 

4. Some consequences for the significance, capacities, and practice 

of argumentation 

In the light of these considerations, it is still the aim of truth-oriented 

rhetoric and argumentation in these deep contexts to achieve insight 

and produce conviction, but we now need to re-understand insight and 

belief in these cases, first, as partly activities of our being. For the 

same reasons, the means and procedures by which we achieve insight 

and conviction—that is, argumentation and the insight-enabling re-

sources of rhetoric generally—are also partly activities of our being. 

Second, these insights and resources centrally involve an element and 

phase of confusion and incapacity to opine and proceed, an element 

and phase that resolve themselves by virtue of their own character and 

logic. 

Correspondingly, we therefore need, first, to widen the scope of 

what we understand by both the aim and procedures of rhetoric and 

reasoning to recognize and do justice to their significance as engage-

ments of our being. For example, argumentation in these contexts 

entails a deep, direct responsibility to the fundamental well-being of 

its participants. Second, we need to include in our understanding of 

the appropriate kinds of skills and aptitudes those that are required to 

negotiate the confusion that is central to this engagement of being and 

to give ourselves over to its self-resolving or self-canceling process. 

Further, just as we need to re-understand the nature of insight and 



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belief, we also need to re-understand skill and competence themselves 

to include what we otherwise think of as incapacity. 

With respect to the change in our understanding of the required ap-

titudes and skills, argumentation about deep issues requires our being 

able to see certain kinds of incapacity—for example, failure of fluen-

cy, of sharpness, of quick response, and even of ability to render one’s 

position intelligible—as states whose achievement is to be cultivated 

and respected. We need to be able to see the necessity and value of 

waiting for sense to emerge without being in control of it, and similar-

ly to be able to respect interlocutors in the same state. Further, we 

need to be able to assist interlocutors in that state, not only by helping 

them to emerge from it but by participating in it with them, since in 

these contexts giving ourselves over to this self-resolving confusion is, 

in fact, the way that we ourselves acquire clarity.9 

In the light of the positive role that the failure of available sense 

may play, we also need a larger perspective on the clarity we already 

possess or that we come to acquire. Since what motivates the need for 

this perspective is the relevance of a self-resolving failure of sense, the 

perspective includes paradoxical elements. On the one hand, since in 

these contexts of failure of sense a framework or conceptual structure 

is at issue which is all-encompassing with respect to relevant sense, 

the sense it offers (when this sense is legitimate by its own standards) 

is in fact conclusive: whatever might put it in question is outside the 

limits of relevant sense. On the other hand, however, issues can arise 

that put available sense itself into question, either because their cur-

rent sense conflicts with itself in fundamental ways, or because inter-

locutors with new, enigmatic conceptual resources appear and what is 

incoherently outside of sense may turn out to resolve itself into a new 

kind of coherence. As a result, our formerly comprehensive and so 

conclusive sense may, in these logically anomalous circumstances, 

turn out to be questionable after all. 

With respect to our familiar certainties, then, we need to combine a 

rightly taken for granted conviction with an awareness that, in the 

right circumstances, what is conceivable and what is simply incoher-

ent can shift their boundaries. As Wittgenstein argues, on the one 

                                                 
9 I discuss further aspects of the shift in our understanding of the required aptitudes 

and skills in Barris 2009; 2011; 2015a. 



 

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hand, what is fundamental for us goes deeper than justification, and is 

instead fixed as the basis of justification; but on the other hand, pre-

cisely because those fixities are not based on anything further, as our 

larger context shifts those fixities too may shift and be replaced by 

contrasting fixities (1969, e.g., 15e). At that point of shift itself, it is 

not that our truths turn out to be falsehoods, but that an incoherence 

emerges which does not allow us to know what we mean by those 

truths, either to confirm or to re-evaluate them. As I have argued, 

however, this incoherence does not simply eliminate the meaning of 

those truths, because it is so comprehensive that it cancels its own 

meaning as incoherence and so restores settled sense. This is what 

makes it possible to have a perspective in which we legitimately both 

take our basic forms of sense unqualifiedly for granted and yet are 

aware that circumstances may arise in which they are questionable. 

