Rhetorical Argumentation

Principles of Theory and Practice

Christopher W. Tindale

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781452238326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

The study of argumentation has primarily focused on logical and dialectical approaches, with minimal attention given to the rhetorical facets of argument. Rhetorical Argumentation: Principles of Theory and Practice approaches argumentation from a rhetorical point of view and demonstrates how logical and dialectical considerations depend on the rhetorical features of the argumentative situation. Throughout this text, author Christopher W. Tindale identifies how argumentation as a communicative practice can best be understood by its rhetorical features.

1

A Rhetorical Turn for Argumentation

Alice couldn’t help laughing, as she said “I don’t want you to hire me—and I don’t care for jam.”

“It’s very good jam,” said the Queen.

“Well, I don’t want any to-day, at any rate.”

“You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,’” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

(Carroll 1993, 87)

ALICE’S PREDICAMENT

For many people, argument and communication would seem strange companions. When we argue, in the sense of a quarrel or bitter dispute, communication is the very thing most in jeopardy, often impeded by heightened emotions and a refusal to listen. Yet this book is about argumentation as good communication. In it, I will explore the ways in which arguers communicate with their audiences, and the positive results that emerge from the processes of anticipation, involvement, and response that are integral to argumentative interaction. We must begin by rethinking, or at least greatly expanding, the meaning we give to “argument.” As suggested, many of us associate it most readily with quarrelling. We think of it as an activity that defines our disagreements. Sometimes it may promise ways to resolve those disagreements, although our performances on this front have often been less than impressive. More formally, “argument” has been understood in the western academic tradition as having a particular structure with fixed ways of understanding that structure. An argument on these terms has a conclusion and premises in support of it. It is a reason-giving use of language, and its success is determined by evaluating the strength of such reasons and the appropriateness of their connections to the claims they allegedly support, employing notions like “validity” and “soundness.” If we have thought of “argumentation” at all, it may have been as an activity in which this structure is embedded: argumentation is the giving, receiving, and assessing of arguments, understood in the terms just presented.

This understanding of “argument” has been seriously challenged by scholars interested in the nature of argumentation and reasoning. In a recent posthumous work, Grice (2001, 8) points out that most actual reasoning does not conform to what he calls “canonical inference patterns.” This agrees with the views of those who deem the traditional concept of argument too narrow to account for much of what should pass as argumentation, when we enter debates, negotiate agreements, investigate hypotheses, deliberate over choices, and persuade audiences. Obviously, these ideas considerably expand the notion of argumentation in the previous paragraph. In general, to think of argumentation this way is to appreciate it as an activity that changes how we perceive the world by changing the way we think about things. But if we are going to expand this idea, it is natural to revise the notion of argument at its heart. To do otherwise, to stay with the notion that we have inherited, invites problems of confronting argumentative situations for which our idea is inadequate.

An argumentative situation, as this book will explore, is a site in which the activity of arguing takes place, where views are exchanged and changed, meanings explored, concepts developed, and understandings achieved. It may also be a site in which people are persuaded and disagreements are resolved, but these popular goals are not the only ones, and too narrow a focus on them threatens to overlook much for which argumentation is a central and important tool.

As a “site,” the argumentative situation is a nongeographical space, located in and created by discourse. We inhabit such spaces with different facility, some of us with ease, others with discomfort. Yet they are crucial to our self-understanding and our understanding of others. Exploring these spaces, then, should be a priority and not an incidental by-product of an otherwise specialized education.

Potentially argumentative situations are not restricted to overt disagreements. They include situations in which ideas are reinforced, proposals are introduced and explored cooperatively, and parties struggle to achieve understanding and agreement even when the starting position of each is virtually unrecognizable to others. Communication faces its greatest challenge in these last kinds of cases, particularly where values and the meanings of terms are not held in common.

