Comments on Rhetorical Analysis Within a Pragma-Dialectical Framework

The Case of R. J. Reynolds

EUGENE GARVER
Regents Professor of Philosophy Saint Johns University Collegeville MN 56321 U.S.A.

RHETORIC, DIALECTIC, AND DEMOCRACY

Rhetorical Analysis Within a Pragma-Dialectical Framework raises three questions. First, what is the relation between the methods of winning a dispute and the methods of securing agreement studied in pragma-dialectics? What is the relation between rhetoric and dialectic? This is a question to which van Eemeren and Houtlosser offer a clear answer, but I will invite them to reconsider in light of my other two questions. Second, how do the methods of verbal manipulation in general, whether competitive or cooperative, relate to the methods used to arrive at something greater than agreement, such as truth or the accurate representation of nature? This second question could be posed as the relation between dialectic and rhetoric and the methods of science. Third, discourse often has purposes that have nothing to do with resolving disputes, and which therefore do not reach the threshold at which dialectic, for van Eemeren and Houtlosser, begins. Often people speak merely to be heard, to express themselves and create their identities within a community. Just as I wonder about the relation between both rhetoric and dialectic and science, I wonder about their relation to purely expressive discourse, a connection perhaps hinted at in Aristotles discussion of epideictic rhetoric, but surely needing more analysis. With a little massaging, the question of the relation of dialectic to rhetoric can be seen as identical to that posed by MacIntyre about practical reason in general: Both kinds of achievement, that of excellence and that of victory, will require effective practical reasoning; and it will be important to learn whether and, if so, how the kind of practical reasoning necessary for the achievement of excellence differs from that necessary for the achievement of victory.1 What is the relation between living up to the dialectical norms of reasonableness and communication and aiming at victory for oneself, ones clients, ones favored party or policy? The question of the relation between excellence and victory is especially urgent, I think, in considering van Eemeren and Houtlossers empirical
Argumentation 14: 307314, 2000. 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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example. There are implicit judgments concerning the audience, the effect on the audience, whether the appeal is successful and whether it should be successful. In a way it seems to me that van Eemeren and Houtlosser take for granted a rhetorical story that is itself divorced from dialectical considerations. They seem to think that rhetorical intentions and effects are fairly transparent, and need only be subject to dialectical judgment. I doubt that audiences are as deceived and manipulated as they make out although how either of us would prove such a thing is another question and wonder how the rhetoric of these advertisements would look under the more dialectical assumptions that audiences are perfectly aware of what is going on. The relation between reasonableness and victory might force us to redefine both those terms. And thus my third issue. I dont think that Reynolds is trying to fool anybody. (This doesnt mean that I have a higher opinion of their motives or purposes than van Eemeren and Houtlosser do.) I offer the competing hypothesis that Reynolds is aiming at the creation and presentation of a corporate identity, that of the upright, thoughtful corporation, albeit one engaged in selling a product of questionable value. Theyve given up on trying to show that cigarettes are not dangerous, and instead are trying to position themselves as corporate good citizens. Like van Eemeren and Houtlosser, I base my hypothesis on the assumption that the advertorials purpose must be connected to something it is doing reasonably well: Since it belonged to Reynolds dialectical commitments to make a real effort at convincing young people that they should not smoke, whereas Reynolds being a tobacco company cannot be expected to abandon altogether its rhetorical aim of persuading people to smoke, it may be assumed that some rhetorical maneuvering is going on. I disagree with the antecedent and the assumption of that implication, but agree that we can only infer purposes from how the appeal works. On my hypothesis, there is a sort of persuasion going on, but no aim at resolving differences of opinion. Of course one can always reduce epideictic rhetoric to forensic, in this case by claiming that Reynolds is trying to establish one corporate identity and rebut another: Were good guys, not bad guys. But that does seem to be letting the theory lead the data. In the rest of these comments, I will try to understand the relation between rhetoric and dialectic, both understood as being bounded by both the more scientific or truth-oriented and more poetic or expression-oriented uses of language. A further feature of van Eemeren and Houtlossers presentation is of interest. They make the dialectical task of resolving differences of opinion equivalent to establishing methodically whether or not a standpoint is defensible against doubt or criticism. A couple of things are worth noting about this language. First, differences of opinion arrive fairly late in the process of inquiry, resolving doubts and solving problems. Giving an initial definition to the problem, gathering evidence, sorting through and judging beliefs, all these things are likely to occur before we have articu-

