Abstract

The nebulous area between natural language and formal logic has always puzzled philosophers. The connections between informal logic, rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphor along with the other tropes, have not been made conceptually perspicuous. The theoretical tendency on the part of philosophers has generally been to label the whole field "logically ill-behaved" and to turn over its keeping to Sophists, composition-masters, and literary scholars. Recently, this trend of philosophical neglect has been reversed. Perelman's The Realm of Rhetoric falls squarely in this current movement, as a continuation of the work begun in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric.