Showing papers in "Western Journal of Communication in 2002"

The Acceptability of Deception as a Function of Perceivers' Culture, Deceiver's Intention, and Deceiver-Deceived Relationship

Abstract: This study explored the degree to which deception is perceived to be a socially acceptable form of communication It was suspected that a liar's motivation for deceiving, a perceiver's cultural background, and the type of relationship between a liar and the target of a lie (eg, spouse, friend, stranger, etc) would affect the perceived acceptability of deceptive messages Students from China and the United States rated the degree to which they perceived deceptive acts depicted in written scenarios as acceptable or unacceptable Results indicated that 1) lies told for malicious or self‐benefiting purposes were perceived as less acceptable than mutually‐benefiting lies and lies that benefit others; and 2) culture and the type of relationship between liars and targets of lies interacted with motive for lying to affect the perceived acceptability of deception These results, their implications, and avenues for future research are discussed

A "changing culture of fatherhood": Effects on affectionate communication, closeness, and satisfaction in men's relationships with their fathers and their sons.

Abstract: Fatherhood is a familial role that is historically bound, in the sense that it is subject to social, economic, and political influences that can change expectations for how fathers should act. In this essay, we discuss the cyclical nature of shifts in cultural prescriptions for North American fathers and echo arguments raised elsewhere that fatherhood is currently in the midst of such a shift, away from the authoritarian, emotionally detached father and toward the involved, nurturant father. We reason herein that such a shift should manifest itself in observable differences between the qualities of men's relationships with their fathers and the qualities of their relationships with their own sons. A study involving 139 father‐son dyads revealed that men felt closer to, were more satisfied with, and expressed more verbal, nonverbal, and supportive affection with, their sons than with their own fathers. These findings emerged from both fathers' and sons' reports. Moreover, fathers reported feeling greater c...

Rethinking race, revealing dilemmas: Imagining a new racial subject in race traitor

Abstract: Questions of race, racism, and essentialism continue to garner academic and public attention, often provoking debates about how to rethink and/or eliminate race and produce new identities separate from race and racial categories. In this essay, we explore one racial discourse, a contemporary project titled Race Traitor, that seeks to destroy whiteness and replace it with race treason. Drawing on the insights of critical rhetoric, we explore this discourse and argue that one productive approach to race entails consideration of the racial paradox, or the tension between imagining identities beyond race while still recognizing the material reality of race as a fundamental organizing construct. We maintain that strategies of mobility and political solidarity can assist us in navigating the racial paradox.

Exploring “common couple violence” in heterosexual romantic relationships

Abstract: It is estimated that as many as 50% of American couples experience a minor form of aggression called “common couple violence” (CCV). CCV, defined as the result of a couple's inability to constructively resolve their conflicts, is gender symmetric in initiation and reciprocity, does not escalate, or become more frequent over time (Johnson, 1995). However, because suppositions about CCV were based upon a review of the domestic violence literature, the purpose of this study was to directly explore the profile of CCV as well as the communication patterns of individuals experiencing it. Thirty‐one individuals were interviewed, and the results indicated that CCV was not a unitary phenomenon as originally hypothesized. Instead, three different profiles of couples and their respective communication patterns were identified: aggressive, violent, and abusive. The theoretical and practical importance of recognizing the diversity of violent couples is discussed.

The strategic potential of sequencing apologia stases: President Clinton's self‐defense in the Monica Lewinsky scandal

Abstract: With today's advanced media capabilities and accessibility, scandal accusations tend to unfold across time and require an apologist's response before the accusations themselves are fully formed. Yet theories and critical studies of apologia tend to assume a single major apologetic opportunity to address a reasonably complete kategoria with a single primary audience and also assume that an apologist must choose decisively among the four stases of defense (i.e., fact, definition, jurisdiction, quality) to succeed. This essay proposes the notion of a progressive apologia that maintains options and shifts systematically among stases as kategoria gradually unfold. Using President Bill Clinton's response to the evolving Monica Lewinsky scandal across the course of more than a year to illustrate, we argue that featuring the stases in a particular progressive order (fact; then jurisdiction and definition; then finally quality), while maintaining sufficient ambiguity in each stage to preserve the viability of the ...

