Rhetorical Unconscious

The Rhetorical Unconscious of Argumentation Theory:
Toward a Deep Rhetoric

Author(s): James Crosswhite
Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2013), pp. 392-414
Published by: Penn State University Press
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The Rhetorical Unconscious of
Argumentation Theory: Toward
a Deep Rhetoric
James Crosswhite
a b s t r ac t
The contemporary study of argumentation has produced sophisticated new theories

that attempt to capture norms for evaluating arguments that are much more com-
plex and more suited to actual argumentation than the traditional logical standards.
The most prominent theories also make explicit attempts to distinguish themselves
from rhetorical approaches. Yet, in the case of at least three major systematic theo-
ries of argumentation, a reliance on rhetorical theory persists. Despite denials, each
account ultimately grounds its norms in considerations of reception and audience.
There are good reasons why these theories are attracted to rhetoric, and there are
understandable factors that produce their concern about it. Ultimately, though, the
rhetorical dimension of these theories is one of their major theoretical virtues and
a clear sign of their staying close to the realities of argumentation.
Keywords: Argumentation, rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Ralph

Johnson, Douglas Walton, Van Eemeren and Grootendorst
The contemporary study of argumentation has adopted a fundamentally

rhetorical account of the standards of rationality, although it has also devel-
oped several ways to deny this. One is by obscuring the fact that its stan-
dards of rationality are primarily communicative and that an audience of
some kind is the ultimate judge of the strength of arguments. Another is by
defining “rhetoric” in such a way that it can no longer play any role in pro-
viding rational normativity. I want to challenge these denials by pressing a
single question. The question is: if formal validity is no longer the standard
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2013

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
the rhetorical unconscious of argumentation theory
for evaluating arguments, then exactly what is? I direct this question at three
highly developed, systematic, and genuinely profound contributions to the
theory of argumentation: Ralph Johnson’s account of argument evaluation
in Manifest Rationality; Douglas Walton’s development of genre standards
in The New Dialectic; and Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s
pragma-dialectical approach to assessing the reasonableness of argumenta-
tion. I show that these theories are essentially rhetorical theories, that they
are in alignment with the basic approach of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie
Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, and that contemporary argumenta-
tion theory is in fact part of a movement of convergence between philoso-
phy and rhetoric that began to take shape in the mid-twentieth century.
I begin by elaborating some of the basic principles and features of
a rhetorical approach to the theory of argumentation based on The New
Rhetoric and introducing clarifications and outlining developments
that have occurred since the book’s publication that make the rhetorical
approach clearer.
new rhetorical rhetoric

The fundamental feature that makes The New Rhetoric a new rhetoric is the
place given to audience.1 All argumentation develops in relation to an audi-
ence (1969, 5). The question at issue, the fact that a position needs argu-
mentation at all, the need for clarification, the need for a certain strength
of argumentation, the need to meet objections, the fact that the argumen-
tation is in a specific natural language and medium—all this emerges in
relation to an audience. When it comes to the evaluation of arguments,
the quality of an argument is a function of the quality of the audience that
would be convinced by it (1969, 7–8). The receptivity of an audience is thus
the ultimate source of the force of reasons and the strength of arguments.
Receptivity in this sense is not passive; it is rational agency, and it
involves perception, interpretation, judgment, and evaluation. Conceived as
rational receptivity and agency, audience is an event that occurs in time and
undergoes change. To be receptive to argumentation, to be in audience, is
one of the ways we are, a way we exist as human beings.
What is at stake in argumentation is not simply the acceptability of
dialogue goals or methods, or an attitude toward a proposition, or being
mentally persuaded by reasons, but adherence (1969, 4, 49–54). We attach
ourselves to language and arguments in one way or another. Arguments
carry us toward specific futures. They are our way of moving toward those
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james crosswhite
futures on the basis of reasoned choice. When we attach ourselves to

arguments, we are identifying with the form of life that belongs to a way of
being receptive to arguments.
We are reluctant to submit our reason wholesale to extant conventions
or genres of dialogue or discussion rules when our form of life is at stake,
though in many ordinary cases the stakes may not be this high. We are
reluctant to relinquish our authority because our conception of the future
we desire is never complete and perfectly well formed. Our sense of what is
good is partly implicit. We need the ability to adapt to changes and unfore-
seen situations. We can generate proposals concerning the best way to be
reasonable about our future, and this is, indirectly, what the formal dimen-
sions of our theories of argumentation do. Systems of rules and conventions
are attempts to formulate the kind of reasoning to which a paragon audi-
ence might be receptive; they are attempts to express a conception of the
best possible receptivity and rational agency.
Finally, the study of argumentation is a humanistic endeavor. The
historico-mythic origins of rhetoric lie in the transference of political
authority from gods to human beings and in the political formation of
citizens capable of democracy. Reason is human, and is a form of human
freedom and dignity. Human beings generate different conceptions of rea-
son as part of the history of their freedom.
If all of this is so, then there may well be an audience effect in argumen-
tation theory signaling an inescapable rhetorical reality, even in approaches
that attempt to distinguish themselves very clearly from rhetoric.
johnson’s manifest rationalit y
Ralph Johnson’s Manifest Rationality is an ambitious and systematic

attempt to develop a theory of argument and to bring order and definition
to a number of related efforts and terms: the theory of reasoning, formal
deductive logic, informal logic, rationality, argumentation, argument, dia-
lectic, and many others—including rhetoric. Johnson is mostly interested
in argument as a product, and especially in the evaluation of arguments, but
he also acknowledges that arguments are produced out of the larger context
of the practice of argumentation (2000, 12).
The practice has three important features. First, its purpose is rational
persuasion (2000, 159–60). Rational persuasion requires argumentation that
includes both an “illative core” that contains the rational structure and a “dia-
lectical tier” that acknowledges the need to respond to objections, address
394
competing points of view, and so on. Both dimensions of argumentation are

