Rhetoric

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rhetoric is employed in both act and perception, in private thought and public communication. It is a means of communication as well as a theory for understanding and criticizing itself and the alternative means of communication. Wedded by the motives of both author and audience, the rhetoric of the social sciences is, like other rhetorics, simultaneously a guide for persuasive writing and a framework for intelligent reading. Centrally speaking, the rhetoric of the social sciences is the study and practice of argumentation and proof making, constrained only by the available means of persuasion. As such, rhetoric judges and is judged, it moves and is moved. Rhetoric is our ways and means of scientific deliberation. Following the models of Aristotle (c. 384–322 BCE) and of Cicero (106–43 BCE), the Roman statesman and philosopher, rhetoric is also importantly about the ethos or character of the author; to some theorists, such as Quintilian (35–96 CE), it is nothing less than “the good person speaking well.”

Rarely claimed after Aristotle to be a science unto itself, rhetoric as a discipline has profoundly shaped the sciences, and each of the sciences, including the social sciences, have returned the sometimes painful favor by reshaping and redefining the theories and vocabularies of rhetoric; (cf. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus : “The method of the science of medicine is, I suppose, the same as the science of rhetoric.... In both sciences it is necessary to determine the nature of something” [2005, p. 56]).

An ancient discipline of Greek and Latin origins established originally for pleadings in law, politics, and international commerce, the rhetorical theories of Cicero, Quintilian, St. Augustine (354–430 CE), and especially Aristotle proved to be of central importance to all of human communication, including scientific communication, and became the foundation for liberal education in Europe for more than twenty centuries. The influence of rhetoric was particularly strong in the medieval university trivium, of which St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) is a product. The trivium was organized around three basic subjects: grammar (that is, words, word order, phonics, sentence structure, and the like), logic (syllogism, cause and effect, quality versus quantity, and so forth), and rhetoric—with rhetoric presiding as queen and lord. Rhetoric was not a mere synthesis of grammar and logic, though partly it was; rhetoric provided fundamental training in strategic theories of persuasion. It gave students practice in the arts of persuasion and good citizenship that would be necessary for success in later pursuits, such as immediately in the quadrivium (the study of mathematics, science, and music) and followed by (at least for some students) investigations in philosophy, theology, and public service. Compared to today’s four- or five-step handbooks on “valid” scientific method, the handbooks of rhetoric appear, like scientific argument itself, copious. In Aristotle’s On Rhetoric alone, one can identify several scores of distinct strategies for argument and proof, and literally thousands more of unique “commonplaces” (or topoi )—that is, general and particular sites of knowledge and belief—for use in designing arguments (Aristotle [c. 350 BCE] 1991). The sum of the permutations, a subset of all the available means of persuasion, is immense.

In the sixteenth century a Frenchman named Peter Ramus (1515–1572) was deeply inspired by his surface reading of Plato (c. 427–347 BCE), the sophists, and other classical rhetoricians. A persuasive and powerful (but not, it seems, a highly original or ethical thinker), Ramus commenced to reduce the very word rhetoric to mere “style,” “emotion,” “ornament,” or, in the foulest of moods, “manipulation”—a project that was encouraged by the so-called scientific revolution, of which Ramus was a part. In the century before René Descartes, Ramus thought a new language and taxonomy of thought were necessary to suit the scientific and mathematical ideas of the Renaissance, and Aristotelian rhetoric and logic, which students had been learning for centuries, was eclipsing, he said, the full reception of those ideas (Ong 1958; Olmsted 2006). That Ramus himself adapted ancient principles of rhetoric (such as the pairing of opposites) to enact his, as Ong puts it, “superficial” revolution was to Ramus and his followers apparently beside the point. The fleeting success of antirhetoric rhetoric—such as, to repeat, Ramus’s own reduction of the very word to mean “mere” style—had been observed in previous epochs, however, and would periodically recur.

In educated circles of the late eighteenth century, rhetoric reappeared in a form closer to its ancient, philosophical stature (Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham each wrote a book on rhetoric, Smith emphasizing the rhetoric of belles lettres and Bentham the fallacies of political pundits). In the second half of the nineteenth century a notable addition to rhetoric and religion was supplied by Cardinal Newman in Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (c. 1870). Rhetoric was then shoved far under the rug by neopositivists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (the neopositivists were a diverse group that included, among others, the scientist-philosophers Karl Pearson, Ernst Mach, and the so-called “scientific socialists”). But the logical positivists, the members and philosophical allies of the Vienna Circle, went even further and tried with some success to bury rhetoric along with other “cognitively meaningless” subjects such as, they said, metaphysics, theology, and poetry. In retrospect, the positivists said, their goal was not to kill off rhetoric and other humanistic disciplines but simply to banish them from scientific deliberation.

