rhetorical logic

Rhetorical logic is argument. It is not logic in the sense that formal logic or predicate logic is logic. Though argument is informal, it is not what is sometimes referred to as informal logic. Argument involves linking, binding, or associating the facts of the world with claims about the world. Argument is expressed in language. The premises of rhetorical argumentation are supplied by the arguers intended audience. An argument properly so called begins with what a community assumes to be the case, or what a community values. In this sense rhetorical argument is dialectical. To argue with someone on the basis of premises that are not their own is no longer dialectic, it is eristic, the sort of partisan discourse that thrills the faithful but fails to reach anyone else.

For my purposes the rational does not refer to any technique of inferential reasoning. For my purposes you can believe in wood nymphs and water sprites and be perfectly rational. For my purposes an agent or an agency is rational to the degree that it will hear every side (audi alteram partem). Hence, for me: Argument is a rational practice to the degree that it admits of, or will hear, other or opposing points of view.

For Aristotle and the peripatetic school of the arts rhetorical, the ars rhetoricae of which this developing blog is but one among many books (or librae, as in liber.rhetoricae), rhetorical argument reduces to but two distinct discursive gestures,

enthymeme

and

paradigm

In Aristotle’s own words, the “common pisteis are two in number: paradigm and enthymeme” (Aristotle 179).

r-r-r-r-reference:

Aristotle. On Rhetoric, a Theory of Civic Discourse Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press 1991.