necessary for a speaker to succeed in rational persuasion. This first feature of
argumentation implicitly contains its second: argumentation is dialectical
(2000, 161). Someone is trying to persuade someone in a rational manner,
and this requires entertaining objections and addressing the questions and
concerns of the person one is attempting to persuade. The argument itself is
often modified in this process. The third feature of argumentation is what
Johnson calls “manifest rationality,” which is to say that argumentation is
not only rational but also transparently so. Manifestness requires that rea-
sonable objections and criticisms be expressed and addressed and that even
misguided criticisms be answered (2000, 161, 163–64).
Johnson is centrally concerned with evaluation, and he draws his pri-
mary evaluative principle from the purpose of argumentation; an argument
is a good one if it achieves its primary purpose of rationally persuading
someone of its conclusion (2000, 190). He sets forth four more specific
criteria for evaluating the illative core: relevance, sufficiency, acceptability,
and truth (2000, 191–206). Johnson also provides criteria for evaluating the
dialectical tier, and he formulates these criteria as three questions: how well
is the arguer able to deal with the standard objections and criticism?; how
well does the argument address itself to alternative positions?; and how well
does the argument deal with consequences/implications?
What is most striking about Johnson’s theory of argument is that it
appears to be elaborated wholly from within a new rhetorical perspective.
For Johnson, argument is produced by social interaction—rational per-
suasion of one person by another. Argumentation is a social practice, and
it develops out of a background social condition that calls for it, often a
condition of controversy. As Johnson puts it, argumentation is “dialectical.”
Arguments themselves develop in dialectical exchanges between arguer
and audience. Argumentation requires an audience that will be rationally
persuaded. One of the four criteria on the grounds of which an argument
is evaluated is “acceptability” by this audience. Given this, how distant can
Johnson’s theory possibly be from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The
New Rhetoric? Among that treatise’s first principles are that all argumen-
tation develops in terms of an audience and that arguments are judged
by audiences (1969, 5, 7–8). This is what differentiates The New Rhetoric’s
theory of argumentation from other theories of reasoning and especially
from logical approaches, at least at midcentury.
However, Johnson goes out of his way to deny that his theory is a rhe-
torical one. In the course of explaining how manifest rationality is a feature
395
james crosswhite
of argumentation, he attempts to draw a defining distinction between

argumentation and rhetoric (2000, 163). He admits that rhetoric can be
rational—that is, that rhetors can try to persuade with reasons. However,
he denies that rhetors are under the constraint of manifest rationality in the
way that arguers are. Even when they have no sufficient responses to offer,
arguers may not ignore objections that would work against their arguments.
Rhetors, on the other hand, are free to ignore possible objections if this
would make their case more persuasive.
Although this is implicitly a kind of stipulative definition of rhetoric that
begs the question—or perhaps, more precisely, obscures it—it is also clearly
a misrepresentation of rhetoric—at least of the rhetoric of The New Rhetoric.
From a new rhetorical point of view, Johnson’s “argumentation” and “rheto-
ric” are both essentially rhetorical. Each develops in relation to an audience,
and the arguments that are produced are in each case judged by an audience.
It is simply that the audience’s demands differ in the two cases. One audi-
ence places very high demands on the arguer when it comes to the matter of
responding to objections, and one audience places unusually low demands on
the arguer—or else is simply unable to think of relevant objections.
Defining rhetoric in terms of a dim or undemanding audience is some-
thing The New Rhetoric rejects from the start:
We have no wish to limit the study of argumentation to one adapted

to a public of ignoramuses. . . . We can easily understand that the
discourse which is most efficacious on an incompetent audience is
not necessarily that which would win the assent of a philosopher.
But why not allow that argumentation can be addressed to every
kind of audience? . . . A change in audience means a change in
the appearance of the argumentation and, if the aim of the argu-
mentation is always to act effectively on minds, in order to make a
judgment of its value we must not lose sight of the quality of the
minds which the argument has succeeded in convincing. (1969, 7)
According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, once we have understood

this, we will realize that the differences in the different demands placed on
arguments are at bottom differences in the qualities of the audiences. We
will ground our evaluative criteria in the kinds of audiences there might be.
For what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call a “universal audience,” the
demand to respond to possible objections would be high. For most “par-
ticular audiences,” the demand would not be so high.
396
Johnson makes a place for audiences in evaluating arguments, but in

this matter of determining exactly which and how many dialectical obliga-
tions an arguer must meet he wants the concept of manifest rationality to
do the work of the audience, the work of human judgment—partly so he
can draw this distinction between “argument” and “rhetoric.” And yet, as he
realizes, it will be hard to get enough specificity from the concept of mani-
fest rationality to say exactly how many and which possible objections must
be made manifest without relying on an audience to provide some limita-
tions. Johnson acknowledges the problem and devotes a separate discussion
to it under the rubric of what he calls “the specification problem” (2000,
327ff.). We return to this issue a little later.
Johnson tries to differentiate rhetoric from argumentation again in his
treatment of informal logic and rhetoric (2000, 268ff.). Informal logic, he
says, is “the normative dimension of the study of argumentation” (2000,
268). Rhetoric, on the other hand, is the study of “effective communication.”
For rhetoric “the rational force of the argument is not and should not be the
only factor in determining outcomes in argumentative space” because ethos
and pathos must also be taken into account (2000, 269). For informal logic,
on the other hand, “the telos of rational persuasion is governed especially
by Logos. It does not deny that Ethos and Pathos have roles to play, but
these are secondary” (2000, 269). Since this is the only place in the book
that Johnson uses “pathos,” and only one of three uses of “ethos,” and since
these terms are nowhere defined, and since their possible rational and argu-
mentative uses are nowhere explained, it is difficult to grasp exactly what is
being claimed here.
In any case, and once more, this account does not seem to connect with
The New Rhetoric’s conception of rhetoric. That treatise simply doesn’t have
much to say about pathos. In fact, it carefully avoids separating ethos and
pathos and logos into discrete categories. The assumption seems to be that
speakers are always characterized by ethos and that audiences are always
characterized by some disposition in their receptivity and that the argumen-
tation and arguments develop partly as a function of this. There are instances
in argumentation when ethos—say, the good will and knowledgeability of
the speaker—can be important rational factors in coming to a conclusion.
Whether these factors are more “primary” or “secondary” may depend on
how many other arguments are available or what an audience especially val-
ues. A theory of argument should account for this. Simply making a general
theoretical claim that sharply distinguishes the rationality of these factors
a priori tilts a theory away from the realities of argumentation. The better
397
james crosswhite
way, once again, is to distinguish among audiences that judge these matters
in different ways. It would be very difficult to account for the “primariness”
or “secondariness” of these factors in actual argumentation without relying
on some human audience for help.
Another difference Johnson marks between his theory and rhetoric
lies in the area of the criteria for argument evaluation, which Johnson has
already described—in relation to evaluating the illative core—as relevance,
sufficiency, acceptability, and truth. Although all have a role to play in eval-
uation, informal logic favors truth over acceptability, while rhetoric favors
acceptability over truth (2000, 271). To explain and defend this idea, he
devotes a later section of the book to what he calls the “integration prob-
lem,” and we move to that discussion shortly.
We turn now, then, from Johnson’s efforts to deny that his theory of
argument is a rhetorical theory to his efforts to establish those parts of
the theory that are supposed to distinguish it from rhetorical theories. He
undertakes this only in the penultimate chapter of Manifest Rationality, in
a chapter titled “Outstanding Issues and the Research Agenda.” One of the
outstanding issues is the specification problem. When discharging dialecti-
cal obligations to respond to challenges, how does one know which chal-
lenges to address? How can one find some limiting or specifying principle?
On what would such a principle be grounded?
Obviously, the requirement cannot be to address all possible challenges.
One cannot address twenty-third century challenges to a premise based
on twenty-first-century science. One will probably not know of the pos-
sible challenges of a member of a small Islamic sect in Northern Africa to
what seems an intuitive ethical premise to most Canadians. The “all pos-
sible challenges” requirement would be far too strong.
Johnson’s best response here is that “the arguer is expected to deal with
what might be called The Standard Objections” (2000, 332). If we add this
requirement to the requirement that arguers address all objections known
to the audience and all objections known to the arguer, then we will have
a complete specification of the dialectical obligation. So let’s look carefully
at this idea of the standard objections. “It is tempting to say,” he says, that
the standard objections are what “anyone familiar with the issue” would
know (2000, 332). This is, however, pretty evidently an audience criterion.
The audience that judges what the standard objections are is an audience
made up of those familiar with the issue. We can understand Johnson’s
tentativeness. He next resorts to metaphor: “The Standard Objections . . .
would refer to that class of salient objections typically or frequently found
398
in the neighborhood of the issue” (2000, 332). But found by whom? It is