In the 1940s and 1950s the study of rhetoric was again revived to respectability, this time by the writings of I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Richard McKeon, Chaim Perelman, Wayne Booth, Richard Weaver, and some others. A tiny postwar boom came to rhetoric by way of a delayed interest in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and American philosophical pragmatism (represented by C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey), both of which, like Aristotle and his followers, saw symbols and human action as inextricably entwined, even in science. A larger boost came from specific economic and cultural change. Demand for workers in the fields of technology, such as in for example the increasingly important radio and broadcast journalism industries, gave new value to the skills of the rhetorician. And in the 1970s and 1980s the philosophical and cultural movements generally referred to as “postmodernism” gave new purpose to theories and arts of communication, that is, to rhetoric.

Nowadays the larger universities maintain a department of rhetoric. If lacking a full department of their own, academic rhetoricians find employment with journalists and others in a department of communication studies, with political scientists and others in a school of public affairs, or with scientists, historians, and philosophers in the departments of classics and science and technology studies.

Rhetoric is among the oldest of subjects and also the most fluid. The fluidity of rhetoric—its ability to adapt to radically changing social, economic, and political conditions—is essential to and descriptive of its fitness. Rhetoric is constantly under attack, often by highly skilled writers. To them—the Platonists, the Ramists, the Cartesians, the logical positivists, the scientific socialists, and the media journalists—the University of Chicago philosopher Richard McKeon (1900–1985) never tired of pointing out that because rhetorical choices are always being made—from the arid symbols of first-order predicate logic to the manifestos of scientists and philosophers who would deny the force of rhetoric—rhetorical training is always relevant to the human condition.

Contemporary social scientists are formally speaking innocent of their own rhetoric. That is not to say they do not grasp the words, facts, models, theories, experimental methods, and institutional environments with which and in which they operate; rather, with a few exceptions, professional societies and the modern university do not require more than an imitative capacity to work with other than highly specific, state-of-the-art rhetorical forms to gain in-group authority (Latour and Woolgar 1979; McCloskey 1985; Nelson, Megill, McCloskey 1987; Brown 1989; Klamer 2007). A mathematical article purporting to prove with utility theory the goodness of market economies, for example, is not likely to refer to the decline of “character” talk in nineteenth-century economic psychology. Nor is the positive social scientist likely to know or even care about the purposive erasure of “ethics” and “narrative” from twentieth-century economic thought. Today’s social scientist is trained to believe with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association that there is only one scientific style—today’s style, exemplified by articles published in the top-ranked journals. Her neatly separated section titles—introduction, theory, model, data, hypothesis test, policy implications, conclusion—are said by her teachers to represent distinct and nonrhetorical epistemic objects (Bazerman 1988). She is trained to “let the facts speak for themselves” and to keep her values out of sight (Burke 1950; Booth 1974; Fish 1990). Likewise, the empirical economist does not bother to learn the rhetorical history of “statistical significance testing,” even though significance testing is his lifeblood, and does not achieve the crucial “test” of “economic” or “social scientific significance” his handbook on method imagines (McCloskey and Ziliak 1996; Ziliak and McCloskey 2007). The loss of rhetoric in social science training is more than a simple academic farewell to reason.

Some observers argue that without a basic training in rhetoric, a social scientist cannot know the difference between knowledge and belief, and why the difference matters. Quite a few others think that the reason to bring rhetoric back to the center of education—including graduate education—is that highly specialized scientists would become better equipped to speak with other specialists, and, perhaps more importantly, with policy makers and the general public. Specialization, Adam Smith observed, is on balance good for society; but he added that it is only through mutually beneficial exchange that the gains from specialization can be realized ([1762–1763] 1963). Rhetoric, some say, enables both the means and the ends.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. [c. 350 BCE] 1991. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bazerman, Charles. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bentham, Jeremy. [1824] 1962. The Handbook of Political Fallacies. Intro. Crane Brinton. New York: Harper.

