Sticky judgement and the role of rhetoric

Informal Logic, 1993

Prudence has long been an important topic for rhetorical theorists and its place in intellectual history is becoming increasingly well documented. This essay develops a conception of prudence as an ideological construct, a term crafted in the history of its public usages to govern the relationship between common sense and political action as enacted in the name of historically situated social actors. From this perspective, prudence represents the recursive interaction between a rhetoric of judgment and the grounds on which that rhetoric is evaluated by a historically particular community of arguers. A case study of the 1991 U.S. Senate debate regarding the authorization of offensive military action in the Persian Gulf illustrates how competing standards of prudential judgment are crafted and evaluated in discursive controversy.

If we are to follow Michael Billig’s lead in our inquiries into how our own human capacity to think works, and how we come to develop such a capacity in the first place, we must move from thinking in static forms to thinking in terms of our dynamic involvements out in the world with the others and othernesses around us. We must change our attitudes, our orientations, what we focus on and pick out for further study, the ways in which we relate ourselves to our surroundings as we live our lives and move around within them. We must allow the fact of our immersion in an unending flow of complicated activity continually going on around us to play a part in determining what and who we are to ourselves. We cannot continue with what seems to be the mass illusion of our time, that single individual persons are already finished wholes unto themselves, and that at best we construct relations with the few others around us, whilst we forget that our ways of being, our styles of thought and talk, our values and what we care about, and much more, all emerge from the dynamic intermingling of strands of flowing activity within which we are already immersed.

Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 2009

The uneasy relationship between deliberation and rhetoric Public talk in different institutional settings has always been a central element of politics, and the study of rhetoric has traditionally dealt with this topic. Although theories of deliberative democracy are also about public discourses, rhetoric is often considered a non-deliberative type of speech, alongside with bargaining, story-telling and testimony. The aim of rhetoric is to convince members of the audience in order to strengthen their convictions, to change their minds, or to encourage them to act in a desired manner. Understood as persuasive discourse, rhetoric can be regarded as a form of conduct where people are treated instrumentally. This appears to be at odds with the normative ideals of deliberative democracy requiring that people are treated as autonomous and equal beings. Because a rhetorician is primarily interested in making a particular impact on an audience, rhetoric does not seem to encourage such weighing and judging of arguments which is central in deliberative democracy. Moreover, rhetoric often includes appeals to emotions whereas reasonable and rational argumentation is the centerpiece of deliberative democracy. Rhetoric also appears to entail an asymmetrical relationship between a speaker and the audience, whereas deliberation involves a reciprocal process of mutual justification. Rhetoric may thus be mono

Deeds and Days, 2016

2013

There was recently an attempt to correlate some sectors of the studies on argumentation and the theory of democracy. The relationship between these two areas concerns the fact that in both cases there is a ignificant interest in normative models of good argumentation. In these models there is no place for rhetoric. Our work has a twofold aim: (1) to show that,starting from the Aristotelian rhetoric, it is possible to develop a more suitable model of argumentation in the public sphere and (2) to doubt the very need to identify normative constraints for this type of argument.

The Journal of Politics, 2021

The revival of scholarly interest in political rhetoric is salutary, but has unnecessarily focused on defending only the kind of rhetoric whose end is to persuade listeners to change their judgments. In this article, I explore an additional style of rhetoric that has another aim: that of motivating or inspiriting listeners to support with vigorous action a judgment already made. Such rhetoric is not simply a species of persuasive rhetoric, and therefore must be justified on its own terms. I argue that motivational rhetoric is fundamentally linked to a particular psychological phenomenon: akrasia, or weakness of will. Through an examination of classical theorists of rhetoric, as well as contemporary debates and empirical research, I attempt to distinguish motivational rhetoric from its persuasive counterpart and make a preliminary defense for it as a legitimate mode of political speech.

Italian Society of Philosophy of Language, 2016

The aim of this paper is to discuss and criticize – from Aristotle, through Perelman, to Mouffe – the traditional view of rhetoric as a " peace " of words. The principal purpose is to show that it is necessary to understand how rhetoric, and its practice, can represent a real opportunity to question consensus, to disturb it, and that this can be good for the social process and the political space. Democracy cannot be well practiced without rhetoric, without a transmission of rhetorical tools with which individuals can raise their voice with, but also against, others – and their consensus. A well-understood use of rhetoric could rightly be seen as a "school" for practicing disagreement, and how to accept the vulnerability that results from this.

Rhetoric Review, 2011

Argumentation, 2023

The core function of argumentation in a democratic setting must be to constitute a modality for citizens to engage differences of opinion constructively -for the present but also in future exchanges. To enable this function requires acceptance of the basic conditions of public debate: that consensus is often an illusory goal which should be replaced by better mastery of living with dissent and compromise. Furthermore, it calls for an understanding of the complexity of real-life public debate which is an intermixture of claims of fact, definition, value, and policy, each of which calls for an awareness of the greater 'debate environment' of which particular deliberative exchanges are part. We introduce a rhetorical meta-norm as an evaluation criterion for public debate. In continuation of previous scholarship concerned with how to create room for differences of opinion and how to foster a sustainable debate culture, we work from a civically oriented conception of rhetoric. This conception is less instrumental and more concerned with the role of communication in public life and the maintenance of the democratic state. A rhetorical meta-norm of public argumentation is useful when evaluating public argumentation -not as the only norm, but integrated with specific norms from rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and formal logic. We contextualise our claims through an example of authentic contemporary public argumentation: a debate over a biogas generator in rural Denmark.