difficult to imagine this “neighborhood” as something naturally evident to
just anyone. It can be sighted, as in the previous formulation, only by some-
one familiar with the issue, a kind of expert audience.
Johnson seems to see the quandary quite clearly. He rejects Trudy
Govier’s attempt at specification (1998) in terms of objections “that are taken
seriously by the audience to whom the argument is addressed” because he
is suspicious of solutions that rely too heavily on the audience. He rejects
David Hitchcock’s solution for the same reason. Hitchcock proposes that
the arguer must respond to “any objection which would reasonably be
expected to raise a serious doubt about the cogency of the argument.” Yet,
says Johnson, the “expected” here probably refers to what is expected by an
audience. The discussion ends without a conclusion, except for Johnson’s
commenting that “the whole issue of how to specify the arguer’s dialectical
obligations deserves further study” (2000, 333).
So we have denials that the theory of argumentation can ground itself
in rhetoric. Then we have a kind of return of the repressed when, in address-
ing the specification problem, the most robust proposals turn out to be
rhetorical solutions. Johnson’s response to this is that there must be some
better way that still eludes us. This is the fundamental quandary faced by
informal-logical approaches to argumentation. One wants the self-evident
criteria one had in formal systems of logic, or at least in syllogistic logic,
or at least in statistical forecasts, criteria that would appear to be indepen-
dent of human beings and their variousness. Yet argumentation takes place
in natural languages. It involves reasoning about matters that often admit
disagreement and in fact matters about which conflicting judgments some-
times seem equally reasonable. These are exactly the matters with which
rhetoric has long been concerned. It is not surprising that, even after deni-
als, rhetorical solutions present themselves again and again.
Johnson’s other attempt to distinguish his theory of argumentation
from rhetorical theories occurs later in chapter 11 in his discussion of
the “integration problem” (2000, 336–40). The integration problem is the
theory’s difficulty reconciling truth and acceptability criteria when they
come into conflict. The conflict arises from the purpose of argumentation:
rational persuasion. To be persuasive, an argument must be acceptable to
someone; to persuade rationally, the argument must also meet criteria that
are audience independent.
Johnson has already expressed his judgment on this conflict: rheto-
ric favors acceptability over truth and the theory of argumentation favors
399
james crosswhite
truth over acceptability. The New Rhetoric has it somewhat differently.