There are three kinds of case in which this sort of self-canceling 

shift occurs and that our larger perspective needs to be able to make 

sense of: that of reflecting on our own framework to gain a deeper 

understanding of it, that of coming to understand a new framework 

without being committed to it, and that of finding ourselves honestly 

committed to a new framework and no longer to our old one. The 

logic of the self-canceling comprehensive incoherence I have de-

scribed gives us the conceptual resources to make sense of them. 

In the first case, when we reflect on our framework, and so are, as 

it were, in part outside its constraints, our familiar sense is in question 

and we are not in a position to know unequivocally what we mean and 

so to evaluate it one way or the other as true or false. If in that reflec-

tion, however, we come to establish our honest commitment to our 

framework and consequently return to it, the circumstances of shift are 

then no longer relevant, and familiar sense is no longer in question or 

(within the framework that establishes it as sense) even meaningfully 

questionable. We then know what we mean, and our familiar basic 

truths are re-established. And as I noted above, they are then estab-

lished conclusively, where before the reflection they were not estab-

lished at all, but instead were simply taken for granted.  

In the second case, that of coming to understand a new framework 

without being committed to it, the same structure of self-canceling 

incoherence that allows us to move outside the constraints of our 

framework so as to allow our and others’ being to emerge, for the 



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same reasons allows the sense of frameworks different from our own 

to emerge. When that happens, we necessarily establish the other 

framework’s truths as, in the same way as our own, conclusive within 

its own all-embracing context. And these truths, of course, exclude 

our own. But if our familiar order is still the one that we are honestly 

committed to, then even in our understanding of the new framework 

we also simultaneously inhabit our own. Consequently, we are then 

still partly in a context in which conflicting frameworks are both 

relevant and so in which sense is in question. In these kinds of sense-

questioning contexts, our own particularity of being plays a deciding 

role in establishing truth, and in this case, again, we are still honest to 

our own being in maintaining our familiar truths. As a result, the same 

structure of self-resolving incoherence that allowed us to establish the 

sense of the new framework works here too to re-establish our own 

familiar truths as the ones that have meaning for us. And, again, it 

does so conclusively and unequivocally once the resolution is settled, 

since the idea of sense that conflicts with that of our all-embracing 

framework then no longer has meaning. 

In the third case, where the new framework becomes honestly our 

own, its truths become the familiar truths that are now established. But 

the former truths have still not become falsehoods but instead have no 

meaning at all, since we are now in a framework of sense that com-

prehensively excludes the sense made in the old framework. For those 

inhabiting the old framework, its truths are rightly and genuinely still 

truths. Awareness of the role of the self-canceling shifts of meaning 

that occur when the foundations of sense are at issue allows us to 

recognize and situate both of these incompatible states of meaning.10 

Turning now to the issue of engagement with being: this paradoxi-

cal larger perspective that I am proposing on the clarity we already 

have or that we come to achieve concerns those contexts where the 

foundations of sense are at issue and may be subject to argument. As I 

have argued, argumentation in these contexts involves an engagement 

of our and our audience’s being. Living out this larger perspective, 

then, is one expression of a recognition and appreciation of the signif-

icance of deep argumentation as an engagement of being. 

                                                 
10 For further discussion of this larger perspective, see, again, Barris 2012; 2015a. 



 

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This significance is partly that deep argumentation involves a very 

deep responsibility, in that we are dealing not just with this or that 

issue in our lives, but with the very being of our audience and 

ourselves, with the very substance of who we are and of our lives (on 

this aspect of this kind of dialogue, see, for instance, Buber 1970). 

Emmanuel Levinas (1969) and Raimond Gaita (2004), for example, 

both also express this depth of responsibility as one of dealing with 

the absoluteness of the reality of others. They also both argue, howev-

er, that as a result, this responsibility supersedes what ontology or talk 

of being can express. I have argued that while this recognition is a 

matter of ontology, this is ontology conceived as canceling its own 

sense and so the sense of any relativizing questions about it that re-

flection on it might occasion. As a result, I believe this conception 

acknowledges the absoluteness they are trying to be true to when they 

propose that we supersede ontology. 