Booth, Wayne C. 1974. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brown, Richard Harvey. 1989. Social Science as Civic Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Burke, Kenneth. 1945. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Burke, Kenneth. 1950. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Fish, Stanley. 1990. Rhetoric. In Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 203–222. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Klamer, Arjo. 2007. Speaking of Economics: How to Be in the Conversation. London: Routledge.

Klamer, Arjo, Robert M. Solow, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds. 1989. The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Lanham, Richard A. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. New York: Sage.

McCloskey, Deirdre N. [1985] 1998. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

McCloskey, Deirdre N., and Stephen T. Ziliak. 1996. The Standard Error of Regressions. Journal of Economic Literature 34 (March): 97–114.

McKeon, Richard. 1987. Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery. Ed. and intro. Mark Backman. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

McKeon, Richard. 1990. Freedom and History, and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon. Ed. Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nelson, John S., Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey. 1987. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Olmsted, Wendy. 2006. Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Ong, Walter J. [1958] 1983. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pearson, Karl. 1892. The Grammar of Science. London: J. M. Dent and Sons.

Perelman, Chaim. 1979. The New Rhetoric and the Humanities. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel.

Plato. [c. 380s–370s bce] 2005. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin.

Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, Adam. [1762–1763] 1963. Lectures on Rhetoric and “Belle Lettres”. Ed. John C. Bryce. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ziliak, Stephen T., and Deirdre N. McCloskey. 2007. The Standard Error: How Some Sciences Lost Interest in Magnitude, and What to Do About It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Stephen Ziliak

RHETORIC
1. The study and practice of effective COMMUNICATION.

2. The art of persuasion
.
3. An insincere eloquence intended to win points and get people what they want. All three senses have run side by side for more than 2,000 years. In the late 20c, rhetoric has an explicit and an implicit aspect. Explicitly, many 20c language professionals refer to rhetoric as archaic and irrelevant, while for some philosophers of communication and for many teachers of writing it is a significant and lively issue. In the latter circles, there is discussion of a ‘new rhetoric’ that blends the best of the old with current insights into the nature of communication. It is, however, an ironic measure of the centuries-old strength of rhetoric that many of its principles, concepts, and devices are taken as given by educated users of languages like English, French, and German. Terms like ANALOGY, ANTITHESIS, dialectic, and METAPHOR had their beginning among the rhetoricians of ancient Greece, as did many of the techniques of court-room argument, public speaking, advertising, marketing, and publicity.

Origins

In ancient societies with no awareness of writing, the ability to speak informatively, cohesively, and memorably was essential and admired. In such societies, chiefs, bards, and seers used a variety of techniques to gain attention and ensure retention of information (in their own as well as their listeners' minds). Linguistic techniques included: RHYTHM; REPETITION; formulaic lists and descriptions; kinds of EMPHASIS; balance and antithesis; ELLIPSIS; and words and devices to evoke mental images. In the course of time, such techniques were organized into bodies of received knowledge. In some societies, they were largely a part of religious ritual, as in India; in others, such as Greece, they were part of the craft of speaking which in the 5c BC became the foundation of education in city states like Athens and Sparta.

Greek rhetoric

The story is told of exiles who returned to Syracuse, a Greek colony in Sicily, after the overthrow of a tyrant. Because they needed to organize their claims to appropriate land, they hired teachers to help them argue their cases, and, as a result, the craft of rhetoric emerged through pleading in the Syracusan court. Itinerant teachers known as sophists (wise ones) then taught this forensic art alongside logic, a subject which was associated with the new craft of writing. Rhetoric's foremost exponents and analysts were Gorgias, Isocrates, Plato (all 5–4c BC), and Aristotle (4c BC). Of their rhetorical works, however, only Plato's Phaedrus and Aristotle's Rhetoric have survived. As writing became commoner, elements of the oral craft were transferred to prose composition and efforts were made to harmonize the rules of speech and writing with those of logic. The devices of rhetoric, however, did not lose their links with poetry or their practical ties with the law. As a result, rhetoric came to be viewed in two ways: as the high moral and philosophical art of speech and writing, and as a low art of winning arguments and impressing the gullible.

The five canons

Many manuals were compiled on the subject, such as the Latin treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium (‘Oratory for Herennius’: anonymous, 1c BC). These works usually listed five canons or offices of rhetoric, concerned with gathering, arranging, and presenting one's material:

1. Greek heúresis, Latin inventio.

Finding or researching one's material. The speaker or writer assesses an issue and assembles the necessary material.