When questioning turns to face threat: An interactional sensitivity in 911 call-taking

Abstract: Asking questions and taking down information is one of the most important, yet problematic, parts of a 911 call‐taker's job. Citizens often resist answering questions, and many call‐takers express confusion over why this is the case. In this article, I argue that we can further understand interactional sensitivities in 911 calls by viewing questioning through the lens of facework. Training materials at Citywest 911 (a pseudonym) and much past research treat questions as simple information‐gathering tools devoid of relational function. However, the case study presented in this paper—constructed from transcribed 911 calls, participant observation data, and interviews—illustrates how questions can be face‐threatening. It closes with a discussion of how the analysis supports and parts ways with past research, as well as points to implications for the practice of emergency communications.

The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910-1913: Possibilities and Limitations of an Early Feminist Rhetorical Strategy

Abstract: This essay offers a greater understanding of how the introduction of annual parades into the woman suffrage movement created both rhetorical possibilities and limitations for the women's campaign. Through an analysis of suffragists' use of the parades as an innovative rhetorical strategy with formal limitations, I argue that the parades ultimately were successful in drawing attention to arguments for woman suffrage, but proved problematic for achieving the movement's goals, particularly suffragists' efforts to control the image of their movement and its members. I conclude with a consideration of how the parades' contradictions reflected the larger rhetorical paradox inherent in early twentieth‐century gender politics.

Kinship address: Socializing young children in Taiwan

Abstract: Recent scholarship on language socialization, Chinese kinship, and studies of personal address suggests that personal and familial identities are constructed through common everyday interactions. Based upon data collected from ethnographic interviews and participant‐observation, this study suggests that kinship address is one way that young children in Taiwan are socialized into these identities. This study also suggests that the meaning system or folk theory associated with the practice of kinship address can be readily articulated by caregivers, and that the folk theory supports this practice. Finally, these data suggest that identities of person and family are creatively and fluidly constructed.

Attachment style and person‐centered comforting

Abstract: This study examines a link between attachment style and person‐centered comforting. Research suggests that those with secure attachment beliefs tend to be better comforters than those who are more avoidantly or anxiously attached. This paper suggests that one possible explanation lies in secures' ability to construct person‐centered comforting messages. The results of data analysis support this suggestion. Both continuous measures of attachment beliefs (comfort with closeness and anxiety) and self selected attachment style were reliably related to person‐centered message construction. Specifically, comfort with closeness was positively associated, and anxiety was found to have an “inverted U” shaped nonlinear association, with person‐centered comforting message production. This relationship remained after participant sex, cognitive complexity, and unwillingness to communicate were controlled. Implications for attachment theory and the constructivist approach to communication are discussed.

Multivalent narratives: Extending the narrative paradigm with insights from ancient Indian philosophical texts

Abstract: This study discusses the ways in which ancient Indian narratives use ambiguity and contradiction to enshrine new values and stories for potential acceptance by cross‐cultural audiences. By examining two representative Indian didactic texts (gitas), the Avadhoota Gita and the Devi Gita, this inquiry explores how auditors are forced to reconstruct what these texts mean before they can evaluate them, thus exposing the auditors to powerful sources of novelty. The narrative paradigm espoused by Walter Fisher has been criticized as not allowing new possibilities into the lifeworld of the audience in the form of narratives espousing foreign values and beliefs. This study explicates how these multivalent narratives differ from polyvalent and polysemic narratives in their use of multiple value structures that force the audience to reconcile and reconstruct the various meanings within the text. This study culminates by revising the concepts of narrative probability and fidelity to allow for multivalent narratives t...

Somalia and the imperial savage: Continuities in the rhetoric of war

Abstract: Bill Clinton's response to the Somalia situation demonstrates the development of a kind of presidential war discourse in the post‐Cold War era. Clinton's rhetoric hosts a re‐articulation of an image of an imperial savage, a primitive “other.” This form is contrasted with the image of the modern savage, another common construct used to represent American adversaries. In considering this rhetorical continuity, the reader is asked to recall the heritage of the form, so as to better identify its essential character and grapple with the cultural implications of its re‐emergence in the post‐Cold War era.