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lated ideas explicitly enough to have a pair of opinions that we know are different from one another. In fact, I wonder whether starting at differences of opinion does not arise from neglecting my second issue, the relation between methods of rhetoric and dialectic and scientific methods. Consider these two possible relations between dialectic and rhetoric. First, one could survey rhetoric and communication in general, and make dialectic a subset of rhetoric. One might decide, for example, that among the ways we influence audiences, rational discourse was particularly useful in coming to agreements, while emotional discourse was especially disruptive or agonistic. Dialectic would then be about rational communication. Similarly, we might single out unconstrained or undistorted communication. I can read both the Platonic and the Aristotelian program this way, to find within the given practices of persuasion and teaching those adapted to get at agreement, progress, and truth. As I understand them, van Eemeren and Houtlosser take the opposite tack. Dialectic establishes norms instrumental in achieving this purpose [resolving differences of opinion] maintaining certain standards of reasonableness and expecting others to comply with the same critical standards. Those norms by themselves never determine what anyone will say. They allow a certain freedom, and within that freedom lies the rhetorical opportunity to resolve the difference in their own favour. Rhetorical aims can, in principle, be realised within a dialectical framework. There is something else worth noting about this formulation of the dialectical project. Establishing methodically whether or not a standpoint is defensible against doubt or criticism presupposes a judicial or forensic model for rationality. We have a right to opinions only if we can justify them. The burden of proof is on the holder of the opinion. It is popular these days to blame everything on Descartes. His method of doubt was the tree of knowledge that introduced the sin of skepticism into the world, and so it has become natural for us to think that any opinion that is not justified is unjustified, that all opinions stand accused of being prejudices unless we can overcome that suspicion by showing that we are justified in holding the belief. Poppers theory of falsification fit in this mode of thought. For better or worse, I believe that Descartes as Satan wildly overestimates the power of philosophy in our lives. I agree that skepticism and the need to justify our opinions plays a major role in configuring our intellectual lives. I propose as a hypothesis that this presumption that all our beliefs need justification is a function of the democratic nature of our contemporary conceptions of rationality. Since everyone has a voice, there would be anarchy and cacophony unless there were a means of silencing opinions that are not worth hearing. The method of justification and the method of doubt is precisely such a necessary means of silencing opinions that are not worth listening to. Starting with the equality of democratic voices, the problem becomes one of instituting a hierarchy of which voices

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are worth listening to and which not. The judicial model of reasoning is a response to that problem. Naturally, the problem with basing dialectic and rhetoric on the judicial model will be to make sense of the traditional deliberative and epideictic functions. My correlation between justification as the primary function of reasoning, both theoretical and practical reason, can best be seen by noting how absent justificatory reasoning is from ancient models of rationality. Moderns criticize ancient pictures of practical reason, of rhetoric and dialectic, for being aristocratic.2 There only gentlemen were allowed to speak. The aristocratic presumption is that speakers are worth listening to, both because they were probably intelligent and because they were almost certainly like us. The burden of proof, correspondingly, is on a challenger to show why a given speaker or opinion is wrong. If we restrict the franchise and have high costs of entry into a conversation, then justification becomes less crucial, and a less natural feature of conversation. If we open discourse to all, then each must pay a price by justifying whatever he or she has to say. I think that this difference between ancient and modern presuppositions about practical reason accounts for some interesting differences between van Eemeren and Houtlossers presentation of dialectic and rhetoric and Aristotles. One of the striking things about the Topics and the Rhetoric is that the Topics is the much more confrontational and agonistic work, with a stress on strategies for winning, while the Rhetoric presupposes a much more cooperative relation between speakers and their audience. In dialectic, as in pragma-dialectics, there is no audience, only a pair of interlocutors. In rhetoric, there are no interlocutors, only a speaker and an audience. 3 The tasks of both rhetoric and dialectic are different from their contemporary appearance because of the ancient aristocratic presumption. In the Rhetoric, the aristocratic assumption is that speaker and hearer are engaged in a common enterprise of trying to find the best policy. Deliberative rhetoric, not judicial or forensic rhetoric, is the paradigm for practical reasoning. Persuading and giving good advice are linked together (I.8.1365b22). On any important decision we deliberate together because we do not trust ourselves (Ethics III.3.1112b1011). Make deliberation and not justification the model for practical reasoning, and rhetoric is no longer the manipulative one of the dialectic/rhetoric pair. Rhetoric is reasoning by a speaker directed at an audience, while dialectic concerns reasoning directed at an opponent. If I assert a given proposition, I am committed, in dialectic, to all its logical consequences. The Topics shows how to exploit this commitment by enabling dialectical arguers to trip up their opponents, by showing undesirable implications of their propositions, or to avoid being trapped. The Rhetoric sees the rhetorical situation not as a confrontation between opponents, as the Topics does, but as the construction of a relationship between speaker and hearers. The aristocracy of the Topics comes in its source of opinions in those which commend themselves to all or to