As an extreme and artificial example of this, but one that will be widely familiar, consider Alice’s interactions with the White and Red queens in Lewis Carroll’s fantasies. The queens do not view experience and the language that describes it in the way that Alice does, and we share her confusion because of this unfamiliarity. The queens refuse to conform to the rules that govern communication and logic as we understand them. The White Queen, for example, wants Alice to believe impossible things, suggesting she just needs to practice to do so. She wants her to admit the value of punishing people before they commit crimes, on the grounds that Alice has benefited from past punishments. And when Alice points out, reasonably we might think, that she was punished for things she had done, the Queen observes how much better it would have been had she not done them and prior punishment would encourage this. When Alice responds to the offer of jam every other day with the remark that she does not want any today, she is told that she could not have it even if she wanted it. Jam every other day means “jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.” The Red Queen is no easier. She dazzles Alice with exaggerated claims about gardens like wildernesses and hills like valleys, forcing her at last to disagree: “a hill can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense.” But that would be sensible compared to some of the nonsense the Red Queen has heard.

This playful recalling of a childhood favorite has a point: Alice’s discourses with the queens in Through the Looking Glass are like interactions with intractable people. It is not that they are particularly hostile to her perspective; they simply do not recognize it as significant. Alice cannot get a level foothold in her conversations with them, cannot manage herself in those conversations (really, have conversations) because they insist, stubbornly, on seeing things their way, whether it be the language they use or the reality around them, and they don’t admit a perspective other than their own. As a potentially argumentative situation, with terms to explore and disagreements to resolve, the tools of traditional argument ill-equip anyone to deal with it.

We may ask of situations like these: What must take place in them for real communication to occur? And what perspective on argument best serves our needs? This book answers these questions by proposing a model of argument that is characterized as rhetorical. This is to contrast it, as we’ll see in the next section, with perspectives that are primarily logical or dialectical. As we will see, the rhetorical model is the best candidate for grounding a theory of argumentation that manages both everyday situations and extreme aberrations like those between Alice and the queens.

MODELS OF ARGUMENT

Following scholars like Habermas (1984) and Wenzel (1979), those working with theories of argument have been attracted to the divisions suggested by Aristotle’s triumvirate of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric. These are three distinct ways of conceiving argument, the first of which, the logical, has been the one to dominate the tradition to the extent that many people are accustomed to the idea that arguments are no more than logical products. In this book, I will challenge such thinking by presenting the case for a rhetorical notion of argument. But in order to better appreciate the benefits of the rhetorical model, we need first to understand what is at stake in the alternatives.

The logical emphasizes the product of statements collected in the relationship of premises and conclusions. As its name implies, the logical sense of argument has occupied the attention of logicians, both formal and informal. Minimally, an argument under this definition requires one premise in support of one conclusion, as in:

Premise: Most people believe that incidents of crime in large cities are on the increase.

Conclusion: More money should be put into law enforcement.

Beyond this structure there is a further component: an argument has an intention behind it, namely to convince others to accept the proposition put forward as the conclusion.

The dialectical sense of argument focuses attention on the argumentative exchanges within a dialogue and the moves that might be involved. There are several dialogues of interest, such as the quarrel, the negotiation, the debate, or the inquiry. Theorists who study the dialectical sense of argument uncover and devise rules governing the correct procedures by which such arguments can be conducted. Hence, the dialectical focus stresses argument-as-procedure.

The third division is the rhetorical, which emphasizes argument as a process. Here attention is paid to the means used in argumentative communications between arguer and audience. Questions are asked about the nature of the audience, what subgroups might comprise it, and what beliefs are involved. The character and interests of the arguer are also important, as are the background circumstances in which the argument arises. Such components contribute to a full sense of the context in which arguments are embedded.

Consider these three perspectives in light of an example that illustrates what each has to offer and the particular power of the rhetorical. Imagine the following argumentative exchange on the justification of the 2003 Iraq-US war.

Bob:	The United States and its allies were justified in waging a war to free the Iraqi people from a dictator.
Susan:	If such a war was necessary, it was the role of the United Nations to determine this and act accordingly. Without their endorsement the war was illegal.
Bob:	That’s not my point. I said they were justified in acting, not whether they had anyone’s permission. The reasons were there to support the war.
Susan:	That’s consistent with my point. If the reasons were there, it was the UN’s role to decide so and determine what action was necessary.
Bob:	But the world couldn’t wait forever for the slow wheels of diplomacy to turn while Iraq became an increasing threat to global security.
Susan:	That’s a different point altogether from the one you claimed justified the war. It’s not that insecurity leads to war, but that war leads to insecurity.