Debating “what out to be”: The comic frame and public moral argument

Abstract: Since collectivities construct morality codes through public argument, maintaining fair deliberation is a great concern for rhetorical scholars. However society's increasing reliance on technical knowledge as a basis for deciding what “ought to be” has led to the exclusion of substantive community values from public argument. Since the connection of rhetoric to values has been a longstanding scholarly struggle, a variety of rhetoricians have identified modes of argument that ensure their incorporation. In this paper, I examine the possibility of Burke's comic strategies for this purpose through a study of Lisa Crawford's discourse, an activist at the Feed Material Production Center.

Re‐reading the X‐files: The trickster in contemporary conspiracy myth

Abstract: Mulder: I want the Smoking Man smoked out. I want him exposed to be the murdering son of a bitch that he is.... I want his name.... Skinner: These men don't have names. --From The X-Files episode, "Talitha Cumi" FOR MUCH OF its nine-season run, The X-Files achieved both cult and mainstream success with tens of millions of viewers each week, hundreds of websites devoted to it, and millions in revenue from merchandising. (1) Despite the fall in ratings over the last two seasons, the show has always generated much scrutiny. (2) This is understandable given the unusual premise of the show. For several seasons, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully tracked down mutant serial killers, other-dimensional monsters, supernatural horrors and, most frequently, investigate cases that may involve extraterrestrial visitations and a government conspiracy to hide that fact. Critiques consistently note that the show's bizarre stow lines resonate with audiences of all ages because it instills what The New York Times calls a "vague, insidious paranoia" into our daily relationships, especially with the government (James, 1998, p.9). The Chronicle of Higher Education echoes that sentiment, writing that the show's popularity comes from the challenge viewers have to "seek that fine line separating informed skepticism and suspicion from full-blown political paranoia" (Rosen, 1997, p. B7). "The beauty of "The X-Files" is the seamlessness with which it unites the two strains" of the political and the paranormal, notes The Washington Post, revolving around the belief that the "government has concealed a major alien appearance" (Powers, 1995, p. G01). Scholarly critiques of the series run the gamut of explanations for its cultural resonance. Joe Bellon (1999) argues that The X-Files is best seen as an "ontological detective story" that helps viewers to deconstruct and reconstruct their perceptions of authority. In fact, Bellon believes that the narrative "alerts us to the dangers of authority we have been taught to ignore" (p. 152). Mark Wildermuth (1999) concludes that the show acts as a commentary on science and epistemology in American culture. For him, the show's self-reflexive nature on such issues as clairvoyance and angels and their supposed impact in our lives reflect the "millennial thinking that mainstream culture shares with the paraculture, which seeks to save us from irrationality even as its presence challenges norms of rationality" (pp. 155-156). An edited volume of essays on The X-Files interprets the show from a number of perspectives. For instance, it demonstrates how: the show has adapted the modern horror/science fiction genre; the main characters depart from television's stereotypical gender roles; fans enhance their interest in the show via the internet; patriarchy and institutional authority are linked; and it demonstrates how the show is indebted to folkloric sources (Lavery, Hague, and Cartwright, 1996). These studies explore the uniqueness of The X-Files, recognizing the problem of interpreting the show because it does not fit traditional genres. Ironically, when these studies do discuss, in varying degrees, the recognized source of the show's popularity--The X-Files-as-alien/ government-conspiracy-text, with Mulder as the lead conspiracy buster (3)--they do so in a traditional fashion. Conventional conspiracy drama describes a belief in vast, arcane networks comprised of abnormally evil conspirators who engage in the most demonic of acts (Hofstadter, 1965, p. 14; Moscovici, 1987, pp. 154-155). Confronting these villains are equally typical heroes who stalwartly defend the foundations of American culture (Medhurst, 1993, pp. 130, 134). Scholars' critiques of The X-Files embrace this classic conception of conspiracies and the characters within them. For example, Allison Graham's (1996) focus on The X-Files-as-conspiracy-text in that edited volume contextualizes the show as a reflection of the conventional conspiracies of the 1970s, narratives that increasingly featured the government-as-villain (pp. …

