When Reasons No Longer Persuade

Abstract

This essay examines a striking feature of contemporary public life: the weakening of the practice of giving and asking for reasons in shared discourse. What often appears as a failure of argument is interpreted more deeply as a shift in the understanding of belief itself. Drawing on Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images, and engaging Marx, Mannheim, the Frankfurt School, and contemporary standpoint approaches, the essay argues that beliefs are increasingly construed not as conclusions reached through the weighing of reasons, but as expressions of social location. Within such a framework, justification gives way to manifestation, persuasion to disclosure, and argument to the presentation of standpoint. The result is not merely procedural difficulty in public reasoning, but a deeper erosion of the shared space of reasons upon which intelligible disagreement depends. The essay concludes by suggesting that this erosion bears directly upon theological speech and upon the public intelligibility of human life itself. Where words can no longer be heard as bearing truth beyond standpoint, both persuasion and the ontology of life are weakened.