For The New Rhetoric, arguments must have rational structure; they must
employ formal argumentative techniques of the kind to which the treatise
devotes over three hundred pages. They must also be grounded in what the
treatise calls “facts” and “truths.” So something like rationality and truth
standards are built into the account.
Yet Johnson has something in sight here. It is not that rhetoric “favors”
acceptability over truth. Since The New Rhetoric does not use the concept
of acceptability, it is difficult to make comparisons. It is fair, however, to
say that its account ultimately grounds judgments about truth in human
beings. We have conceptions of the variousness of things that are indepen-
dent of human beings, things that are good or true or beautiful in them-
selves. These are very important human achievements, and we can’t help
but attempt to conceive such things and orient our lives and societies by
them. Yet they are historical, and they hold sway, to one degree or another,
because human beings judge them to be true and good and beautiful. This
is the rhetorical point of view. We shape ourselves into the best possible
audiences for hearing the different cases for judging matters concerning
truth. We set aside the partiality of which we are aware. We inform our-
selves about the issue. We perform what we like to call “due diligence” on
a philosophical level. Yet, still, any judgment about truth or about a “what”
that serves to ground truth will belong to human history. Out of our his-
torical particularity, we form ourselves into something more—a more ideal
human receptivity and rational agent, an auditoire universel that will make
rational judgments about truth. Truth is grounded in this event of auditoire.
The conflict between a truth criterion and an acceptability criterion is in
this light a conflict between different kinds of audiences—a more universal
audience capable of making good judgments about truth and a more par-
ticular audience without the capability and knowledge required to make
those judgments as well.
Johnson’s own solutions to the integration problem rely on an unex-
plained conception of truth, so it is difficult to offer an exact analysis of how
he resolves it. He examines two distinct cases in terms of three different
argumentative roles—the arguer, the audience, and the evaluator.
In the first case Johnson analyzes, a premise is understood to be false
to the arguer and the evaluator but not to the audience, to whom it is
acceptable. In this case, the argument could not from the arguer’s stand-
point be a good or usable one. If we assume that both the arguer and the
audience believe the premise is true, but the evaluator takes it to be false,
400
then no matter how good the rest of the argument, and regardless of its
being acceptable, the evaluator must “deliver a negative verdict” to the
question “how good is this argument?” (2000, 338). The audience itself
may be “justified” in accepting the argument, but that does not make
the argument a good one. Truth trumps acceptability without difficulty.
Thus, says Johnson, “There is no problem for my theory of evaluation”
(2000, 338).
Well, perhaps not, but that is because the treatment of the case is
wholly rhetorical. We are measuring the argument against the standard
of three different audiences and not against any independent standard of
truth. An argument with a known false premise is not going to be convinc-
ing for anyone, whether that audience is arguer, evaluator, or an actual audi-
ence. And an audience that wrongly believes that a premise is true when it
is known to knowledgeable people to be false is not a very reliable judge of
the quality of the argument. This analysis is thoroughly grounded in audi-
ence considerations. A rhetorical approach would come to the same conclu-
sion with a few small differences. First, in a rhetorical approach, audiences
are explicitly the judges of the quality of arguments, and so the quality of
arguments is a function of the quality of the audiences with which they
would succeed. Second, a rhetorical approach would acknowledge that the
parties that were more knowledgeable were more reliable audiences, perhaps
more universal or paragon or more expert audiences, depending on the
particular case.
In the second case Johnson analyzes, the premise is understood to be
true by the arguer and evaluator but also known to be unacceptable to the
audience. In this case, says Johnson, the arguer has an obligation to argue
for the truth of the premise. For the evaluator, the argument “is not a good
argument as it stands” because it fails to meet the acceptability requirement.
It does not accomplish rational persuasion (2000, 339–40).
There is certainly some irony in this outcome, and it has some of the
unsettling marks of the return of the repressed. Johnson is attempting to
develop a theory of argumentation that favors truth over acceptability, and
yet in this instance, as he admits, “the acceptability requirement takes pre-
cedence” (2000, 340). And it does so in what seems to be a rather unrea-
sonable way. If everything about an argument and the argumentation that
produces it is good and reasonable, and any knowledgeable and reasonable
person would judge so, and the only issue is that an ignorant audience has
a false belief about a premise, Johnson concludes nonetheless that the argu-
ment is not a good one. This judgment is even more radically rhetorical
401
james crosswhite
than that of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, who would admit that the
argument may fail to persuade some actual audience but would not for that
reason judge the argument itself to be a bad one in general. Arguments are
judged in different ways by different audiences. Incompetent or ignorant
audiences may not be the best overall judges, even if they are taken to be
reasonable in their particular contexts.
The upshot here is that, despite the denials, Johnson’s approach is
deeply rhetorical, and because the theory does not fully acknowledge this
and work with this truth, it runs up against problems. I take these irrepress-
ible returns of rhetoric to be a sign of the strength of Johnson’s effort and
his following the arguments through wherever they lead. The denials and
the efforts to displace rhetoric fail because of Johnson’s sustained attempt
to make sense of argumentation and to find the heart of its normative
dimension.
walton’s new dialectic

Douglas Walton’s The New Dialectic is clear about its approach and its ambi-
tions from the very outset. It aims at a new conception of rationality, one
that is especially concerned with the appraisal of arguments. The standard
proposed is pragmatic in that on Walton’s view arguments are evaluated in
light of the purposeful dialogues in which they occur; good arguments con-
tribute to achieving the purpose and bad arguments do otherwise. Thus, in
a general sense, the book’s framework resembles that of pragma-dialectics
and is even a little like Johnson’s. However, with Aristotelian confidence,
Walton informs us that there are in fact six kinds of dialogue: persuasion,
inquiry, negotiation, information seeking, deliberation, and eristic dia-
logues. Each kind of dialogue has its own specific goals and methods for
achieving its goals, and so each has “rules and conventions that exclude cer-
tain kinds of moves” (1998, 9). Good arguments follow these rules and con-
ventions and bad arguments do not. Thus, the genres or idealized “types”
have normative force. They each develop naturally, like comedy and tragedy,
or deliberative and forensic and epidictic rhetoric, and each has its own
telos, toward which in its essence it naturally strives and from which it also
has the potential to stray and so decline. As idealized types, they also have
a kind of pragmatic logic, a structured system of rules that allow one to
progress toward an argumentative goal. Violations of the rules are analo-
gous to logical errors or fallacies. Conformity to type is analogous to proper
logical form.
402
Walton goes into great detail in describing the structure and

expectations and rules and goals associated with each type of dialogue,
and the scope of his achievement is undeniable and in many ways
unmatched. However, I want to stop here and raise some questions. First,
how does Walton make the move from description to evaluation? Why
doesn’t argumentation theory just describe the ways and the degree to
which an argument does and does not conform to generic type expecta-
tions? Where does the evaluative force really come from? Why do genre
rules bind us? On what grounds? We could ask this question both with
respect to the goal we are supposed to have accepted and with respect
to the means that are supposed to have an unavoidable connection with
that goal.
One answer, and Walton sometimes seems to me to go this way, is that
these types have Aristotelian reality—that they really do exist, that they
have in themselves essences and goals, and that we can somehow misunder-
stand our own speech and reason in the same way that we misunderstand
an instance of some other natural kind. Another answer might be that
the theory is not supposed to provide a compelling normativity but just a
broadly conventional one. It gives us good grounds for assessing arguments
in the context of what are matters of agreement among average people as
well as the wise.
This latter answer broaches the notion of agreement, and I believe that
the real answer lies here. There is a working factor of reception without
which the normative potential of the dialogue genre cannot be activated.
As Walton states, “An argument is advanced within a framework or context
of dialogue that defines the goal of argument for each of the participants in
the dialogue” (1998, 10). He understands this essential recognition to be a
fulfillment of one of the central aims of informal logic, which is defining “a
common framework of understanding common to the arguer and the audi-
ence or respondent” (1998, 7). So, it is because the arguer and respondent
or audience have agreed to adhere to the dialogue goals and the means of
achieving them that the goals and means have the normative force they do.
The normative force comes from a mutual commitment to the goals and
methods of the dialogue, a commitment that makes possible and gives force
to the evaluation made of the arguments. For this reason, I would say that
Walton has developed a reception theory of rationality. Argument proceeds
in terms of and has its force as a function of certain characteristics of those
who are to judge it, whether it is the interlocutors themselves or an audi-
ence distinct from them.
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james crosswhite
The New Dialectic is consistent in this approach. Not only in the