The significance of deep argumentation as an engagement with be-

ing is also partly, for example, that rhetoric or reasoning in these 

contexts is an activity that, as an emergence of our being, is our be-

coming more fully who we are. Alternatively, it may be a process in 

which, as we acquire wholly new resources of sense, we who are 

entities partly composed of meanings grow, not simply in what we 

have but, again, in what we are. In that case our substance acquires, as 

it were, new organs of sense-making. 

I have described our being as our irreplaceable particularity. Here I 

am suggesting that our essential particularity can develop and trans-

form in the course of its own activity. As Johnstone argues, our being 

consists partly in not being what it is; and as I have argued further, 

this non-self-coincidence departs even from its own character and so 

cancels itself into simply integral selfhood. In this kind of being, then, 

to become more fully what it already is and to grow beyond itself are 

one and the same. That is, one of the peculiarities of our being is that 

it is both state and process at once. 

5. The structure of the process of deep argumentation 

The role of the fundamental incoherence or confusion I have described 

has consequences for the overall structure of the process of argumen-

tation, and we can establish a schematic outline of the structure of that 



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process in the contexts where this confusion occurs. These contexts 

are those of establishing or reflecting on sense, and they occur when 

we approach one conceptual order from the perspective of another, 

incompatible one. This is the situation even if we are simply reflecting 

on our own familiar conceptual order since this reflection implies a 

perspective on the conceptual order partly from outside it, and so, as I 

argued in the second section above, it implies a contrast to at least a 

possible different conceptual order or framework. More directly, since 

the reflection on the framework is partly outside the framework, its 

own sense is to that extent incompatible with that of the framework, 

and it, therefore, amounts to its own “framework under construc-

tion.”11 

This approach to a different conceptual order is not a linear process 

or even a dialectical one. Because in this kind of context the con-

trasting conceptual orders each embrace all relevant sense, they each 

reconstitute, in incompatible ways, what can possibly be meant by 

each other and also by the process itself. That is, there can be no 

ultimate neutral, consistent ground, independent of the frameworks 

and their comprehensive incompatibility, on which the process takes 

place and in whose terms it can be consistently described from start to 

finish. 

Considering this approach to a different conceptual order with 

respect to what the frameworks undergo, the process is one in which, 

                                                 
11 In the case of reflecting on our familiar conceptual framework, the contrasting 

framework may in fact be the familiar framework’s own deep, presuppositional or 

foundational structure. But for it to be the underpinning of the framework as a 

whole, it must nonetheless be in some sense outside the whole of the framework or, 

in other words, it must be in some sense not subject to the constraints of the frame-

work’s sense, and consequently it must belong to a different order of sense. Other-

wise, again, it is not an underpinning of that framework as a whole, but simply an 

internal part of its unquestioned, unreflective sense. One consequence of this is that 

the relation of what we mean by a presuppositional or transcendental structure to the 

content for which it is the presuppositional ground in these contexts of reflection on 

sense as such involves the kind of moment of incoherence for which I argue in this 

essay. 

 Where that kind of presuppositional structure is taken to be implicit in the 

content, this moment of incoherence may even characterize the structure’s relation 

to its own explicit articulation, since its implicitness entails that it is integrally part 

of the content’s sense, while its explicit articulation transforms it into an independ-

ent sense structure in its own right, distinct from the content because grounding it. 



 

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first, each framework necessarily wholly reconstitutes the other in its 

own terms (since it embraces all relevant sense), and then, as it 

establishes the other’s own sense, comes in turn to be wholly 

reconstituted by the other in the other’s terms (since those terms, in 

turn, embrace all relevant sense). Because there is no neutral ground 

of common meanings, what happens between these two moments is a 

moment in which incompatible meanings construe the same thing 

simultaneously: in other words, a moment of incoherence or concep-

tual confusion. 

It is important to note that this is not a matter of our construals as 

interpreters, but of the frameworks’ construals as the sources of sense, 

and so it is a matter of the objective sense of the situation. The sense 

of the situation is given by the frameworks, and because both frame-

works are in fact in effect at this time, the same thing, in fact, has both 

incompatible senses at once. 

To describe the process more accurately: because the entire pro-

cess, from the first moment to the last, is an interaction between the 

incompatible all-embracing frameworks, that entire process is partly a 

varyingly explicit construal of the same things in incompatible ways. 