A conspiracy of science

Abstract: Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself on the student of rhetoric. --Kenneth Burke As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away --Author unknown It is not the content of arguments predicated on conspiracy that makes them so unsettling but their form. There is nothing particularly horrific about a "man who wasn't there;" he is an absence, a blank space. What is disturbing in this bit of doggerel is its way of confounding the rules of everyday epistemology. How is it possible to meet someone who wasn't there? The question suggests either insanity or the supernatural; it is the moment identified by Tzvetan Todorov as the essence of the fantastic--the hesitation between belief and rejection, a moment suspended between the marvelous (the extraordinary but ultimately credible) and the uncanny (the bizarre and ultimately untrue) (passim). Contemporary thinking on conspiracy theory inclines toward the notion that Richard Hofstadter's mid-century, totalizing, stable, declarative, reassuringly complete, omnipotent conspiracies have been superceded by postmodern, fragmented, unstable, interrogatives, that provide more doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, even ironic detachment, than direction for resistance. In Kathleen Stewart's poetic description, contemporary conspiracy theory: lives in a world where the line between inside and outside, fantasy and reality, animal and human and machine does not hold. This is a world full of gaps and the urge to find the missing link. It hums with the possibility that the uncanny is real and it hunkers down in fearful but excited expectation. We're waiting for something to happen--a drama, an endpoint, something to break the enclosure of untouchable systems and the drone of an endlessly repeating present (16). We live in a world, on the one hand, where every phenomenon is available for perusal as a "text," and on the other hand, a world in which, as Nietzsche warned it could, "the text finally disappeared under the interpretation" (49, emphasis in original). There are, of course, pedestrian, mundane versions of the appearance/reality tension as reflected in such ready cliches as "There's more here than meets the eye" or "This isn't what it looks like," yet while these suspicions lie within the realm of the normal, there is an unmistakable defensiveness even in such mild protestations. Under normal circumstances, appearance demands presumption. One who claims that things are not as they appear to be assumes the burden of proof; a strong prima facie case is required before appearances need be seriously interrogated. Conspiracy argument exploits and reverses this normative presumption, making lack of evidence into evidence transmogrifying surfaces from their pedestrian status as the most visible outward manifestation of reality into veils and masks. The only thing separating conspiracy argument from prevailing explanation, according to Jamer Hunt, is the "ratio of visibility to plausibility" (25). Conspiracy argument reveals the significance of what seeks to pass beneath notice as insignificant. Brian Keeley suggests that "conspiracy theories are the only theories for which evidence against them is actually construed as evidence in favor of them" (120). Conspiracy arguments rely on, to appropriate James Baldwin's magical phrase, "evidence of things not seen." When the absence of evidence becomes evidence, narrative possibilities expand--what is seen is finite; what is unseen is infinite--limited only at those moments when confronted with the presence of intractable contrary evidence. The exchange of evidence for non-evidence reverses figure-ground relationships and constitutes the critical moment in the creation of the maddeningly tautological logic of conspiracy argument. …

Behavioral inhibition and the communication of public speaking state anxiety

Abstract: Researchers studying the communication of public speaking anxiety have reported that audiences consistently underestimate the state anxiety of public speakers and that speaker behavior, rather than audience decoding skills, are primarily responsible for the discrepancy. In the present study, behavioral inhibition is advanced as explanation of this phenomenon. Analyses of variance for trends revealed an inverse linear relationship between state anxiety level and audience decoding efficiency. Behavioral assessments of speaker inhibition and rigidity, however, were positively related to state anxiety levels. These findings are consistent with the operation of behavioral inhibition within Buck's readout theory of emotion. Implications are advanced for future research and pedagogy.

The master conspiracy of the john birch society: From communism to the new world order

