Does American culture think?

Americans tend to use speech on a model that is shared with the proceedings in law courts. There, lawyers advocating for their client make claims that they do not necessarily believe but are made because they can be made. (They are considered 'true' if successfully made. They are successfully made if proven. They are proven if the judge or jury is convinced). This is pure sophistry, the very definition thereof. What most Americans do most of the time in situations of conflict or disagreement, especially if it involves money or obligations related to it, is to make tendentious claims that they do not fully believe, in lieu of admitting to any uncertainty or ambiguity. They may recognize the existence of that, but they won't admit it. You could all this an aggressive use of discourse. Habermas would say that this is strategic rationality substituting for a 'communicational' rationality in which, among other things, people are fully sincere, and say what they mean and mean what they say. My experience in American society and also with the dominant styles of thinking, which are theorized in analytical philosophy and practiced in law and journalism, as well as advertising and marketing, and most communicational acts of government or business (including, of course, labor unions, and other 'interested actors' or interest groups representatives), leads me to doubt the sense of the strategic/communicative action distinction. But I note that law is different from philosophy as a model of thinking, and I believe that the dominant analytical philosophy lends itself to legal models of thought with their tendentious sophistry, because of its almost absolutely 'thetic' or propositional character. The principal everyone using this mode of discourse follows is that speech should say what one believes 'is' or is 'the case'. But that always is structured in terms of what one wants. The Anglo-American liberal model of government (which is based on limits to powers, with liberties granted or guaranteed by these limits) is based on this ultimate indiscernibility (or difficulty of discerning) of fact and desire, and on the legal model of thinking and discursive antagonism. A different model might be the philosophy seminar, which is an idealization of French academic culture since the Third Republic (1871). But how different is it really? It does differ in this respect: The English model of essay writing is to state a thesis or claim and then prove it, and that fits the lawyer's task, though it less fits the judge's. It also fits the demands of advertising and marketing, of course; they follow rhetoric as the language of persuasion. A somewhat different model of essay writing has explicit roots in Montaigne, founder of the modern essay at least in name: the extended work of prose as an experiment in thinking. One writes not to prove, in order to get something one wants, but to understand, and to understand you think, and to think you ask questions, and you question or doubt every proposition. American culture has long struck me as one in which most people are certain of everything they say, or at least posture with one another as such, while in fact this certainty has little basis in thought, and they have little curiosity, and little doubt as to whether they are right or wrong. This would tend to make a people more apt to argue but in ways that are not resolved. The American idea of 'argument' is a dispute in which different parties confront each other with claims and reasons given for them for the purpose of expressing the desire that underlies everything they claim, think, and even perceive. But they do with little or no wish to resolve the disagreement, which can only be done by negotiation and compromise, as in business, where interested parties confront each other without any basis in something they share. If people shared something by way of political and social commitment, it would be like a res publicae or shared 'thing', a possible definition of republican thought political and its 'communitarian' basis. That might not be better, and the liberal tradition fears this, as articulated in the Federalist Papers, which express a fear of majority rule. Communities and their presumed or actual consensuses are not obviously the answer. But politics is dissensus, and if there are genuinely political procedures of 'communicative' interaction, they are ways in which people would be motivated not only by trying to get what they want, or at least what they wanted at the outset. In America, an argument is usually a fight. And a person who argued with himself would have a problem. People are expected to be sure of what they want and not have any problems. That enables people to believe they are right whether they are or not, and to prioritize being right to being interesting or to learning about what they do not fully understand. So we are more likely to be right, and boring. That must mean that the wisest among us will shut up and attend to the world around us with a Buddhist silence. Then we might be spiritual and holy, in which case we ought to have stayed a monarchy; a republic is a political community. I think this must ultimately mean that there are no simple elements that, being presented, could be represented, being absolutely what they are and not what they are not. And a mind that is like that would be endlessly curious. Like with Keats's negative capability, it could be uneasy without that being painful. We could then have antagonism and dissensus without that meaning angry quarrels. I am not sure if a business society could easily succeed like that. Though a traditional society also might not.