That is, the whole process is partly structured by this incoherence, 

which becomes, first, increasingly explicit, and then, after its extreme 

point, increasingly resolved in the way I outline below. The central 

moment is therefore only the most extremely explicit form of the 

incoherence which structures the whole process. 

The “moments” are temporal in that the degree of explicitness of 

the incoherence changes through the process. But the incoherence is in 

some degree of explicitness also part of the logical structure of the 

whole interaction, and in that sense is an unchanging, logical moment 

of it, together with the logical moment of its self-cancellation and the 

logical moments of coherence that this self-cancellation ensures. Like 

the moment of incoherence, however, each of these moments also 

varies in its explicitness and immediate relevance. 

There is, of course, a problem with the statement that the same 

thing is simultaneously construed in wholly incompatible ways. This 

amounts to saying that it is not the same thing, and that there is 

therefore no incoherence: instead, two different things are being con-

strued legitimately in appropriately different ways. As I discussed in 

the second section in connection with the self that straddles incom-



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mensurable frameworks, however, there is reason to think that there is 

a sense in which this incoherent proposal of a sameness across incom-

patible contexts is legitimate. As MacIntyre, for example, argues 

about incommensurable traditions of thought, “each community, using 

its own criteria of sameness and difference, recognizes that it is one 

and the same subject matter about which they are advancing their 

claim; incommensurability and incompatibility are not incompatible” 

(1989, 190). It may be easier to see this in cases where a framework 

undergoes a revolutionary change into a framework with incommen-

surable meanings (as, for example, Kuhn (1970) argues occurs in the 

history of science). There is a phase in the process of change of these 

meanings where it is unclear which framework constitutes the mean-

ing, or, differently expressed, where it is undecidable which the mean-

ing is. To describe this state of the meaning, we need to make use of 

both meanings simultaneously. 

We can map out the process of approach to a different conceptual 

order schematically in four moments, as follows. First, we have the 

starting framework or conceptual order considered simply on its own. 

Second, as we engage with the new framework or the framework we 

are developing in reflecting upon our starting framework, we have the 

content or materials of that new framework necessarily construed in 

the inapplicable terms of the sense structure of the starting framework, 

which at this point is still the only sense structure available to us. 

Once we have established a grasp of the new framework (I shall return 

to the mechanism by which this happens), we then have, third, the 

sense structure of the new framework, but still with much of the unre-

vised materials or content of the starting framework. This phase oc-

curs not because it is logically necessary, but for the empirical reason 

that it simply takes time to adjust from one way of thinking to another, 

and to learn to apply new general principles consistently. Fourth, and 

finally, as we learn to work consistently with the new framework (or 

with the framework of deeper reflection), we have the new framework 

(or the deeper sense structure of our familiar framework) on its own. 

Once this process of coming to understand is complete and we have 

grasped the new framework in its own terms, we are finally in a posi-

tion to try fairly to evaluate and decide between the two frameworks 

and their claims, a decision which, I have argued, turns on the essen-

tial particularity of our being. As I have sketched in the previous 



 

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sections, we undertake this decision by entering into the reflective 

perspective on and therefore partly outside both frameworks. This is 

the same reflective space that we inhabited, for the different purpose 

of coming to understand the new framework, during the process of 

approaching the new framework. The same self-canceling incoherence 

of this position which allowed us to move from one framework to 

another allows us here to be both outside and within both frameworks. 

This allows our being to emerge both in substantial relation to and to 

some degree free from both forms of sense. This combination, in turn, 

allows our being to establish, where possible, the relevant sense that is 

true to it. 

Returning to the structure of the process of coming to understand 

the new framework, the way in which we shift from the old frame-

work to the new is, as I have argued, through the element of self-

resolving incoherence or confusion itself. Not only does this incoher-

ence ultimately cancel itself and so make room for simply clarity 

again, but before it does so, or as the first part of its doing so, the 

simple fact of incoherence or confusion itself is what allows the shift 

to a new mode of making sense. At its extreme point the comprehen-

sive incoherence is sufficiently explicit that it is established and rec-

ognizable as inescapable: that is, the old way of making sense is 

genuinely, thoroughly, and explicitly disorganized. This comprehen-

sive disorganization of familiar sense allows the paths offered by a 

new sense structure to emerge, and our now well-grounded recogni-

tion of this state of affairs allows us to register and explore that con-

ceivable emergence of new sense. 