introductory development of the philosophical framework of the theory
but also in its later account of the evaluation of licit and illicit dialectical
shifts—shifts from one kind of dialogue to another—argument evaluation
comes down to the judgment of those who receive the argument, usually
the interlocutors themselves. It is their agreement on and commitment to
the purpose of the dialogue and to the means by which to accomplish that
purpose that provide the normativity in the theory. For example, Walton
provides two ways one might judge whether a dialectical shift from one
dialogue type to another is permissible. The first is to ask whether the
new dialogue is “supporting those old goals, or at least allowing forward
movement on their fulfillment, or is . . . blocking them” (1998, 201). This is
the pragmatic question. If the answer is that the shift is continuous with
the goals of the earlier dialogue, then there is no problem and therefore
no need to ask further critical questions. However, if there is doubt, then a
further question must be asked, namely, whether “the shift [was] agreed to
by the original speech partners” or was rather “unilateral, or even forced by
one party” (1998, 201). This is the rhetorical question, and it addresses the
issue of normativity. If there was no agreement, or if there was force, then
the shift was illicit.
I take this merging of a rhetorical criterion into Walton’s approach to
be a strength. Dialogue genres are highly conventionalized forms of speech
and argument; as idealized types, they embody what most of us agree on
most of the time when it comes to the discursive means for achieving a
goal. However, there is no logical or “dialectical” necessity in the relation
between the means and end. Unusual situations may well allow or even
require unusual means. How are such cases to be judged?
How else but by the appropriate audience? A central theme of Walton’s
new theory is that the logic has changed from a logic grounded in a pro-
hibition against asserting contradictory propositions to a “dialectical” logic
grounded in a prohibition against breaking one’s commitments to one’s
dialogue partner, one’s audience. One’s partner, one’s audience, becomes the
judge of when this commitment has been broken both because the type
constraints do not have sufficient normative force and because good rea-
soning requires agreement among dialogue partners that an acceptable goal
is still being pursued. So, when it comes to establishing what is ultimately
normative, the theory becomes an audience-grounded rhetorical theory.
This is not a theme that the book pursues. The emphasis in the final
chapter is on the new dialectical critic of arguments and the tools offered to
404
such a critic by the new dialectical theory. Like Johnson, Walton sometimes
takes the new rhetorical audience function of judging arguments away from
the audience and gives it to a critic. In fact, in this last chapter, Walton
raises the question of rhetoric, noting that “the goal is to study not effec-
tive persuasion, how to actually persuade audiences, but how to critically
evaluate arguments as strong or weak, fallacious or nonfallacious, once we
have the text of discourse of the argument at hand” (1998, 277). However, as
we have seen, there are countertendencies in The New Dialectic to this kind
of simple distinction between effectiveness and argument strength. And I
have mentioned only a few.
Throughout the book, there is reference, in the context of evaluating an
argument in a dialogue, to the need of determining what kind of dialogue
it was—and I quote the phrase used over and over again in the book—
“supposed to be.” The critic must know what kind of dialogue a dialogue
was supposed to be in order to know how to evaluate the arguments used
in it. The question is: supposed to be by whom? It must be someone. The
question arises because the textual and contextual indications for deter-
mining what kind of dialogue a dialogue is are not always sufficient for
coming to a conclusion. So who are the ones who have supposed it to be
one kind of dialogue or another? This would be the audience for whom
we are searching, the ones who have agreed on the goals and the means of
achieving them. Presumably this would be the interlocutors in the dialogue;
however, it might also be some other audience, one to whom jurisdiction is
appropriately granted.
Walton faces this question again in an interesting discussion in his
chapter on dialectical shifts. He is addressing the problem of finding evi-
dence that an interlocutor has shifted dialogue forms in order to deceive a
dialogue partner, an audience. “The key factor in making normative judg-
ments about argumentation in such a case,” he states, “is the need to look
backwards and to determine, on the basis of the textual and contextual
evidence, what type of dialogue the arguers were supposed to have been
engaged in at the outset of their verbal exchange” (1998, 205). He goes on
to note that “some cases of retrospective evaluation are based on an explicit
agreement by the two parties to take part in a certain type of dialogue.
In other cases, conventions and institutions enable us to clearly make this
determination” (1998, 205). So far so good. We are entitled to make rea-
sonable judgments about the audience for the argument on these grounds.
However, he further suggests that “in many cases of argumentation in every-
day conversation, such agreements are implicit and can be determined only
405
james crosswhite
by making a contextual judgment of the expectations of the p articipants,

by looking at the evidence given through their verbal exchanges, as the
sequence of arguments proceed” (1998, 205).
Such agreements must be discovered because, as we have seen, it is
these agreements that provide normative force to the rules and conven-
tions associated with the dialogue form. There is no reception, no experi-
ence of the force of the argument, without access to these agreements, these
commitments to the purpose of the dialogue. The critic needs retrospective
vision to discover them, but the critic also needs to access the relatively
intimate receptivity of the interlocutors in their roles as audience for one
another. We seem to be building a conception here of an ideal audience for
the argument in the form of the new dialectical critic, one who has rather
extraordinary knowledge.
Walton concludes that “in some cases, it is not clear to the participants
themselves, or to anyone else, exactly what type of dialogue they were sup-
posed to be engaging in when they had an argumentative exchange, and
it is precisely this indeterminacy that is often exploited by deceitful and
fallacious arguments.” This is something like the new dialectician’s night-
mare, and it is caused by the fact that the audience, as the requisite form of
receptivity, has collapsed into disorder. The “supposed to be” of the dialogue
has lost its ground. There is no audience who knows what the dialogue
was supposed to be. Walton’s resigned response is that “in evaluating such
arguments, the best we can do is to make a conditional judgment that such
and such an argument would be fallacious if evaluated from the point of
view and standards of argumentation appropriate for a particular type of
dialogue.” (1998, 205–6). That is, with no audiences, no agreements or com-
mitments, there is no argument evaluation of specific arguments, just hypo-
thetical judgments. Normativity in the new dialectic ultimately requires
grounding in audiences, and so the new dialectic is ultimately another
branch of the new rhetoric.
frans van eemeren and rob grootendorst:

