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e an exhaustive investigation like those offered by Sharon
Crowley, Robert Connors, or the oft-referenced Albert Kitzhaber
and I have no pretentious of trying to rival them, or their
efforts. I want simply to try to explore further those
connections I believe I have seen between those cultural and
social “causes” and that rhetorical “effect” and try to explain
what they mean. With all of this said, then, I would leave the
present day and travel back through these many years to the 19 th
century yet again and examine, briefly, how certainty – an urge
to embody it, an urge to engender it – was exhibited by the most
powerful of cultural influences in America at the time and then,
with such a backdrop laid out, how their convergence transformed
rhetoric into a tool for the continuation of certainty.
But before I set out on this return exploration of the 19 th
century, I want to establish further what that call for
certainty is all about in the end. What does certainty “do” for
those in, sometimes desperate, search of it? What does it
serve, whether psychologically or spiritually? To John Dewey,
the need for certainty is one of humanity’s very oldest and
deepest emotions. The basic purpose of Dewey’s The Quest for
Certainty, a collection of lectures he had delivered at the
University of Edinburgh in 1929, was to explore and explain the
divorce of philosophy from practice, or, as he put it in the
book, the “historic grounds for the elevation of knowledge above
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