Philosophy & Rhetoric

When considering the interactions between rhetoric and argumentation, readers of this journal will no doubt be reminded of the seminal work of Henry W. Johnstone Jr. (1959; 1978) who gathered both concerns together in ways that were designed to engage philosophers and persuade them of the intellectual seriousness of both enterprises. He was, of course, a principal force among those who brought Chaïm Perelman’s work to the attention of audiences in North America, and he himself entered into deep and fruitful dialogues with Perelman by way of reviewing the value that rhetoric brought to argumentation and logic, as well as to philosophy generally. His interest in philosophical argumentation prompted an early skepticism about the New Rhetoric project, and at the end of one of his reviews of Perelman’s work he wondered “whether there is really any promise after all in the attempt to define philosophical argument in terms of rhetoric” (1965, 133).¹ Rhetoric, in that review, Johnstone understood as “the art of allaying philosophical doubts and hesitations” (1965, 127). He expressed his own view in a lecture a few years later: “Rhetoric is the evocation and maintenance of the consciousness required for communication” (1978, 129).² Thus, rhetoric is necessary for humanity (a view reiterated by Crosswhite in this issue) and is implied in the communication of objective fact (1978, 125).

Decades later, the engagement between argumentation and rhetoric is stronger and richer, but no less controversial. As editors of this special issue, we approach the subject as philosophers, but our view is distanced from Johnstone’s abiding interest in philosophical argument by developments of recent decades, among them the development of informal logic.³ This background is an important factor in the current climate governing argumentation theory, and our selection of articles is intended to illustrate many of the advances that have emerged. [End Page 379]

Informal logic developed as a response to a pedagogical situation. The standard approach to teaching logic in North America in the 1950s and the 1960s was to present what was known as “baby logic.” The standard introductory logic course had three parts: a part on formal logic; a part on inductive logic that covered causal reasoning and generalization; and a section on fallacies (Hamblin 1970).⁴

The then-standard view of what counted as a good argument came from formal logic. A good argument was a sound argument: the premises were true and the form of the argument was valid, meaning that the conclusion followed necessarily from the premises. Students were taught various means of determining validity. That meant they were taught formal logic: perhaps a bit of propositional logic and some quantification theory.

This approach did not always meet their needs, as Howard Kahane (1971) recounted in his introduction to his landmark text Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric:

Today’s students demand a marriage of theory and practice. That is why so many of them judge introductory courses on logic, fallacy and even rhetoric not relevant to their interests. In class a few years back, while I was going over the (to me) fascinating intricacies of the predicate logic quantifier rules, a student asked in disgust how anything he’s learned all semester long had any bearing whatever on President Johnson’s decision to escalate again in Vietnam. I mumbled something about bad logic on Johnson’s part, and then stated that Introduction to Logic was not that kind of course. His reply was to ask what courses did take up such matters, and I had to admit that so far as I knew none did.

(1971, vii)

At the University of Windsor, J. Anthony Blair and Ralph H. Johnson took up the challenge of developing such a course that at first was called Applied Logic, later Informal Logic. The informal logic initiative began as an attempt to change logic instruction. In the attempt to devise a better approach to teaching students about argument, they had to, little by little, develop a better theory of argument for informal logic. An important step in this development was a reorientation towards rhetoric.

One of the important sources that many of us drew on...