pragma-dialectics
Van Eemeren and Grootendorst begin their volume A Systematic Theory
of Argumentation with a definition. “Argumentation,” they say, “is a verbal,
social, and rational activity aimed at convincing a reasonable critic of the
acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of proposi-
tions justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint”
406
(2004, 1). “Acceptability” looms large in this definition. It is not validity or

knowledge or truth that is the aim—at least not directly—but establishing
the acceptability of a standpoint. The “reasonable critic” also stands out.
Not only is some general logical or rational acceptability the aim, but there
is also an audience that must be convinced of this acceptability, a “reason-
able critic.” It is the goal, the purpose of the argumentation, to convince
this reasonable critic of the acceptability of a standpoint. The rest of the
introduction to the volume glosses this definition, elaborating on these
notions of acceptability and a reasonable critic in interesting ways. The
book appears to be announcing what might justifiably be called a rhetoric
of argumentation since the notion of an audience that must be convinced of
the acceptability of a standpoint occupies central stage in the definition. In
fact, several critics have read the book in just this way and have complained
that this reduces argumentation to mere rhetorical effectiveness, to relativ-
ism, and so on.
However, matters are not that simple. The definition retains the abstract
and formal notion of a proposition, and it is concerned with acceptability,
a property of a standpoint (also a formal and abstract notion), and not
acceptance, which would involve the real receptivity of an audience. And
yet the introduction and first chapter of the book do tend to amplify these
notions of acceptability and of a reasonable reception by a critic in ways that
strengthen the idea that the theory has a strong rhetorical dimension. The
“reasonable critic,” the listener, the reader, the wise rabbi, all make central
appearances, in conformity with the definition. In fact, when a distinction
is made between the descriptive and the normative aspects of the theory,
the normative is defined by its reference to the reasonable critic (2004, 10).
Yet Van Eemeren and Grootendorst also strive to make important
distinctions between their own approach and a rhetorical approach. They
adopt Toulmin’s characterization of three kinds of reasonableness: geo-
metrical, anthropological, and critical. The geometrical approach relies on
an axiomatic method of demonstration, and though clearly rational, it is
not fitting for all the matters about which people argue, and Van Eemeren
and Grootendorst even call it antiargumentative. The “anthropological”
approach, or, as they call it, “anthropo-relativistic,” holds that argumenta-
tion is acceptable “if the argumentation complies with the standards that
apply to the people in whose cultural community the argumentation takes
place” (2004, 14). This, they say, is the position of The New Rhetoric. The criti-
cal rationalistic view, which is theirs, draws from the geometric view in that
it relies on independent, formal, procedural rules for a critical discussion
407
james crosswhite
but is pragmatically tempered in that the rules are valid only insofar as they
enable the discussants to resolve their differences of opinion. This is what
they call the criterion of problem validity. However, their critical rationalis-
tic view also includes a criterion of intersubjective validity, drawn from the
“anthropological” perspective, that acknowledges the variations of discus-
sants in time and place and keeps the approach’s idealized model of argu-
ment in touch with ordinary argumentation as it actually occurs. According
to this approach, the answer to the question of when an argumentation
should be regarded as acceptable is: when “the argumentation is an effective
means of resolving a difference of opinion in accordance with discussion
rules acceptable to the parties involved” (2004, 16).
Although one thrust of this synthetic approach is to incorporate a
rhetorical element into the criterion of acceptability, van Eemeren and
Grootendorst follow it by distinguishing more sharply between the anthro-
pological approach and the critical-rational approach of pragma-dialectics.
They take their rabbi, their idealized audience for philosophical reflection,
through a careful consideration of the differences between the two, in which
rhetoric takes a bit of a beating. In the end the rabbi disappears into the
voice of the narrator who created him and who tells us that the rhetorical
and dialectical research programs are both valuable and yet distinct—but
that the choice is for the dialectical research program. Yet the rhetorical
dimension continues to ride along inside this program in the form of the
notion of acceptability, especially as it is related to the discussion rules that
define the reasonable procedures of a critical dialogue.
The question of whether critical rationalism and pragma-dialectics can
contain the tensions between the rhetorical and the dialectical is pursued
in chapter 6, “Rules for a Critical Discussion,” where the question of the
source of normativity is explored. However, the accounts there reproduce
the “inclusive” account, without completely clarifying the relation between
the formal element and the audience element in relation to normativity.
There is, though, a continuing attempt to separate critical rationalism from
the rhetorical approach. In the critique of audience-oriented consensus
accounts of reasonableness, Van Eemeren and Grootendorst mention
De Groot’s (1984) idea of a “forum of scientists or scholars who ultimately
decide on methods, rules, and criteria” (2004, 125). However, they note that
De Groot himself finds it impossible to specify exactly who belongs to this
forum. They conclude that “a better way of solving the problem . . . seems
to be to approach it from the opposite direction by first determining which
discussion rules apply and then examining which researchers observe these
408
rules” (2004, 126). This makes it sound as if there were some way to establish
the rules independently of reasonably convincing someone of them.
However, when push comes to shove, Van Eemeren and Grootendorst
will never really say this. They will charge audience-oriented thinkers such
as Toulmin and Perelman with anthropo-relativism, but they will always
continue to include “intersubjective validity” or “acceptability” as a counter-
balance to what might otherwise seem to be the arbitrariness of the rules for
a critical discussion and of the underlying principle of pragma-dialectics:
that the “starting point” for critical rationalists is to subject all fields of
human thought and activity to critical scrutiny (2004, 131). In this approach,
they say, conducting a critical discussion is the “point of departure” for
any conception of reasonableness. However, lest there be any doubt about
the source of normativity, they also state very clearly that “the rules of the
pragma-dialectical discussion procedure pertain to the behavior of people
who want to resolve their differences of opinion by means of a critical dis-
cussion” (2004, 135).
This must need saying because the rules do not pertain to people who
do not want to follow the rules of a critical discussion. As in Walton’s
approach, the discussants’ receptivity and commitment to (in this case criti-
cally rationally grounded) discussion rules generates the normativity. The
approach is rhetorical—which I once again regard as a sign of its strength
and its humanism.
The commitment people make to each other to pursue certain goals by
certain specific limited means obligates them to act in certain ways toward
one another, and it is in this commitment that the normativity of the rules
is grounded. The rules are in this sense ethical rules that codify the actions
that will constitute the keeping of a commitment. At the same time, the
commitment establishes the interlocutors as audiences and judges for each
other. In fact, in making the commitment, they are already acting as univer-
sal audiences by judging that the rules are indeed reasonable. Without this
audiencing, the establishment of an auditoire, there would be no normative
force for the discussion rules.
Although it does not appear in A Systematic Theory of Argumentation,
Van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser have a unique and disarming way of
denying that pragma-dialectics has a rhetorical soul. They make this denial
by distinguishing the standard pragma-dialectical theory from its rhetori-
cal “complement.” Yet they also want to include this rhetorical comple-
ment as part of the more general pragma-dialectical program. The divide
is this. Dialectic in pragma-dialectics is “a method for dealing with critical
409
james crosswhite
exchanges in verbal communication and interaction ‘that amounts to the

