Abstract
All who are familiar with the history of Perelman’s work know that he and Mme. Olbrechts-Tyteca initially set out to discover the structures, methods, and techniques by which propositions involving values are presented as deserving degrees of reasoned assent by other minds. The product of their study of such structures in hundreds of samples of discourse in “the human sciences, law, and philosophy” was a compendium and interpretation of well over sixty verbal forms used to justify claims as resonable. Their findings were offered to “complete the theory of demonstration … by a theory of argumentation.”1 Their “new rhetoric” was fundamentally a logic of informal reasoning, a “field of study [that]… has lain fallow for centuries.”2
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Notes
Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver, trans. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 10. Hereafter referred to as NR.
NR, p. 10.
Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, La Nouvelle Rhétorique: Traité de l’Argumentation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). I, 12. I use here the English translation by Francis Sullivan, the translation Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca used in Philosophy Today 1, no 4 (March, 1957) and republished by Perelman in The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).
Herbert W. Simons, Persuasion: Understanding, Practice, and Analysis (Reading, MA: Addison, Wesley Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 112–113.
Gerald R. Miller, Michael Burgoon, and Judee K. Burgoon, ‘The Functions of Human Communication in Changing Attitudes and Gaining Compliance,’ in C. C. Arnold and J. W. Bowers, eds., Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1984), pp. 418–427. Hereafter cited as ‘Changing Attitudes and Gaining Compliance.’
‘Changing Attitudes and Gaining Compliance,’ pp. 427–428.
NR, p. 14.
Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979), pp. 9–12.
‘Changing Attitudes and Gaining Compliance,’ pp. 400–404.
For a brief sketch of the European and American traditions in study rhetoric see my “Introduction” to Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. xvii–xix.
NR, p. 4.
‘Changing Attitudes and Gaining Compliance,’ p. 417.
Douglas Ehninger and Gerard A. Hauser, ‘Communication of Values,’ in C. C. Arnold and J. W. Bowers, eds., Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1984), p. 745.
Michael A. Overington, ‘The Scientific Community as Audience: Toward a Rhetorical Analysis of Science,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 10 (Summer, 1977), pp. 143–164.
‘The Scientific Community as Audience,’ p. 158.
‘The Scientific Community as Audience,’ p. 158. My emphasis.
‘The Scientific Community as Audience,’ p. 159.
‘The Scientific Community as Audience,’ pp. 159–160.
Realm of Rhetoric, pp. 159–160. See Note 10 for complete citation.
I am not disregarding Stephen Toulmin’s more widely used “layout” of practical arguments. In my view, that analytical scheme is superior to Perelman’s when one’s question is: “What and how much support is presented or needed in this case?” (See John F. Wilson and Carroll C. Arnold, Public Speaking as a Liberal Art, 5th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1983), pp. 115–124.) However, Toulmin’s system does not yield the kind of description that directly invites a critic to weigh an argument’s appropriateness for its specific type.
A step in this direction is represented by Lawrence J. Prelli’s ‘A Rhetorical Perspective for the Study of Scientific Discourse,’ Ph.D. dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1984. Prelli attempts to develop a theory of rhetorical invention specific to scientific discourse, drawing extensively on the conceptions of Kenneth Burke and Chaim Perelman.
NR, p. 460.
NR, p. 471.
NR, pp. 471–473.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), pp. 58–70.
Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1953). pp. 211ff. The entire final chapter (IX) is generally devoted to this manner of rhetorical analysis.
Zahava Karl McKeon, Novels and Arguments: Inventing Rhetorical Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Chapter IV, ‘Making Discursive Wholes’; see especailly pp. 70–73.
‘Changing Attitudes and Gaining Compliance,’ p. 456. Emphasis in original.
Kenneth D. Frandsen and Donald A. Clement,’ The Functions of Human Communication in Informing: Communicating and Processing Information,’ in C. C. Arnold and J. W. Bowers, eds. Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1984), p. 350. This essay will be hereafter cited as ‘Communication in Informing.’
‘Communication in Informing,’ p. 385.
NR, p. 1161.
NR, p. 117.
NR, p. 117.
NR, p. 148.
Realm of Rhetoric, p. 35.
L’Empire Rhétorique: Rhétorique et Argumentation (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1977), p. 49.
In discussion with Perelman, I discovered that he was not aware of the relatively static conception of “presence” implied by the English term. The active connotations I am discussing here are those he intended to imply.
The American College Dictionary.
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.
Ralph L. Rosnow and Edward J. Robinson, eds., Experiments in Persuasion (New York: Academic Press, 1967), pp. 101–103.
Charles J. Stewart, ‘Historical Survey: Rhetorical Criticism in Twentieth-Century America,’ in G. P. Mohrmann, Charles J. Stewart, and Donovan J. Ochs, eds., Explorations in Rhetorical Criticism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973), p. 11.
Patricia Topliss, The Rhetoric of Pascal (Amsterdam; Drukkerij Holland, N. V., for the Leicester University Press, 1966), p. 320.
Realm of Rhetoric, p. 49.
NR, p. 413.
Simons, Persuasion: Understanding, Practice, and Analysis, p. 120.
These are among the kinds of dissonance-reducing alternatives mentioned by Simons in discussing relations between dissonance theory and theory of persuasion. Ibid., p. 126.
NR, pp. 205–210.
F. Heider, The Psychology of International Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958).
H. H. Kelley, Causal Schemata and the Attribution Process (New York: General Learning Press, 1972).
Charles N. Cofer, ‘Argument and Intellectual Change,’ in W. B. Weimer and D. S. Palermo, eds., Cognition and the Symbolic Processes (Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), pp. 148–149. Emphasis in original.
Frandsen and Clement, ‘Communication in Informing,’ p. 350.
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Arnold, C.C. (1986). Implications of Perelman’s Theory of Argumentation for Theory of Persuasion. In: Golden, J.L., Pilotta, J.J. (eds) Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs. Synthese Library, vol 183. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4674-3_3
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