The logical approach to argumentation would extract the separate arguments of Bob and Susan, lifting them out of the exchange and rewriting them in premise/conclusion form, and then test those arguments for validity and strength (basically internal assessments of the relationships between the propositions). A logical analysis might focus on whether Bob has committed a fallacy by bringing in another point in his last statement.

The dialectical approach to argumentation would test the exchange against procedural rules (which vary according to the dialectical account employed): Are the arguments relevant? Does each of the arguers adequately deal with the objections of the other? A dialectical analysis might focus on whether a fallacy has been committed through the violation of a rule of discussion.

The rhetorical approach to argumentation insists that far more is involved in appreciating this exchange, and that the other two approaches miss what is really happening as communication by failing to attend to these rhetorical features. What is said has to be considered in relation to who is saying it and why (something both other perspectives overlook). We need, for example, to look at the features of the context (insofar as this is available): How has this dispute arisen? What do the participants know of each other, and the commitments involved? What are the consequences of this exchange in the lives of those involved, and how might this affect what is being said? Moreover, how well do these two people reason together in addressing the issue? How might they improve this? That is, what collaborative features could emerge here? How effective is Bob’s metaphor of diplomacy progressing like a slow-turning wheel, and how are we to evaluate Susan’s refutation by reversal in the antimetabole she provides at the end? More importantly, from the rhetorical perspective, how is this exchange being experienced by the participants, and how does that affect their understanding? All this is to rethink what it means to be an arguer, and what it means to have an argumentative situation. Learning about and seeing these features at work provides for both better argumentation on the student’s part and better evaluations of others’ arguments, because one can now see much more involved in both activities.

Of course, the focus on the rhetorical does not mean that the other two perspectives can be dismissed. Product, procedure, and process are each important ideas in the understanding of and theorizing about arguments. While they can be discussed and studied in isolation, in actual argumentative contexts we might expect each to be present, and a complete theory of argument will accommodate the relationships among the three. Still, it is the rhetorical that must provide the foundations for that theory, and it will influence how we understand and deal with the logical and the dialectical in any particular case.

The remainder of this section has something to say about the logical perspective that has dominated our tradition of argument and its recognized ineffectiveness for dealing with argumentation in the kinds of situations we are envisaging here. The subsequent sections will consider some recent developments of the dialectical and rhetorical perspectives that provide considerable advances in our understanding of argumentation. Yet, they remain wanting in several significant ways.

In spite of the playfulness of some of his characters, Lewis Carroll was a traditionalist when it came to “argument.” He lived in exciting logical times, if such can be imagined. His career coincides with the breakdown of Aristotelian logic and the flowering of Boolean algebraic logic (Carroll 1977, 19), as the discipline went from a period of stagnation to one of serious study and publication with many significant treatises appearing, including the works of John Neville Keynes and John Venn, and Carroll’s own Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic, Part 1 (dedicated to the memory of Aristotle). Carroll’s work was in the algebra of logic, developing and modifying techniques of Boole and Venn.¹

While traditional logic was undergoing change, one of its core concepts—that of “argument”—was not. This is reflected in Carroll’s own treatment.² Simply put, Carroll adheres to the traditional way of viewing arguments merely as premise/conclusion sets. We find fairly standard “logical” appreciations of “argument” and its attendant terms: the standard for an argument is introduced as the Syllogism (1977, 107) and defended against detractors who would argue that “a Syllogism has no real validity as an argument” (128–129). And a term like “Fallacy” is defined in the standard Aristotelian way as “any argument which deceives us, by seeming to prove what it does not really prove” (129). Nothing here would help Alice manage her misunderstandings with the queens, because what is needed, beyond an assessment of the “validity” of the reasoning, is some appreciation of those involved in the exchange, the arguers themselves, their beliefs and backgrounds, their styles and strategies. And once we entertain these ideas, we have already turned to the underlying rhetorical features of the situations.

Resistance to such a traditional way of conceiving argument has come from scholars of varying stripes. Chief among these was the Belgian philosopher Perelman who, along with Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), set the foundations for modern studies of rhetorical argumentation. Their work will be of considerable importance in the chapters ahead. A thinker sharing more of the logical approach is Toulmin, who...