pragmatic application of logic, a collaborative method of putting logic
into use so as to move from conjecture and opinion to more secure belief ’”
(2006, 383). People make an implicit commitment to this dialectic when
they engage in argumentation to resolve a difference of opinion. They agree
to maintain certain standards of reasonableness (2000, 295). Rhetoric, on
the other hand, is “the theoretical study of the potential effectiveness of
argumentative discourse in convincing or persuading an audience in actual
argumentative practice” (2006, 383). People who engage in argumentation
not only agree to recognize the norms involved in trying to resolve a dif-
ference of opinion but also aim to resolve the difference of opinion in their
own favor (2000, 295). This attempt to resolve matters in one’s own favor
gives rise to “strategic maneuvering,” sometimes within dialectical con-
straints and sometimes outside of them.
Van Eemeren (2010) has followed up on this in what is, on its own
terms, a magnificent and systematic development of the idea. I can by no
means do justice to his accomplishment here, which is substantial and
shows a powerful and thoughtful deepening of his interest in rhetoric.2 I
wish only to point out here how this definition of rhetoric and its being
linked to strategic maneuvering diverts attention from the real presence of
rhetoric within the dialectic of pragma-dialectics. This prevents the real pres-
ence of the rhetoric within from being recognized and denies rhetoric its
own name. The repressed is openly acknowledged and welcomed—only not
as itself. That is successful denial. From a new rhetorical point of view, the
fact that pragma-dialectical rules of discussion depend on an audience for
their normativity establishes that the philosophical grounding of pragma-
dialectics is in rhetoric—a philosophical rhetoric, but rhetoric nonetheless.3
Further, a similar issue is at stake in the characterization of the prob-
lem that the account of strategic maneuvering is supposed to address. The
problem is the split between reasonable dialectic, on the on hand, and
effective “rhetoric,” on the other. The strategic maneuvering component of
pragma-dialectics aims to conjoin them by subjecting rhetoric’s legitimate
(but excessive) interest in effectiveness to the discipline of dialectic and the
limitations imposed by reasonableness. For the new rhetoric of Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca and similar rhetorical theories of argumentation, this
begs the question by defining dialectic and rhetoric in a way that makes
them essentially distinct, as having different goals and so a propensity to
come into conflict with one another. The entire thrust of the new rheto-
ric project is to reject this assumption and to show how in fact dialectic
410
and rhetoric can be unified in a rhetorical framework. The great irony here
is that Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (and Walton and Johnson) have
already implicitly supported the new rhetoric project by grounding norma-
tivity in audience considerations.
One may ask what hangs on this, since it appears that much of the dis-
agreement may come down to the question of what counts as a rhetorical
theory—whether a theory of argumentation that grounds normativity in
audience considerations is ipso facto a rhetorical theory. There may be room
for disagreement here, especially given some of the traditional meanings
of “dialectic.” However, clarifying the philosophical grounding of reason-
ableness is important. Highlighting the rhetorical grounding emphasizes
the historicity of reason and emphasizes, too, the inseparability of ideals
of reason from certain forms of life and certain philosophical frameworks.
Reasonableness is a historical and cultural accomplishment. This recogni-
tion can be a remedy for the hubris that often attends theories of a more
autonomous rationality, and yet it confirms that reason is a hard-won
human achievement and that it needs and deserves our protection as we
weather, together, torrential time.
toward a deep rhetoric

These hidden layers of rhetorical thinking, however much they are denied,
are ultimately signs of the strength and humanism of the theory of argu-
mentation. The theory of argumentation has faced an essential dilemma in
its development since 1958, the year Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument
and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle
rhétorique appeared. The development of a modern theory of argumenta-
tion is defined by two realizations. First, normative criteria appropriate for
a strictly logical approach are simply not adequate for evaluating the kinds
of arguments that are most common and important in our lives and our
societies. Second, we nevertheless do have a strong, enduring, implicit sense
that ordinary arguments about important matters really can be judged in
reasonable, justifiable ways—and our experience often confirms that sense.
The theory of argumentation is an attempt to make explicit that which we
sense implicitly, to illuminate the ways we reason and make choices when
we do so reasonably and well.
The dilemma for the theory of argumentation has to do with the
source of the normativity in judgments about the strength or goodness of
arguments. On the shores of the land they have left behind, theorists of
411
james crosswhite
argumentation can still see the clear white-bright lights of mathematical

