Some synthesizing thoughts of mine...please add yours

I’d like to record here some things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been teaching the Arguing Differently course.

First, a big revelation for me has been the realization that “argument” is a broader term than “rhetoric,” that argument includes the back-and-forthness of what Artistotle calls “dialectic” and what Plato records Socrates practicing in the dialogues. And argument includes the extended persuasive discourse of public address. What both have in common is the presentation of proof, of claim and evidence, whether in a give and take way or in a seemingly boundaried artifact.

Of course, no artifact is boundaried, and so that is why Brummett, for example, understands rhetoric to be a function rather than an artifact. Rhetoric works across boundaries. But even then, we still have the circulation of proofs with explicit or implicit claims—sometimes associations (affective and metonymic--networked)  in addition to direct articulations (linked through language and so more metaphoric/analogic). 

But when argument is taught in composition classrooms (and perhaps in speech communication classrooms?) the focus tends to be on the formal goal of an isolated artifact. It isn’t that those artifacts don’t matter—certainly, they do, at least in academia and also in other kinds of contexts (political communication, organizational communication, etc.). It’s just that underlying those stopping points (or pause points?) of argument is the ongoing process of dialectic: claim and proof, claim and proof, claim and proof. What counts as a claim tends to change depending on the context, but certainly what counts as proof changes depending on the context. What different audiences value is different. Maybe a bit circular, but still true.

So when I was thinking about the circulating arguments textbook, I hadn’t figured this out, and so it was hard to figure out what I wanted the textbook to teach. I think what a textbook like that might teach is the process of proof and claim and how no isolated document is enough, It’s just one node in an ongoing network of proof and claim. So is it possible to learn to navigate and participate at both levels?

There’s also the piece of traveling argument, how a “claim” in one arena is taken up in other arenas and changed in terms of the underlying values. This is the kind of work both Jenny and Rebecca talk about.

My interest is pedagogical and practical: how are people actually moved to act? (And that question is perhaps better approached by people who study the rhetoric of social movements.) And how/what might we teach when we teach argument in order not to solidify argument as a boundaried, formal piece of writing or speech? (Or, even worse, as simply the verbal fighting that happens in much popular public discourse?)


I would love to see each of you to do some synthesizing thinking of your own. How so far have you been able to think about arguments in new ways, to maybe bring together strands of your thought?