Abstract
I am not a lawyer. I tend to think of language and how it makes culture or is made by it. Call this rhetoric, if you wish. One result is that I feel uncomfortable evaluating prescriptive practices (laws, a right to reply, and so on). I prefer considering how any prescriptive practice is itself an instantiation of cultural history. Such a position allows me to see prescriptive practices as embedded in the values and beliefs of a people and, in a sense, as "hardening" or making visible, what I call, the "assumptive network" of such a people. In short, the author's reasoning, my own reasoning in this response, as the reasoning of any other responder are not moves towards some higher ground of rational understanding or even justice; rather, they are inscriptions that solidify the varied potential of what it means to be a member of our society. For me, then, evaluating a prescriptive practice plays the rational-thought game. Such a game is necessary, of course, for decision-making, but my own preference is to understand the history and evolution of a prescriptive practice. We do not do enough of the latter; hence, our prescriptive practices continue our discourses and our histories and rarely have the power to alter them.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Speech Communication
Volume
23
Issue
2
First Page
47
Last Page
51
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Cintron, Ralph
(1991)
"Response to "The Case for a Right to Reply," by Ralph Cintron,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 23:
No.
2, Article 8.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol23/iss2/8
Copyright
©1991 Iowa Communication Association
