Week 5: Group A

Preparation Guide 2014

Rhetorical Argument

One of the earliest problems addressed by contemporary theorizers was the exclusion of argument from rhetoric. This traces back to the Ramist and Port Royalist's division of invention (assigned to dialectic) from rhetoric. In the twentieth century this influence remained in the teaching of formal logic as practical logic. The theorists working on this problem worked to attack this interpretation of practical reasoning. Their problem was to construct an alternative model for practical reasoning based in rhetoric.

With an infrastructure of conferences and journals supporting this work, this has been one of the most active of the pursuits in contemporary rhetorical theory.

Clusters: Mechanistic argument; Field theory; Narrative argument; Good reasons, Informal logic, Pragma-dialectics..

Questions to stimulate thought:

* = Assigned to be read

Basic Readings:

Additional Reading:

Recent Work: (Selected by Winnie Obike and Amanda Gogarty)

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Rhetoric as Epistemic

Once argument was torn loose from its position as an inferior derivation of formal logic, the implications of that change began to be traced. Robert L. Scott posited that if rhetorical and scientific logic were different then there must be a rhetorical way of knowing. The epistemic work sought to trace down the implication of practical reasoning on human knowledge.

Clusters: Social Knowledge; Social Epistemics, Rhetoric of Science, Rhetoric of Inquiry.

Preparing for Class:

  1. Theorists in this cluster participate in a scholarly conversation surrounding the nexus of philosophy and rhetoric. Robert L. Scott’s germinal essay on this topic (“On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic”) posits that rhetoric is a way of knowing -- a traditional kind of philosophical inquiry aimed at discovering and creating truth in contingent moments, hence his terminology “epistemic rhetoric.”  Barry Brummett, in his Quarterly Journal of Speech Forum essay “A Eulogy for Epistemic Rhetoric,” argues that philosophical musings about rhetoric have no place in the discipline; rather, scholars should focus on using theory for criticism and praxis only. In the same Forum, Richard A. Cherwitz and James Hikins defend the role of philosophical study in the discipline of rhetoric, asserting that “While criticism may help us generate and even test hypotheses about rhetoric, a philosophical investigation of rhetoric allows us to work through the many definitional, theoretical, and disciplinary issues that define the field” (p. 75). Both theory and criticism are essential for comprehending rhetoric; one is not more fundamentally disciplinary or inherently rhetorical than the other.

    2. Questions to answer as your read:


  2. While Scott’s original idea of epistemic rhetoric involved classical notions of philosophical inquiry and argued that rhetoric is a way of creating knowledge (social epistemology), later theorists seemed to “hijack” this idea for the rhetoric of science.  Not only do theorists posit that scientists use rhetorical figures/devices to communicate their research, but the scientific process itself is rhetorical--the notion of process (instead of product) is theorized as the rhetoric of inquiry.

    Questions to answer as your read:

* = Assigned to be read

Basic Readings:

Additional Reading:

Recent Work (Selected by Rebecca Alt and Melissa Lucas):

Return to the COMM 652 Home Page