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the majority or to the wise that is to all of the wise or to the majority or to the most famous and distinguished of them (Topics I.1.100b2223). Dialectic can include conflict in ways that rhetoric cannot because dialectic is not practical. For Aristotle all practical conflict is stasis, a negative term. There is nothing of what Kenneth Burke called the delights of faction. Cicero aligned rhetorical and dialectical methods of arguing both sides of a question with the skeptical program from philosophical enlightenment. Machiavelli read Livy as showing that factions led to stability and progress, and that insight into the value of faction led to later ideas that even truth could emerge from conflict, and eventually from the marketplace of ideas.4 But all that is much later than Aristotle. There are refutative topoi, but persuasion itself is not an agonistic activity, and dialectic not a practical one. This suggests that rhetoric and dialectic are related in more ways than van Eemeren and Houtlossers configuration that dialectic sets the norms within which rhetoric is free to operate. Pragmadialectics may well be more suited to a democracy than were Aristotles methods. I am not upholding the existence of an Aristotelian alternative as a reason to suspect van Eemeren and Houtlosser so much as to put their project in context. Aristotle contrasts dialectic and rhetoric in another way. They are both universal faculties without the restricted subject-matter that a science has. But rhetoric is restricted to the subjects of deliberation, judicial disputes and epideictic situations. Dialectic has no such circumstantial limitation. I wonder, though, about the dialectic of van Eemeren and Houtlosser. And thus my second question at the beginning, about the relation between dialectic and scientific method. Is there is a method for, as they say, resolving differences of opinion? Is it the same method which allows us to resolve our differences over whether scientific biology and/or creationism should be taught in public schools, disputes about gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, whether individual organisms or genes are the unit of selection and evolution, and over whether modern evolutionary theory is compatible with divine revelation? Or is dialectic restricted to the subjects on which democratic disagreement is allowed? The pseudo-Augustines Rhetoric says that rhetoric is about subjects about which we should be ashamed not to have an opinion. (See Gorgias 452de, Protagoras 318e319a.) Does dialectic have a subject-matter delimited in this way, even if not delimited by the principles that make a domain into a science? Or is dialectic about settling all sorts of differences of opinion? Is there a difference between negotiation and inquiry? Is there a difference between aiming at agreement and aiming at truth?5 To begin with, I suggest that the story that van Eemeren and Houtlosser draw from Toulmin, that the triumph of scientific method drew rhetoric and dialectic apart, is too simple. As they note, as dialectic disappears from the intellectual scene, logic and rationality itself become identified with scientific method and the development of method itself is another part

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of that story that needs to be told and so rhetoric becomes style and arrangement, and deception. Missing from that story is the fact that when dialectic is about methods of securing agreement and resolving disputes, the relation between whatever agreement we come up with and truth seems to become secondary. If dialectic as a means for resolving differences of opinion has nothing to do with truth, then its function is more limited than van Eemeren and Houtlosser suggest. I am not suggesting that we should go back to Aristotle. I do not think we ever have that kind of freedom to choose philosophical models of rationality. I think that van Eemeren and Houtlosser are right to make practical reason basically a matter of justification. Democracy itself requires a hermeneutics of suspicion and a method of doubt. Deliberation becomes colored by this democratic requirement and its judicial model. Instead of a problem-solving activity, deliberation becomes ideologized into another forum of resolving differences of opinion. Thus, in the Prometheus myth in Platos Protagoras, everyone gets to speak in political deliberation because the assumption is that everyone has something worth saying. In contemporary democratic deliberation, everyone gets to speak because everyone has a right to speak. Aristotles famous argument in favor of democratic deliberation in Politics III says nothing about rights and nothing about resolving differences of opinion:
It is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually, but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one mans cost; for where there are many, each individual, it may be argued, has some portion of virtue and wisdom, and when they have come together, just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties (III.11.1281b110; cf. 13.1283b2734).6