Abstract: During the height of the cold war and nuclear brinksmanship in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of self-styled crusaders and organizations took up the challenge begun by congressional committees and Joseph McCarthy to expose and defeat the communist menace threatening the United States and the free world. For example, the Reverend Carl McIntire preached his anti-communist message throughout the United States, published innumerable tracts such as "Communism Is of the Devil," and through the 20th Century Reformation Hour, broadcast a thirty-minute radio message Monday through Friday. The Reverend Billy James Hargis formed the anti-communist Christian Crusade, toured the country with numerous rally's "for God and against communism," and broadcast his messages on hundreds of radio stations. The largest, most thoroughly organized, and visible effort began when Robert Welch, a retired candy company executive, met in Indianapolis on December 9 and 10, 1958 with eleven handpicked businessmen. Welch delivered a two-day speech in which he identified the "Communist conspiracy" as "Our immediate and most urgent anxiety." (1) He warned his business friends that: .. you have only a few more years before the country in which you live will become four separate provinces in a world-wide Communist dominion ruled by police-state methods from the Kremlin.... We are living, in America today, in such a fool's paradise as the people of China lived in twenty years ago, as the people of Czechoslovakia lived in a dozen years ago, as the people of North Vietnam lived in five years ago, and as the people of Iraq lived in only yesterday. (2) This speech became The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, named after a U.S. Array captain apparently killed by Communist Chinese soldiers at the end of World War II. Birch became the Society's "first martyr" of the cold war, and Welch became the Society's unquestioned, authoritarian leader. (3) He had devoted the previous three years of his life to studying the world situation and the communist conspiracy, so he alone was capable of leading the life and death struggle against freedom's archenemy. At its peak in the mid-1960s, following two near-nuclear wars (the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962) and when thousands of Americans were building bomb shelters in their basements and backyards in anticipation of a nuclear holocaust, the Birch Society had hundreds of chapters throughout the country, 100,000 members, 400 American Opinion bookstores to distribute and sell its literature, and an active cadre of speakers that crisscrossed the country. The Society's declared purpose was to educate the American people to the dangers of the communist conspiracy, expose communism and communists everywhere, and stop the conspiracy's planned takeover of the United States and the free world. The media and many American leaders branded the Society as an extremist, ultra-right, fringe group that saw communists behind every tree and under every bed and had the audacity to slander American heroes such as George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, accusing them of being conscious or unwitting supporters of the communist conspiracy. Convinced that such criticisms came from those who were ignorant of the conspiracy or part of it, Welch and his followers remained committed to the cause. As the cold war began to thaw and the threat of nuclear war seemed increasingly remote, McIntire, Hargis, and other anti-communist speakers and groups disappeared from the scene. The Birch Society continued the crusade, but its membership declined during the Reagan-Bush years to below 50,000 members. It faced severe economic problems as income dropped and it tried to maintain headquarters on both the east and west coasts. (4) The Society suffered a demoralizing leadership vacuum when, first, its young, charismatic president, Congressman Lawrence McDonald, was, in their words, a martyr who murdered by assassination in the "mid-air massacre" of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983 when Soviet fighter planes shot it down after it strayed into Soviet air space north of Japan. …

Conspiracy rhetoric at the dawn of the new millennium: A response

Abstract: EMILE DURKHEIM ONCE OBSERVED: "There is perhaps no collective representation which is not, in some sense, delirious" (qtd. in Moscovici, 1987, p. 157). I begin this response by acknowledging that we all might be more prone than we realize to the powerful, often beguiling nature of conspiracy appeals. As Stewart, Smith, & Denton (1994, pp. 52-53) observe, a "conspiracy may be real or imagined, but the process is the same; a chain of apparently unrelated events or actions is linked to reveal concerted actions and intentions to cause all sorts of social, economic, political, religious, and moral problems." (1) In the process, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy. It also may be difficult to avoid delirium. The Continuing Appeal of the Birch Society Robert Welch once publicly asserted that Republican Senator Robert Taft had died of cancer that had been passed on to him by Soviet operatives through "a radium tube planted in the upholstery of his Senate seat" (Pipes, 1997, p. 37). The description of this absurd scenario can take on the patina of legitimacy when, for example, such claims are made in a cold war setting where reputable sources report that KGB agents, in an effort to get a British spy out of a room, smeared a poisonous substance on a chair and made the intended victim violently ill. Telling the real from the imaginary can be a difficult and demanding task. There are legions of subjective judgments attached. The reference to Welch is, of course, a not so subtle transition to Professor Stewart's essay. Stewart rightly observes that the changing context of the times has everything to do with the believability and potential acceptance of conspiratorial forces. In fact, the social, historical, geographic, temporal, and contextual dimensions of change help account for the popularity or demise of particular conspiracy accounts. In the John Birch Society, we encounter a remarkable longevity and persistence. Professor Stewart persuasively documents why this is the case. I believe the Birchers have latched on to a classic conspiracy model; it is made even more complete because it is imbued with transhistorical significance through what Stewart terms "interlocking conspiracies." Indeed, Stewart gives a convincing account of how the Society made the transition from one conspiracy context to the next. In Stewart's apt phrase, it was an "effortless shift." This shift is particularly striking since we are now in the post-Soviet, post-Cold War era. Welch's guiding principles help establish the generic parameters of conspiracy discourse. Key themes, like the "cancer of collectivism," the master conspiracy tracing its roots to the secret 18th century Bavarian society that came to be known as the Illuminati, all the way to the "invisible government" represented by the nefarious agents of Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, to the god and devil terms associated with the New World Order, and the attribution of a moral decline associated with the "family," strike, one and all, old familiar refrains. Indeed, the characters and actions emerge like family members in a long lost but constantly resurrected picture album handed down through the generations. In this company and with these images, an article such as "My Mother the State" becomes a generic warrant for all that is wrong with America and a clarion call to action against "wrongdoers" (see e.g., Goldzwig, 1987). Thus, in conspiracy, active participants and dupes alike march inexorably toward the precipice of impending disaster. Ostensibly, only true believers can stanch the rising tides of ruin. What is most convincingly documented in Professor Stewart's account is a vivid description and analysis of a rhetoric of dystopian logic that has accomplished transgenerational influence through a contextually constructed substitution of terms--each of which blurs distinctions as they chain out over time. …

