Abstract
In 1940 Albert Einstein passed along, sadly perhaps, but with a note of resignation, one of the cardinal tenets of the wisdom received from rationalism and positivism. He expressed the futility of arguing about ultimate values. “I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate about fundamental value judgments,” he wrote. “For instance, if someone approves, as a goal, the extirpation of the human race from the earth, one cannot refute such a viewpoint on rational grounds. But if there is agreement on certain goals and values, one can argue rationally about the means by which these objectives may be attained.”1 As a theoretical physicist who devoted his considerable powers of conceptualization almost exclusively to the achievement of a deeper insight into the nature of physical reality, Einstein would have modestly disclaimed any special knowledge of logic, epistemology, or of the scope and limitations of rational thought. The notion that basic values were impregnable to logical assault was accepted so pervasively, however, as to raise no eyebrows among the professional philosophers whose training had equipped them to issue pronouncements upon such ideas.
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Notes
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza Books, 1954), p. 31. Originally published in Freedom, Its Meaning, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940).
Chaim Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980), p. 89. Perelman’s first study of justice undertaken in 1944 was published as De la justice (Brussels, Belgium: Office de Publicité, 1945). This essay appears in English translation as ‘Concerning Justice’ in The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, trans. John Petrie (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).
For a brief descriptive review of this essay, see E. N. Garland, ‘Book Notes,’ Journal of Philosophy XLIII (September 12, 1946), 529–530.
Harold Zyskind, ‘The New Rhetoric and Formalism,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie, La Nouvelle Rhétorique: Essais en Homage à Chaim Perelman, 127-128 (1979), 18.
See, for example, the account in Chaim Perelman, Justice (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 58–59; and Ray D. Dearin, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Chaim Perelman’s Theory of Rhetoric,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech LV (October, 1969), esp. pp. 219-222.
Representative of these writings are The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument; ‘Réflexions sur la justice,’ Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie, no. 2 (1951), 255-281; Justice et raison (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1963); ‘La justice,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie XI (1957),344-362; and ‘Value Judgments, Justifications, and Argumentation,’ Philosophy Today VI (Spring, 1962), 45-50.
Dearin, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Chaim Perelman’s Theory of Rhetoric,’ p. 219.
Walter B. Weimer, ‘Science as a Rhetorical Transaction: Toward a Nonjustificational Conception of Rhetoric,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric X (Winter, 1977), 20.
Weimer, p. 1.
The identification of knowledge with proof and certainty is, according to Weimer, “the essential tenet of justificationism.” (p. 2) This meaning is far from Perelman’s thinking. As will become evident, for him, justification is a broad concept embracing a wide range of degrees of adherence. Weimer quotes Perelman a number of times, but seems unaware of his extensive writings on the nature of justice and justification. At least he has not integrated them into his account. This is unfortunate since Weimer’s essay is intended to show the inadequacy of the “new rhetorics,” presumably including Perelman’s.
Weimer, p. 20.
Charles Kauffman, ‘The Axiological Foundations of Plato’s Theory of Rhetoric,’ Central States Speech Joumal XXXIII (Summer, 1982), 356.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), 1358b.25–26.
A. Campbell Garnett, Ethics: A Critical Introduction (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1960), p. 104.
Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892), p. 65.
Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), p. 87.
It should be noted that the original French cognates preserve essentially the same semantic relationships as do the English words.
Giorgio del Vecchio, Justice: An Historical and Philosophical Essay, ed. A. H. Campbell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1956), p. 23.
del Vecchio, p. 27.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 79.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 41.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 34.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 78.
Stephen Edelston Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 159.
A. C. Ewing, Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 150.
W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 26. For an even more analytical treatment, which includes Aristotle’s distinctions between distributive and corrective justice, see John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1926), p. 414.
P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), pp. 238–239.
David D. Raphael, ‘Perelman on Justice,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie, La Nouvelle Rhétorique: Essais en Homage à Chaim Perelman. 127-128 (1979), 260.
W. T. Stace, The Concept of Morals (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1937), p. 176.
Stace, p. 177.
Perelman, Justice, Law and Argument, pp. 84–85.
del Vecchio, p. 2.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 7.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 16.
See Raphael, p. 261.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 99. This passage is from ‘The Use and Abuse of Confused Notions,’ a paper presented in 1978 at the University of Iowa.
Garland, p. 530.
Raphael, p. 260.
