Generic evolution. Ritual, rhetoric, and the rise of discursive rationality

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the historical and diachronic dimensions of a nowadays widespread discursive practice, i.e. the settlement of conflicts on the basis of reasonable arguments. Although it is generally accepted that the antecedents of rational discourse are in ancient and medieval rhetoric, there is no consensus about the roots of rhetoric itself; what is specially lacking is a clear insight into the generic background of the early rhetorical text and discourse types that have furthered the steady advance of discursive rationality in modern society. Drawing an analogy between the textual fabric of Thomas Aquinas's written theological expositions and the speech-actional make-up of (literary representations of) pre-modern oral controversies, I shall argue that, in the context of medieval rhetorical practice, the dialectic model of ritual altercation served as a model for the scholastic disputation, both as regards its formal structure and its underlying pragma-semiotic design. Concerning the development of dialogic argumentation as exemplified by the scholastic disputatio into monologic forms of argumentative discourse, I will posit that the propensity for – if not indeed the necessity of – devising and presenting arguments according to the altercatio-derived bipartite discourse model lasted well into the early modern period.