ABSTRACT
In 1994, Art Walzer and Alan Gross published an article in College English discussing rhetorical analyses of the space shuttle challenger accident. They described the analyses as either being a form of naïve positivism or a nihilistic postmodernism, and they proposed their Aristotelian position as one which resolves the failures of either extreme. I start here because Walzer and Gross identified an earlier essay written by Carolyn Miller, Barbara Fennel, and me as the representative of the radical postmodern position—an attribution that came as something of a shock to us. In part of that article we argued that the managers and engineers at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle's solid rocket booster, could not resolve their differences because their arguments belonged to different argument fields in Steven Toulmin's terms. Specifically, we wrote that participants in the discussions “were unable, more than unwilling” to recognize and accept each other's positions (Herndl, et. al. 303). Identifying this moment in our argument as the central issue, Walzer and Gross charge that ours was an anti-rhetorical position because it makes reasoned argument impossible.