H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 155.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 41. Elsewhere Perelman says: “Cette règle de justice est admise par tous ceux qui ont jamais cherché à définir la justice, mais leur accord ne concerne qu’ une forme, dont le contenu n’est pas précise.” [‘Réflexions sur la justice,’ p. 259.]
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 32.
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. W. D. Ross, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1137bl 1–14.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1374a27.
Chaim Perelman, Preface to Introduction à la logique juridique, by Georges Kalinowski (Paris: Librarie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1965), p. v. (Translation mine.)
Chaim Perelman, ‘Le problème des lacunes en droit, essai de synthèse,’ Travaux du Centre Nationale de Recherches de Logique (Bruxelles: Établissements Émile Bruylant, 1968), p. 538. (Translation mine.)
Here it is well to emphasize the obligation of the judge under most western legal systems to render a reasoned verdict. Perelman stresses this requirement repeatedly throughout his writings.
Chaim Perelman, ‘How Do We Apply Reason to Values?’ Journal of Philosophy LII (December 22, 1955), 798.
Stephen Edelston Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 7.
Julius Stone, Legal System and Lawyers’ Reasonings (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 335.
This point is made by Don Abbott in ‘The Jurisprudential Analogy: Argumentation and the New Rhetoric,’ Central States Speech Journal XXV (Spring, 1974), 54–55.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 148.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. vii.
See Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 108.
Perelman, Justice, p. 104. Toulmin, too, accepts the doctrine of presumption: “On most occasions it is a good reason for choosing or approving of an action that it is in accordance with an established maxim of conduct, for the existing moral code, and the current institutions and laws, provide the most reliable guide as to which decisions will be happy. …” [An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics, p. 223.]
Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, ‘De la temporalité comme caractère de l’argumentation,’ Il Tempo: Archivio di Filosofla (1958), 125.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 86.
Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979), p. 131.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, p. 71.
David Zarefsky has recently speculated that “presumption in rhetorical argument may be the analogue to entailment in formal logic — the convention by which one knows that if the premises are true the conclusion must (probably) follow from them.” [‘Must Argument Criticism Be Field-Invariant?’, paper presented at the 1984 Speech Communication Association annual conference, Chicago, Illinois, p. 6.] Zarefsky’s point is insightful, so long as one does not think of presumption (in Perelman’s sense) as roughly analogous to an argumentative warrant in Toulmin’s sense. Presumptions do not just rationalize the connecting of argumentative elements; they are linkages between the arguments themselves and the psychological principle which makes argumentation possible.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 91. Perelman is influenced here by Patrick Day’s paper entitled ‘Presumptions’ in Actes du XIVe Congrès International de Philosophie (Vienna: Herder, 1970), V, 137-143.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, p. 157.
Zarefsky, pp. 2-3.
Weimer, pp. 22-23. For this example, Weimer acknowledges his indebtedness to Carroll C. Arnold.
For a discussion of these aspects of juridical thought, see Perelman, ‘Value Judgments, Justifications, and Argumentation,’ p. 49.
Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, pp. 157–158.
Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, p. 21.
Julius Stone, Human Law and Human Justice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 330.
Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, ‘Logique et rhétorique,’ Revue philosophique CXL (January, 1950), 35. (Translation mine.)
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, p. 6.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, p. 5.
Henry W. Johnstone, Jr., ‘A New Theory of Philosophical Argumentation.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XXV (December, 1954), 246–247. [Emphasis mine.]
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 49.
Carroll C. Arnold, ‘Perelman’s New Rhetoric,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech LVI (February, 1970), 91.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, p. 4.
Carroll C. Arnold, ‘Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric I (Fall, 1968), 210. (See Note 26.)
Stone, Human Law and Human Justice, p. 327. See also Legal System and Lawyers’ Reasonings, Ch. 8.
Raphael, pp. 262-263.
Perelman, ‘How Do We Apply Reason to Values?’, p. 800.
For the present author’s views on the universal audience, see Ray D. Dearin, ‘Perelman’s ‘Universal Audience’ as a Rhetorical Concept,’ TheoRhet, no. 2 (December, 1970), 1–10. For other views, see Allen Scult, ‘Perelman’s Universal Audience: One Perspective,’ Central States Speech Journal XXVII (Fall, 1976), 176-180; John W. Ray, ‘Perelman’s Universal Audience,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech LXIV (December, 1978), 361-375; and Lisa S. Ede, Rhetoric Versus Philosophy: The Role of the Universal Audience in Chaim Perelman’s The New Rhetoric’ Central States Speech Journal XXXII (Summer, 1981), 118-125. For Perelman’s posthumously published reactions to these views, see ‘The New Rhetoric and the Rhetoricians,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech LXX (May, 1984), 188-196.