This is a blind moment of the process, in which we grope and blun-

der and even despair of possible sense, and in which we may not in 

fact succeed. But, again, the nature of the incoherence itself provides 

materials that help us. As I have argued, it is part of this depth of 

incoherence that it includes elements of sense. This incoherence is, 

after all, incoherence or confusion and not blank absence of any form 

of signification or, on the experiential side, blank incomprehension. 

In addition, this confusion develops with the stages of the process, 

and it does so in such a way that the resources for moving beyond it 

develop with it. In the first moment, there is a sharp separation be-

tween the conflicting forms of sense: we are clear about what the 

issues mean for our framework, but we are also systematically mistak-



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en about what they mean for the other framework we are engaging. As 

we continue to engage with the other conceptual order, we become 

increasingly confused as our assimilation of its terms to ours keeps 

failing to match it consistently. But our confusion occurs in ways 

dependent on the specifics of the clash with the other conceptual order 

and consequently supplies us with resources for being guided to iden-

tifying that order. At the extreme point of confusion, the midpoint of 

the process, as I have noted, incoherence becomes clearly established 

as inescapable and so as affecting available sense itself (and so as not 

just a matter of our personal limitations). At that point we have both 

the resulting explicit necessity and possibility of beginning in a wholly 

new way, and also the increasingly accumulated resources for guid-

ance towards identifying the nature of that beginning. 

This state of affairs allows us the possibility of groping our way to 

an initial grasp of the new conceptual order. As experience shows, this 

grasp need not happen, but it can and often does. If we do gain this 

initial grasp, we are then in the third schematic moment, that of work-

ing on the basis of the sense structure or “grammar” of the new 

framework although still also working with much of our unrevised 

familiar content or meanings. From that point on, however, we can 

progressively resolve the confusions, since we are now based in the 

new single, self-consistent framework. 

As this new context develops into full self-consistency, the entire 

process produced by the interaction of all-embracing yet mutually 

exclusive orders of meaning itself ultimately loses all meaning. This is 

what enables the full resolution of the incoherence that otherwise 

continues to play a role and so undermine the sense of the resolution. 

To see that the process loses its meaning in this way, it is important to 

recognize that the frameworks (or conceptual orders) only have mean-

ing as frameworks (or conceptual orders) at all in the context of this 

process. A framework can only be meaningfully identifiable as a 

framework in contrast with another. Prior to the consideration of a 

contrasting framework, a framework for all possible relevant sense is 

simply the sense of things. That is, it is not one particular framework 

for sense among other possible frameworks, as the term “framework” 

entails, but instead is simply another name for the only conceivable 

sense. 



 

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Consequently, it is only once the process of considering another 

contrasting framework is already under way that the starting frame-

work in the process meaningfully exists at all as a framework or a 

particular conceptual order among others. The first schematic mo-

ment, then, of considering the starting framework on its own, is really 

already one of considering the framework implicitly in relation to the 

new framework. When the framework is considered absolutely on its 

own, rather than relatively to the rest of the process of approaching 

another framework, it is not meaningfully a framework at all. 

Similarly, at the end of the process, once we are exploring the new 

all-encompassing framework entirely and exclusively in its own terms 

it, too, is simply the sense of things, and not a particular framework 

among others. 

This corresponding return to the irrelevance of the process itself is 

what enables the full resolution of the incoherence that otherwise 

continues to play a role in the sense of the resolution. The incoherence 

is resolved not by engaging with it further and so necessarily getting 

caught up in its paradoxical logic again, but by losing its meaning and 

relevance altogether, as the process of interaction between incompati-

ble frameworks which produces it wholly reconstitutes its own mean-

ing, and ceases to have meaning and so relevance as an ongoing pro-

cess at all. At that point the incoherence is and can be shown to be 

simply a logical mistake that can and should be avoided and dis-

missed. 

