Abstract
This chapter deals with the rhetorical dimension of argumentation and the role that Rhetoric is to play for developing normative models shaping the concept of argumentative value.
In order to show the specifics of this proposal, I outline current strategies for dealing with the rhetorical within Argumentation Theory. This task is partly carried out by following the criticisms that C. Kock has raised against the three main theories of argumentation, namely, Johnson’s Informal Logic, van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s Pragma-dialectics and Tindale’s rhetorical approach. In Section 6.2, I analyze these theories’ conceptions of the rhetorical in the light of Kock’s criticisms. In turn, Kock’s assumption that there is a rhetorical type of argumentation will be portrayed as a fourth strategy for integrating Rhetoric within Argumentation Theory.
Then, throughout Sections 6.3 and 6.4, I develop a fifth strategy for incorporating a rhetorical perspective within our normative models. According to it, every piece of argumentation has to be analyzed and, more importantly, appraised from a rhetorical perspective.
The idea of including rhetorical conditions for determining the value of a piece of argumentation seems more akin to those approaches focusing on argumentation just as a persuasive device. Yet, the point of my defense of the role of the rhetorical within Argumentation Theory is that, even if we think of argumentation as a justificatory device, we must take into account its rhetorical properties in order to determine its value, i.e., in order to determine how well an act of arguing plays at showing a target claim to be correct. A proposal of adopting Grice’s Cooperative Principle as regulative is then developed.
Finally, in Section 6.5, I briefly deal with non-verbal argumentation. The reason to deal with this issue in this chapter is to provide an answer to a question that, in my view, is hanging in contemporary approaches to non-verbal argumentation, namely, the possibility of distinguishing argumentation from other types of persuasive devices. I provide a rationale for saying in which cases certain persuasive devices could not count as argumentation, whether good or bad, despite their rhetorical power to induce beliefs.
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Notes
- 1.
Actually, Aristotle distinguished three kinds of speeches that jointly would constitute the domain of Rhetoric: forensic, deliberative and epideictic, whereas Kock seems to aim at narrowing the focus of Rhetoric to deliberative speeches alone. I owe this observation to one of the reviewers of this book.
- 2.
In arguing for p, my addressee may come to believe, for example, that I am very boring. In a way, this belief has been induced by my speech. However as long as it was not my intention to persuade her of this, her coming to believe it does not count as an act of persuading her of it. At best, it may be that my addressee persuades herself that I am very boring. Yet, again, it seems to be the concurrence of some intentional element what would turn her mere coming to believe that I am very boring into her persuading herself that I am very boring. This intentional element would explain why “persuading someone” and “persuading oneself” do not differ only in the subject to be persuaded: in an act of persuading oneself of p there seems to be a component of doubting whether p that it is not necessary in the act of persuading someone else of p. When a subject persuades herself of something she intentionally overcomes her doubts about it.
- 3.
I owe this observation and the observation that “normality” is not the same as “regularity” to Bob Pinto.
- 4.
We may think that there is something more than mere regularities between the features of the rhetorical object and the response of the addressee in the way something is “scary,” for example: there is something “rational” rather than merely “normal” in being scared about certain features of a speech. However, in general, we cannot say that this is the mechanism of perlocutionary effects: what is the reason why a speech is charming, funny or wistful?
- 5.
Think about the Nazi imagery, for instance. At its time and in its place, its rhetorical meaning was something like “this is a magnificent project, something that transcends particular individuals, etc.” Nowadays, however, given all our knowledge about Nazism, we can use the very same imagery rhetorically for meaning something like “this is authoritarian, bombastic, egotistical, scary, etc.” This is, for example, what Charlie Chaplin managed to do in The Great Dictator. Notice that it is not only that we have learnt what the Nazi style really stands for, but also that, now we can use it rhetorically for conveying something completely different.
- 6.
Consider Ed Woods’ supposedly scary movies, for example, where such mismatches were so evident that they were able to bring about a sort of “second order” rhetorical import, which is the one that Tim Burton exploits in his film Ed Woods: that something like “this is so absolutely pathetic that there is something lyrical in it.”
- 7.
In this sense, my talking about speakers and listeners does not aim to restrict communication just to oral communication. Here, “speaker” stands for “producer of a communicative performance” and “listener” aims to include anyone who witnesses such a performance.
- 8.
Thus, I contend that in the particular cases in which addressees are persuaded by considering that the argumentation offered manages to justify its target-claim, they are actually making a further indirect judgment with a new inference-motivation, namely, that if the argumentation offered for p justifies p, then p.
- 9.
In their account, Grice’s paradigmatic cases of implicature would be accounted for as cases of indirect constatives (Bach and Harnish 1979: 172)
- 10.
It is widely acknowledged that it is possible to perform certain illocutionary acts non-verbally. I think this is also the case with the complex speech-act of arguing. In my view, in order to provide a complete normative model for non-verbal argumentation, it would be necessary to provide a systematic model for the interpretation of non-verbal illocutions. So far we lack such a descriptive theory; for this reason, what follows in this section is a reflection on the conditions of possibility of non-verbal argumentation rather than a proper normative account of this phenomenon.
- 11.
- 12.
The mechanism of adopting non-verbal representations as reasons explains the fact that photographs usually happen to have higher rhetorical power than drawings or sentences: we tend to think of them as evidence, that is, as reasons whose correctness is out of question. After all, photographs seem to be the paradigm of a “faithful” representation.
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Bermejo-Luque, L. (2011). The Rhetorical Dimension of Argumentation. In: Giving Reasons. Argumentation Library, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1761-9_6
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