Crable interprets the universal audience to be “those individuals being rational in general and competent specifically to judge the matter at hand,” a concept similar to Stephen Toulmin’s ‘Court of Reason.’ See Richard E. Crable, ‘Knowledge-As-Status: On Argument and Epistemology,’ Communication Monographs XXXXIX (December, 1982), 252.
Carlin Romano, ‘Rhetorically Speaking: Chaim Perelman Rediscovers Western Philosophy,’ Village Voice, May 17, 1983, p. 47.
Max Loreau, ‘Rhetoric as the Logic of the Behavioral Sciences,’ trans. Lloyd I. Watkins and Paul D. Brandes, Quarterly Journal of Speech LI (December, 1965), 457.
Leonard G. Miller, ‘Moral Scepticism,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XXII (1961), 239–245.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 107.
Perelman, ‘Value Judgments, Justifications, and Argumentation,’ p. 50.
Julius Stone points out that only in a 1960 paper printed in Justice et Raison (1963) did Perelman begin to address himself to the explicit connections between his analysis of justice and the idea of justification. (Human Law and Human Justice, p. 329.) See Note 29.
Perelman, ‘Value Judgments, Justifications, and Argumentation,’ p. 48.
Perelman, Justice, p. 83. Another test of arguments, their relevance or irrelevance, Perelman goes on to say, is determined “according to the rules and criteria recognized by the various disciplines and their particular methodologies.” Although we are not concerned with this field-dependent measure in this context, it could be pointed out that it, too, is a matter of audience adherence, not external standards of logical validity. This is true even in those exceptional instances where formal standards seem to be part of a field’s characteristic methodology, because the point at issue is the audience’s adhesion to such tests.
Ray E. McKerrow, ‘Rhetorical Validity: An analysis of Three Perspectives on the Justification of Rhetorical Argument,’ Journal of the Americal Forensic Association XIII (Winter, 1977), 135. McKerrow goes on to say that, “Later events may indicate that the choice, and the concomitant adoption of a belief, was an error, but this in itself does not invalidate the initial adherence.” Perelman would avoid the word “error” to refer to a superseded belief. For him, that is a term suggestive of the assumptions of Cartesian rationalism or logical positivism. It contains assumptions that are foreign to his “regressive” philosophy. See Ch. Perelman, ‘Philosophies premières et philosophie régressive,’ Dialectica III (1949), 175-191.
The “content productive of belief” must not be thought of as a “validation” of the thesis being advanced, but as a “good reason to adhere to the thesis.”
Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, p. 127.
Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, p. 32.
Perelman, ‘Value Judgments, Justifications, and Argumentation,’ p. 46.
Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, p. 125. The idea of a critical model in which every premise can be endlessly examined in a leisurely fashion is foreign to the justification model. In practical argumentation, as in courtroom proceedings, constraints are imposed. The judge is under obligation to decide and to give reasons.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 59.
See Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, p. 112.
Zyskind, ‘The New Rhetoric and Formalism,’ p. 29. See Perelman, Justice, p. 67.
Zyskind, ‘The New Rhetoric and Formalism,’ pp. 29–30.
Carroll C. Arnold, ‘Reflections on the Wingspread Conference,’ The Prospect of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 199.
Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument, p. 106.
J. Robert Cox and Charles Arthur Willard have summarized the “non-justifica-tionist” position of Walter B. Weimer as follows: “Weimer has argued that all the traditional philosophic positions (empiricism, rationalism, formalism, idealism) ‘are variations of the same metatheory …’ The metatheory is ‘justificationism,’ by which Weimer means epistemic views that equate justification with proof and identify knowledge with authority.” [Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. xl.] It should be clear by now that Perelman’s notion of justification concerns adherence, not “proof,” and identifies knowledge with the “best tested of our opinions.” Whether the clash between Perelman and Weimer is entirely semantic (based on different uses of the term “justification”) cannot be known. If it is, the analyses of justice and justification made by Perelman over the course of four decades lend weight to his usage of these terms.
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Dearin, R.D. (1986). Justice and Justification in the New Rhetoric. 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_9
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