The final resolution, then, occurs when we recognize (correctly, in 

this new context), the meaningless of the entire process itself. In this 

way, the incoherence fails to produce any further effects. That is, it 

does not “explode,” as the longer logical tradition objects in rejecting 

any role to incoherence in reasoning and argumentation.12 

                                                 
12 For discussions at length of the character of this structure of deep argumentation 

and its logical legitimacy, see Barris 2003; 2012; 2015a. Elsewhere, I have also 

argued that the kind of self-resolving incoherence at issue here consists in a micro-

structure of what we might call legitimate logical inadequacies (Barris 2015b). 

These include, for instance, non sequiturs and conceptual confusions between the 

conceptual orders, and legitimate circularities within these orders as each the whole 

of conceivable sense and so as requiring no justification beyond themselves. 

 



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As I have argued, however, the incoherence itself produces this 

resolution in virtue of its own character and logic, and for this reason 

it is nonetheless not simply eliminated as a necessary element of the 

process. Rather, it has become a dismissible error only because, 

through the working of that very incoherence itself, the context has 

now shifted to the relevance of only one framework for sense, and the 

process has come to mean differently at a different moment. 

More generally, it is important to recognize that this is not a resolu-

tion that simply eliminates any of the previous moments and phases of 

partial and extreme incoherence, whether of our understanding or of 

the objective sense of the situation and its being, including ours. Or, 

rather, in an equally important sense, it does simply eliminate those 

phases, including their character as logical moments of the process, in 

rendering them altogether meaningless; but it eliminates them in this 

way only as long as there is no reason to put operative or taken for 

granted sense in question. As soon as we are justified in re-raising that 

question, we are back in the context of being “outside of all conceiva-

ble relevant sense,” where the process and, at various of its moments, 

each of its elements and phases re-acquire their meaning again. As I 

have argued, this process is precisely one whose meaning is logically 

structured so as to become altogether reconstituted in this kind of way. 

The final phase of entering into the new framework, then, is only 

definitive in those contexts in which the framework itself and its 

fundamental sense are no longer in question or at issue. These con-

texts may be temporary or otherwise limited. One such context is that 

in which our concern is simply to understand the framework, without 

concern for its relation to our original or other frameworks. Another, 

possibly permanent context is that in which we actually become com-

mitted to the new framework, which, as I have argued, requires an 

existential decision based on the particularity of who we find we truly 

are. 

Even when we are strictly in the contexts of these definitive cases, 

however, we still have access to the sense of frameworks we have 

previously grasped (including, of course, our original framework) as 

what can be sense or have meaning under circumstances other than 

those that obtain in our current context of thought. That is, we can 

imaginatively project ourselves into their context; but it remains true 

that this is not the context of meanings we are currently in, and in the 



 

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context of thought that we are in, the contents of the other frameworks 

really do not have meaning at all. They are meaningful in those cir-

cumstances over there, but those circumstances do not obtain here. 

Differently expressed, in the strict context of the meanings of the new 

framework we are currently considering, the meanings of our home 

framework and other frameworks do not have lived reality, but only 

the reality of something like an abstract game.13 

This difference in the reality of meaning is experientially evident 

when we go about communicating with people who inhabit a different 

sense framework from our own. For example, if we are Westerners, 

we may understand beef as nutritious while at the same time knowing 

we cannot meaningfully offer this idea as a way of endorsing cattle 

raising to Hindus who believe in the sacredness of cattle. 

The possibility of these shifts of meaning and different forms of 

understanding in deep argumentation should make it clearer why, as I 

have argued in connection with the appropriate larger perspective on 

our clarities, argumentation about deep issues can be both unqualified-

ly definitive and genuinely tentative at the same time and in the same 

respects. Where sense itself shifts, the meaning of our claims about 

the status of our own insights can shift with it too—not in a way that 

invalidates their original meanings in their original contexts, but in a 

way that simply means we are in a different context in which those 

original meanings of our claims are no longer relevant. 

If, however, we do not have the larger perspective of awareness of 

the meaning-shifting character of deep argumentation, we have the 

complementary dangers of taking our own framework as the only 

possible framework and so simply as sense itself, and then similarly of 

taking the new framework, should we come to understand it, as the 

only possible framework and so as sense itself. The danger is that of a 

helpless and potentially destructive dogmatism and incomprehension. 