2. Greek táxis, Latin dispositio.

Arranging or organizing one's material. Here, the orator puts the parts of the discourse in order, starting with the exordium or formal opening, then proceeding with the narration, including the division into various points of view, with proofs and refutations, and closing with the conclusion.

3. Greek léxis, Latin elocutio or educatio.

The fitting of language to audience and context, through any of three styles: the high-and-grand, the medium, and the low-and-plain. Included in this ‘style’ section are the traditional rhetorical devices and figures of speech.

4. Greek hupókrisis, Latin pronuntiatio or actio.

Performance, including the arsenal of techniques to be used in proclaiming, narrating, or in effect acting. This aspect was concerned with live audiences but also covered work on papyrus and parchment.

5. Greek mnḗmē, Latin memoria.

Training of the mind, to ensure accurate recall and performance in public assembly or court of law.

In all such discourse, the speaker could appeal to páthos (the emotions, the heart), to lógos (reason; the head), and/or to êthos (character; morality).

Roman rhetoric

Republican Rome shared the Greek interest in debate and legal argument, and therefore considered rhetoric essential to public life. Classics like Aristotle's Rhetoric were augmented by the lawyer Cicero (2–1c BC), who produced among other works the De inventione (On Making your Case) and the De oratore (On Being a Public Speaker), and by Quintilian (1c AD), author of the Institutio oratoria or Institutiones oratoriae (Foundations of Oratory). The systematization of rhetoric served the Empire well, helping to develop Latin as a language of literacy throughout the dominions. Imperial Rome, however, generally discouraged free and democratic debate, with the result that style and effect became more important than integrity.

Medieval and Renaissance rhetoric

Aristotle and Cicero had a profound influence on education in medieval Christendom. Through the works of Martianus Capella (5c), Cassiodorus (5–6c), and St Isidore of Seville (6–7c), their principles became part of Scholasticism, leading to the trivium (the three ways) of grammar, rhetoric, and logic-cum-dialectic, studied by aspirants to Latin learning and clerical orders. The trivium was the foundation for the quadrivium (the four ways) of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music-cum-harmony. Together, these made up ‘the seven liberal arts’, the core programme of theocratic and general education. Cicero had been the first to use the phrase artes liberales (liberal arts), the model not only for medieval and Renaissance scholarly debate but for contemporary liberal arts colleges and degrees and the education they seek to provide. When the complete text of Quintilian was rediscovered in a Swiss monastery in 1416, it helped animate the revival of classical learning known as the Renaissance. Scholars like Peter Ramus (16c), however, saw rhetoric less as a way of developing speech than as a means of teaching writing, whose importance was much greater than in classical times, both to the Church and the new nation-states. The five ancient canons were reorganized, assigning invention and disposition to dialectic and largely ignoring memory (although learning by heart remained a prime element in education). Renaissance rhetoric served the growth of literacy in the vernaculars as well as Latin, focusing on composition, style, and the figures of speech.

Rhetoric and English

During and after the Renaissance, rhetoric dominated education in the humanities in England, Scotland, and France, remaining little changed until the later 19c. During this period, the ancient tension between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rhetoric continued, as the following extracts indicate. The first, from The Schoolmaster ( Roger Ascham, 1563), praises Cicero and everything Latinate; the second, from Hudibras ( Samuel Butler, 1663) mocks the ornate and empty:
Ascham. There is a way, touched in the first book of Cicero De oratore, which, wisely brought into schools, truly taught, and constantly used, would not only take wholly away this butcherly fear in making of Latins but would also, with ease and pleasure and in short time, as I know by good experience, work a true choice and placing of words, a right ordering of sentences, an easy understanding of the tongue, a readiness to speak, a facility to write, a true judgment both of his own and other men's doings, what tongue soever he doth use.
Butler. For rhetoric, he could not ope His mouth but out there flew a trope; And when he happened to break off In the middle of his speech, or cough, He had hard words ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by.

The fragmentation of rhetoric that began in the Renaissance created whole new subjects in succeeding centuries. The third and fourth canons (elocution and pronunciation) became in the 18c courses in ‘proper’ speech, taught by actors like Thomas Sheridan and John Walker, both of whom published pronouncing dictionaries of English.

