ABSTRACT
I used to tell my students that the art of rhetoric does not discern truth. Unlike science or metaphysics, rhetoric aims its considerable arsenal of available proofs at altering belief. I said this because I was once confi dent that rhetors-scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, jurists, and journalists-can discern facts that describe what is and what happens. The facts discovered by authorities such as these were persuasive to me because I took them to be accurate indicators of whatever truth humans can discover. That is to say, I used to be a liberal. Liberals can be persuaded by empirical facts, particularly if these are marshaled by authoritative sources and couched in appeals to reason, such as defi nition, analogy, induction, and the like. The thinkers who conceptualized liberalism trusted evidence provided by the senses. Furthermore, they made a rigorous distinction between facts and values on the ground that values are invented without recourse to empirical evidence and are hence untrustworthy.