Moreover, it makes sense for democratic methods for practical reason to search for rules for resolving disputes, instead of means and resources, such as the virtues, more suited to aristocratic conceptions of practical reason. Thus dialectic is favored over rhetoric. Rules make morality more democratic. When the moral virtues are political virtues they depend on a political community of friendship and homonoia, irreducible to law while the democratic morality of rights and rules is codifiable. The companion charge to Aristotles ethics being aristocratic is that modern morality is legalistic. Open communities and their corresponding moralities must be legalistic. Only closed communities with tacit knowledge virtue is acting as the phronimos would act can be communities of virtue. The relations between democracy and scientific method are manifold, but I wonder if consideration of van Eemeren and Houtlossers paper hasnt led to an unexplored relation between them. I agree that something like van Eemeren and Houtlossers sense of dialectic is necessary for democracies to function. But for dialectic to do its work, it cannot be a universal method,

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and in particular can function only against a background of a distinct scientific method. The growth and success of science makes democracy possible in the following way.7 Democracy, as a method of deliberation that centers on van Eemeren and Houtlossers sense of dialectic and rhetoric, is possible only if methods of resolving differences are segregated from methods of discovering and establishing truth. Of course, even in ancient Greece, as the Prometheus myth itself illustrates, not all questions were open for democratic deliberation. Architects and generals made professional decisions that were not subject to majority vote. But when everyone has a right to speak, and when everyone is expanded through the succession of extensions of the franchise, the decisions available for democratic deliberation are restricted to those where we value, or can afford, agreement rather than truth. Democracy and democratic deliberation are possible only when science is secure and successful enough that its work is left untouched by deliberation, dialectic and rhetoric. For just one example, when Rawls talks about reflective equilibrium, a general method for resolving political differences, all ones opinions are available for compromise and negotiation. But that set of opinions does not include the truths of neoclassical economics. Rawls holds them as fixed and not subject to debate. I do not offer that example in criticism of Rawls, but rather as a symptom of the connection between science and democracy. It is no accident that van Eemeren and Houtlosser rehabilitate dialectic by limiting it to agreement rather than truth. But such an art of dialectic can function only against a background of settled science and scientific method. Science makes the world safe for democracy.

NOTES
1 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, p. 28. For one example, see H. Jefferson Powell, The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism, A Theological Interpretation, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 119. Largely because of the slavery issue, individual legal arguments and judicial decisions in the antebellum period are often marked by conflict between the pursuit of the internal goods of the tradition (logical argument, textual fidelity, and so on) and the external goods of maintaining the Union and the institutional power and prestige of the courts. 2 Nothing in this contrast of ancient and modern denies the democratic origins of ancient rhetoric, for which see, e.g., Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 and Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. 3 Plato shows how to complicate these contrasts. In the Protagoras, after the Simonides interlude, the audience becomes an interlocutor as one of the speakers in an imaginary dialogue with Socrates and Protagoras together as the other party. For Plato, dialectic must neglect the audience because only between speakers can there be the friendship necessary for the discovery of truth. Modern science discovers how one can have truth without friendship, a very democratic procedure. 4 Nor did the sophists advance the idea that truth emerges from the conflict of opinions,

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and so that factions were good things. They simply thought that competition was a given, and they were going to help their clients get the best out of it. 5 One can resist the reduction of inquiry to negotiation and rationality to civility either by distinguishing science from both rhetoric and dialectic, or by showing how scientific rationality infects rhetoric and dialectic too, so that they are not only about agreement and decision but agreement and decision oriented to truth. Rather than inquiry being a form of negotiation, Aristotle ultimately sees negotiation as a form of inquiry. 6 For similar claims, see Politics III.3.11.1282a14, a3441, III.13.1287b2328, IV.4. 1292a1014. See also Metaphysics II.993b16: No one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individual we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not a particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it. III.15.1286a2731: When the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and their judgments all relate to individual cases. Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the same is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual. Yack, 1993, p. 167. Although Aristotle does claim genuine knowledge of the human good and does construct a utopian regime in which the human good is best realized, he never suggests that we should measure the justice of laws and public acts by asking how close they come to realizing the states of affairs found in the best regime. 7 Historically, there are two principal preconditions for democracy. I focus here on the rise of science. But equally the retreat of religion is a necessary condition for democracy. This can be seen in Spinozas Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Political Treatise, and in Humes essay on Parties in General. For the latter, see my Why Pluralism Now? Monist 73 (1990): 388410.