ethics and pragmatism

OK--the drafty post below notwithstanding, here's the question:

As regards defintions of our 'historical' work from a disciplinary perspective, Brandon suggests a "probability-based relativist-pragmatic one: the better of two arguments, as interpreted by an audience, often becomes socially-constructed meaning and reinforces/determines the course of events."

the question:  how is this different than Machiavelli's pedagogical imperative--to show things "not as they ought to be, but as they are"?

Here at the 4Cs, seeing a history panel and other things, enjoying Louisville I would say.  Supposed to say something or include something from the Cs homepage when blogging from the conference, can't remember what so let's just say this statement serves that purpose, with apologies.  I'm thinking about Brandon's most recent post and also thinking about this project, this thinking about the philosophy of history of rhetoric, and maybe it's just being someplace surrounded by a combination of really amazing insights and always already empty jargon, and I'm wondering what it means to think about this question.  Rethinking, doubting, etc. 

Disciplining the Conversation?

This conversation is starting to steer us in the direction of our "marginal" disciplinary status.

I guess when making my claims on the status of a philosophy of history "in rhetoric" I was thinking more of a perspective than a discipline.  So when a Foucault or White deny/deconstruct German historicism, they are being "rhetorical" by my all-encompassing, linguistic-turn notion.

Continuing Controversy

To extend Brandon's previous post and the comments that follow it:  It appears we are begininning to make some fun and contentious claims.  Namely, that what we do as historians of rhetoric is somewhat boundless--that we can take any historical material and make it our own, and that our analyses hold weight even when they impinge on others's disciplinary territory.  Another claim is that the history of rhetoric, or just rhetoric, is anti-historical.  It resists any philosophy of history as classically understood.  It rejects progress, spirit, telos.  It is, I suppose, a sort of timeless continuity, eternal contingency.

We reject discipline.  We reject history.  Is that right?