Descartes, Logic, and the Legitimization of Audience

I'm not sure why Donna had us read The New Rhetoric immediately after Uses of Argument, but reading these two texts one after the other has helped me puzzle through them both better. As I read through P&O-T, I was trying to place it chronologically with UoA. I realized, however, that Toulmin's work came out in England the same year TNR was published in France (1958). Perhaps we can talk in class about the intellectual climate in Europe at the time that led to two such important works on Argumentation to be published at the same time. Also, I wonder if there was any American scholarship being done on this topic, or were we too busy reveling in the 'American Century' that we didn't care about the arguments underlying it?

Toulmin takes for granted Logic as an Epistemology that can explain argument. And while P&O-T don't necessarily rail against the use of Logic as principle assumption in forming arguments, it is certainly clear that these authors feel that stopping at Logic is not enough. In the Introduction, the reader is presented with the Descartian ideal of Logic approaching a science, and the desire by many Enlightenment philosophers to argue using this paradigm. However, P&O-T see this as a method for proving what is self-evident, a pursuit that is limiting. They see rationalist argumentation as "a perfectly unjustified and unwarranted limitation of the domain of action of our faculty of reasoning and proving" (3). This quote alone helped me understand Toulmin's work more thoroughly because I was able to compare his assumptions to another model.

I feel like the P&O-T model is more in line with my understanding of Rhetoric and Argumentation. The intellectual milieu of the 21st century is different than when these texts were written, but I see this more-inclusive, more-complicated, more-exploratory vision of Argumentation as more-sympathetic to our current reality. The aspects of TNR that show me this are held in P&O-T's inclusion of Psychology, a wider view of Text, and a greater importance of pathos to create a more-realistic vision of what it means to argue. Most importantly, however, the reason I see this as a better model for explaining how and why people argue, is the fact that they (re)legitimize the importance of audience in the production of arguments. Like Nilu, I see the importance AND the complexity of considering the audience as a part of the rhetorical situation, but without it, any understanding of Argumentation is incomplete, close-minded, and faulty.

After posting here, I will go over to my Personal Blog and try and extend some of these thoughts on audience in a more pointed way.

Audince in argumentation

I agree with Cathy that Perelman’s language is much easier to understand. I especially liked the part how he mentioned the role of the audience in argumentation. That reminded me Rumi’s phrase “ No matter how much you know and how much you say, your talk will not go beyond what your audience understands”. So taking the values of the audience, education, interests and social environment is very important. This is so important that it is sometimes impossible to start an argument without taking these into consideration.
I am writing a paper (for almost a year, I hope I will be able to finish it) on affect of socio-cultural norms on address forms. This paper is on politeness theory and the main finding so far is that: people, if not addressed properly, even stop talking or lose interest in having conversation. So it is very important to know the values of the audience even to start a conversation and to make your message meaningful for them.
I remember reading a research conducted with lower-income students. Several math instructors made a research on a very poor country in Asia (I believe it was in Asia) to see the relation between school instruction and practical knowledge. Teachers asked one of the students “OK, you have ten dollars and you spend 5 on candies how much do you have”
Student “Ten”
Teachers “Be careful, you had 10 and spent 5 on candies. How much do you have left?”
Student “10”
It goes on like this for a while and at the end the student says “if I have ten dollars, I would not spend 5 dollars on candies, it would be wasteful”.
Money is very precious for these students. The teacher convinced the student to answer the question but could not persuade him in the rationality of the question. If the teachers knew, or paid attention how much $10 meant to these kids, I believe they would ask the question in a different way and would nor spend this much time with one question.

Adherence, Values, and Epideictic Rhetoric

So far, Perelman is quite a fascinating read! I appreciate the clarity of his prose, and have been interested to see (for the first time since beginning my study of rhetoric at MU) references to preaching that are illustrative rather than pejorative. [If I had a dime for every use of "preach" to mean talking at/talking down/power-over/non-listening, even amongst well-meaning colleagues, I would be significantly richer].

Perelman emphasizes the importance of what he calls "adherence" in his discussion of argumentation and persuasion. It is not enough to engage in logical proofs of an almost mathematical precision. What is needed is an awareness of an actual audience who will be disposed to respond to a speaker based on the extent to which the speaker shares or moves their values. Forensic and deliberative rhetoric, as important as they have been seen to be in the history of teaching persuasion, do not cover the whole of what is needed when it comes to making arguments that persuade others. Perelman writes: "epidictic oratory has significance and importance for argumentation, because it strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds" (p. 50). Even more strongly, Perelman notes on the next page: "the speaker tries to establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience" (p. 51). In Perelman, I believe we do indeed see a "new" rhetoric in the sense that he seems to be moving towards an almost Burkean emphasis on identification here, rather than a traditional Aristotelian emphasis upon logical proof.

Perelman's emphasis on values, communion, and adherence raises very interesting questions that once again (as with Toulmin) move us towards a more realistic view of how people actually engage in argumentation. Who defines the shared values? How do they come to be the values of that audience? That speaker? To what extent does the appeal to values involve an "appeal to a universal order, to a nature, or a god that would vouch for the unquestioned, and supposedly unquestionable, values" (p. 51)? As a preacher working in diverse communities, I recognize these questions as real and significant, and I take them seriously every time I get in the pulpit. Looking forward to more reflecting on this in days to come!