proofs and logical validity—sources of normativity that seem independent
of the human variousness that makes agreement on judging arguments so
difficult. On the distant shore toward which they seem to be moving lies
rhetoric, that ancient discipline associated with the rise of democracy that
studies the way people actually do reason successfully under conditions in
which certainty is not achievable—in political life, in courts of justice, even
in households and everyday life and in inner deliberations. And yet on the
shore of rhetoric, the sources of normativity are varied. They are functional.
They provide light. They allow judgments about the strength and good-
ness of arguments, but these vary across human groups. There are no final
judgments, just more work, more talking, more dialogue, more coming
together and searching for arguments, more achieving whatever universal-
ity is possible.
Theorists of argumentation have been heading directly for that shore,
and yet they cannot quite come to terms with this fact. They see there the
specter of a relativism that will defeat the aims of a theory of reason. In
their various theoretical efforts, they attempt to combine formal crite-
ria for judging arguments with rhetorical ones and so to achieve a the-
ory of the open water, the in-between, an informal logic. They emphasize
pragma-dialectical rules, or generic conventions, or other formal criteria
and requirements. They deny that they are developing rhetorical theories.
Yet each of the three major theories considered here is at bottom rhetorical
and manifests a deep and ultimate reliance on an audience of some kind as
its source of normativity. This ultimate reliance is the defining feature of a
rhetorical theory. It is interesting to recall in this context that although The
New Rhetoric is a paradigm example of a rhetorical theory of argumenta-
tion, it is also taken up mainly with what we might call formal matters:
techniques of argumentation, or argument schemata. These are the meeting
places of the interlocutors and audiences who would otherwise be prison-
ers to their variousness. In this respect, rhetorical theory has the same aim
as informal logic—to balance the variousness of audiences with the formal
tools that allow them to meet and come to agreement.
Yet the anxiety that rhetorical approaches would undermine the theory
of argumentation and reduce it to a kind of history or sociology or anthro-
pology or to a psychologism—that anxiety is difficult to overcome. The con-
cern itself is legitimate, but one must wonder whether it is not misplaced. It
was after all a concern of Perelman (a philosopher) and Olbrechts-Tyteca,
who distinguished their work from psychology by pointing to its focus on
412
“argumentative structures” and claiming, as philosophers would, that their

study of argumentative structures “must precede all experimental tests of
their effectiveness” and that “the methodology of psychologists is itself an
object of controversy and lies within the scope of our study” (1969, 9).
Again, it is important to highlight the rhetorical undergirding of the
theory of argumentation because audience is a human event, a human way
of being, and rhetoric clarifies the human ground of argumentation. Human
beings have a defining but very difficult-to-clarify sense of what is true and
what is good and what is reasonable. Norms and rules and genres and con-
ventions and argumentation itself arise out of these facts and this experience
and this perduring sense of what is good, and they are grounded in them.
Yet human beings are also complex, changeable, cultural, historical. They
learn new things. They create history and then have to live with the ceaseless
changes they have set in motion. They have complicated and often hidden
motives and hopes and experiences. The theory of argumentation requires
attention and adaptation to all these complexities because the normative
force of arguments lies in human receptivity and in human judgment—in our
capacity to become audiences, to be the judges of arguments. Reason belongs
to human history. This lays on us a task and a responsibility that has no end.
Department of English
University of Oregon
notes
1. The New Rhetoric’s word for audience, “auditoire,” has meanings that are much
broader than the English word suggests. They include both an environment and a process
for speaking and hearing. Think of a hearing or a legal hearing or a hearing room.
2. Christopher Tindale (2006) has analyzed this effort from a rhetorical point of
view and tracks the rhetorical pea under the cup very carefully. Van Eemeren’s deepen-
ing interest in rhetoric can also be seen in his sympathetic and generous treatment of
Perelman in “Argumentation Theory After the New Rhetoric” (2009).
3. Van Eemeren seems to acknowledge something like this, although from a differ-
ent point of view: “If Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s . . . ‘universal audience’ represents
an ideal that is connected with achieving problem-validity it may be expected to employ
similar norms as those incorporated in the rules for critical discussion” (2010, 32n18). In
fact, it appears to me that the distinction between the acceptability criterion in pragma-
dialectics and the audience in strategic maneuvering mirrors The New Rhetoric’s distinction
between a universal audience and a particular one.
413
james crosswhite
works cited
Govier, Trudy. 1998. “Arguing Forever?; or, Two Tiers of Argument Appraisal.” In
Argumentation and Rhetoric, ed. Hans V. Hansen, Christopher W. Tindale,
and Athena Colman. St. Catharine’s: Ontario Society for the Study of
Argumentation. CD-ROM.
Johnson, Ralph. 2000. Manifest Rationality. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on
Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Tindale, Christopher. 2006. “Constrained Maneuvering: Rhetoric as a Rational
Enterprise.” Argumentation 20 (4): 447–66.
van Eemeren, Frans H. 2009. “Argumentation Theory After The New Rhetoric.” L’analisi
linguistica e letteraria 17 (1): 119–48.
———. 2010. Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse: Extending the Pragma-
Dialectical Theory of Argumentation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst. 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation:
The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter Houtlosser. 2000. “Rhetorical Analysis Within a
Pragma-Dialectical Framework.” Argumentation 14 (3): 293–305.
———. 2006. “Strategic Maneuvering: A Synthetic Recapitulation.” Argumentation 20 (4):
381–92.
Walton, Douglas. 1998. The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
414

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The Rhetorical Unconscious of Argumentation Theory:

Toward a Deep Rhetoric

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The contemporary study of argumentation has produced sophisticated new theories

Keywords: Argumentation, rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Ralph

The contemporary study of argumentation has adopted a fundamentally

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2013

new rhetorical rhetoric

futures on the basis of reasoned choice. When we attach ourselves to

johnson’s manifest rationalit y

Ralph Johnson’s Manifest Rationality is an ambitious and systematic

competing points of view, and so on. Both dimensions of argumentation are

of argumentation, he attempts to draw a defining distinction between

We have no wish to limit the study of argumentation to one adapted

According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, once we have understood

Johnson makes a place for audiences in evaluating arguments, but in

in the neighborhood of the issue” (2000, 332). But found by whom? It is

truth over acceptability. The New Rhetoric has it somewhat differently.

walton’s new dialectic

Walton goes into great detail in describing the structure and

The New Dialectic is consistent in this approach. Not only in the

by making a contextual judgment of the expectations of the p ­ articipants,

frans van eemeren and rob grootendorst:

(2004, 1). “Acceptability” looms large in this definition. It is not validity or

exchanges in verbal communication and interaction ‘that amounts to the

toward a deep rhetoric

argumentation can still see the clear white-bright lights of mathematical

“argumentative structures” and claiming, as philosophers would, that their

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by making a contextual judgment of the expectations of the p articipants,