During the 17–19c, the methods of Cicero and Quintilian were standard in British and American universities. Yet, while students learned the classical languages and their rhetoric, their teachers were often in the forefront of change to English. The Scottish scholar Adam Smith chose English rather than Latin when giving his lectures; his friend Hugh Blair was appointed to the first chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the U. of Edinburgh in 1762, the precursor of all chairs of English language and literature around the world. In 1806, the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Massachusetts, was John Quincy Adams (later sixth US president). He was charged to instruct students in accordance with the models and exercises of Quintilian, but when Francis J. Child occupied the same chair in 1851, it was as Professor of English. In 18c society at large, issues of judgement and taste became more important than aesthetics and rhetoric, and among Romantics in the 18c and 19c freedom and feeling were more intriguing than discipline and refinement. As the 19c progressed, the ancient theorists became of less and less interest, except to classical scholars, and rhetoric became for many either the (empty) forms of public speaking or the study of writing and composition in schools. Some of the ancient aims and practices were, however, sustained in the debating societies of British universities and the departments of speech and public address in US colleges.

Conclusion

The ancient rhetoricians assumed that truth was absolute and separable from a text. Many 20c critics and scholars, however, see truth as relative and texts as self-contained objects whose ‘truth’ is re-made by every reader. The ancients regarded discourse as dynamic, embodying an intention and a design fitted to an audience, much as politicians and lawyers still see it. Many present-day literary critics, however, see discourses and especially texts as complete in themselves and distinct from their creators, the intention and ideas of the creator having reduced importance or no importance at all if they are not directly shown in the text. The dynamic therefore lies not with the writer but with the reader, in the re-creation of meaning. The emphasis has accordingly been on structure, coherence, and interpretation rather than on creation and the techniques of dissimulation that may accompany it, except insofar as these can be deconstructed to reveal a variety of possible interpretations. Even so, classical rhetoric survives. It has given shape to much of the Western world's inheritance of oracy and literacy. Everyone who speaks and writes a Western language or any language influenced by the forensic and literary traditions of the West is willy-nilly affected by it. Anyone who speaks in public or writes for professional purposes engages in the processes first listed in the five canons. In journalism and publishing, on radio and television, in the theatre and cinema, the old names may or may not be known, but the tools continue to be used.

See DISCOURSE, ELOCUTION, FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, GRAMMAR, IRONY, PLAYING WITH WORDS, RHETORICAL QUESTION, STYLE.

rhetoric The art of persuasion by public speaking. This was studied intensively in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and the gospels and the epistles of Paul reflect some of the techniques that had to be mastered. Amongst the teaching methods of Jesus, his use of parables was pre-eminent. The gospels employ the standard rhetorical device of comparison: Jesus is shown to be greater than Moses (the greatest of the Hebrews), and John the Baptist the Baptist, the Temple, Jonah, and Solomon. The purpose is to enhance the significance of Jesus. Paul's epistles, though written for particular needs and with characteristics not unlike many of the personal notes and business letters discovered in papyri from the Egyptian desert, are not without rhetorical devices, e.g. Philemon 11, 2 Cor. 6: 4 ff.; 2 Cor. 11: 22 ff.

rhetoric, in Greek, the art of speaking so as to persuade, was from the first tied up with ethics (persuasion of what is true) and literature (use of language in order to please). It was a branch of the medieval Trivium and therefore an important part of the school syllabus up to the 17th cent. Literary rhetoric is concerned with the organization (inventio and dispositio) and embellishment (elocutio) of works. The first of these is prominent in many 18th-cent. works (Tristram Shandy and A Tale of a Tub, for instance), and the second is important in its provision of poetic ‘devices’ (figures and tropes) in poets from Chaucer to the present day.

rhetoric the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques; language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but which is now often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.

In the Middle Ages, rhetoric was counted as one of the seven liberal arts; the word comes via Old French and Latin from Greek.
rhetorical question a question asked not for information but to produce an effect, e.g. who cares? for nobody cares.

rhet·o·ric / ˈretərik/ • n. the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, esp. the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques. ∎  language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content: all we have from the opposition is empty rhetoric.

rhetoric Art of discourse and persuasive speaking; language, written or spoken, designed to impress or persuade. Rhetoric is valued in public speaking, but the sophistication of many of its modern techniques may have led rhetoricians – such as politicians – to be more distrusted by a better-informed public.

RHETORIC.

This entry includes two subentries:

rhetoric see oratory .

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