Rhetorical Criticism as Limit Work

Abstract: Friedrich Nietzsche's aesthetic language philosophy and theory of history, coupled with Michel Foucault's limit attitude, combine to create the foundation for limit work as a form of rhetorical criticism. As a rhetorical theory, limit work is designed to map the limits imposed by identity formation, including the strategies of remembrance accompanying articulations of collective belonging, through the analysis of controversial speech. In this essay, after reviewing the identity logic derived from Nietzsche, Foucault, and others, I exemplify the utility of limit work by applying it to the process of national identity construction in 1988 West Germany, 1993 Russia, and 1995 Quebec.

Nostalgic longings and imaginary Indias: Postcolonial analysis, collective memories, and the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings

Abstract: This essay provides a postcolonial analysis of the collective memories of the Warren Hastings trial. The author argues that this decade long affair forced both Parliament and the British public to rethink their views on the role that imperial responsibility would play in “British India” and in the future of the British Empire. The essay advances the claim that a postcolonial analysis of the collective memories of the trials reveals how both Edmund Burke and Warren Hastings offered competing visions of imperial responsibility that resonated with different audiences throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The trials provided some of the key legal principles and arguments that would be used to justify the maintenance of empire.

The new world and scholarship translation practices: Necessary changes in defining evidence

Abstract: (2002). The new world and scholarship translation practices: Necessary changes in defining evidence. Western Journal of Communication: Vol. 66, Conspiracy Rhetoric, pp. 507-512.

The invention of ‘quantifiably safe Rhetoric’: Richard Wirthlin and Ronald Reagan's instrumental use of public opinion research in presidential discourse

Abstract: This essay advances the argument that if the ways in which presidents speak to those they govern is important, then the way presidents “listen” to the electorate is equally significant. At least since the Reagan administration, presidents have used polls to construct a “quantifiably safe rhetoric.” The argument is advanced by detailing Richard Wirthlin's development of PINS (Political INformation System), illustrating the use of PINS and PulseLines during Ronald Reagan's second term, and exploring the implications of poll‐driven political rhetoric.

Appeal to proportion in the Clinton impeachment trial: Reconciling judgment with disposition

Abstract: This essay examines the appeal to proportion exemplified in the rhetoric of the Clinton impeachment process, where it emerged in varied forms. As an appeal to judgment, it surfaced sometimes in a strict analogical formulation, or as a bivalent weighting of alternatives, or as an appropriate blending of many and incommensurate elements. Sometimes it referred to the disposition of the case, to the process or deliberation, or to the faculty of judgment. Its polymorphous presence is not accidental, for proportion acts in this discourse at a deep ontological level, linking the disposition of the facts of the case and the disposition of judgment itself.