This kind of incomprehension consists most deeply in an 

obliviousness to the very being of the person, culture, or issue we are 

                                                 
13 Along these lines, Gaita (2004) writes of moral arguments, “we can of course 

extract arguments from what [anyone] says and write them on a blackboard, and we 

can try to improve on them, but until someone is prepared to assert them seriously in 

his own name, then they are arguments only in inverted commas for they yield only 

inverted commas conclusions—‘conclusions,’ that is, which no one is seriously 

prepared to conclude” (316, my insertion). 



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dealing with. In addition, because the absence of the larger perspective 

partly means the absence of reflection on the foundations of sense in 

general and so of being in general, this obliviousness includes oblivi-

ousness to our own fundamental being. 

A relatively harmless and even constructive version of this prob-

lem, which is an often unavoidable and perhaps necessary part of the 

learning process, is that students, for example, when they first come to 

understand a new philosophical position, often begin by finding it 

patent gibberish and end by being unable to understand how anyone 

can not see it that way. In this kind of case, the effect is often tempo-

rary; but it illustrates the logical difficulty of argument about the 

foundations of sense. In many other cases, of course, the effects are 

neither temporary nor benign. 

Finally, let me recall that this process whose structure I have tried 

to describe is not only a process of understanding and insight but is 

also a process of an engagement with and of being. Or, rather, it is a 

process of understanding and insight as an engagement with and of 

being. That is, as I noted in the previous section, the process of com-

ing to understand, where the foundations of sense are at issue, is also 

the ontological process of the emergence of the objective sense of the 

situation and consequently, with it, of the situation’s being or reality. 

As a result, the structure of the process of coming to understand that I 

have outlined is also the structure of the process of the emergence of 

the objective sense and with it of the emergence of the being or reality 

of the situation, including of the being or reality of the arguers. 

By way of clarification, let me note that while I have just described 

our being as emerging during the process of coming to understand a 

new framework, I have also described it as emerging when we decide 

between frameworks. These two forms of the emergence of our being 

are intimately connected. First, the same participation of our particular 

being in sense which allows our being legitimately to decide between 

frameworks of sense also means that our being emerges during the 

emergence of the new framework’s sense. In fact, one consequence of 

the participation of our being in sense is that the nature of the new 

sense (like the old) is partly constituted by our particular being in the 

first place so that our being emerges as part of the emergence of the 

new sense itself and vice versa. The sense we come to understand in 



 

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fact emerges with and partly as our newly emergent being in the first 

place. 

Second, the same structure of self-canceling incoherence which al-

lows our being to emerge independently of and yet relevantly to the 

simultaneous frameworks when we are deciding between them is also 

what allows it to emerge from one all-embracing form of sense into 

another, incompatible yet also all-embracing form of sense during the 

process of coming to understand a new framework. As I have noted, 

the moments of this structure are both logical and temporal and so 

operate both simultaneously and in succession; and our being too is 

both state and process at once.14 During the decision between the 

already-given incompatible forms of sense, the logical role of these 

moments is foremost, while during the emergence of the new sense 

their temporal character is foremost. 

6. Concluding note 

One important upshot of the nature of this structure of argumentation 

about deep issues is that, on the one hand, in the context of those 

issues, neither rhetorical nor consequentially logical principles give us 

a clear sense of how to proceed. Instead, they require us to be partly 

and profoundly at a loss until the type of sense at issue emerges, 

uninterfered with by our presuppositions about its constraints. On the 

other hand, however, as I have argued, the very purity of the element 

of incoherence or lack of structure here necessarily entails its involv-

ing elements of straightforward coherence and structure. As a result, 

the usual constraints and procedures of both rhetoric and consequen-

tially logical argumentation are in fact themselves also elements of 

that uninterfered-with emergence and give us crucial purchase on the 

guidance towards establishing and negotiating sense that it offers. 

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the journal’s editors, and also to the 

journal’s very generous anonymous reader, whose questions and suggestions 

have helped me greatly to clarify the paper’s argument. 

 

                                                 
14 See the end of section 4. 



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