Communication as Rhetoric and Argumentation

Abstract

Rhetoric represents an old stock of knowledge that offers the practical tools for speaking in public and for social communication more generally. Rhetoric is both an art and a science that everyone, in different contexts of daily life — at home, at school, at the market, at the workplace and so on — draws from, more or less consciously. At the same time rhetoric can mean many things to many people and, most importantly, many different things all at once. There is an ongoing ‘rhetoric about rhetoric’ that positions it either among the most valuable skills a person could have (the Queen of Liberal Arts, oldest of the humanities, precious capability, practical logic, etc.), or among the most detestable activities someone could engage in (sophistry, deception, specious reasoning, obsession with style over content, loaded language, empty discourse, a form of idolatry, and a poisoning of the mind, etc.). Rarely can one find neutral accounts of rhetoric as the discipline concerned with how people use arguments in persuasive forms of communication or, in more specialised depictions, how people use non-literal meanings (for example in irony, sarcasm, etc.). In this chapter we will distinguish between at least four meanings of rhetoric:

• the act of persuasion: persuading others by form and content;

• a didactic system: set of rules, a hygiene of speaking (a morality);

• a method of analysing the available means of persuasion (critique);

• a worldview: the ‘rhetoricality’ of all human activities as based on discourse.