Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “Comic Discourse and Knowledge”: A Translation with an Introduction

In light of the genuine disagreement between the seemingly non-rhetorical political philosophy of John Rawls and the philosophical rhetoric of the new rhetoric project I propose a re-reading of Rawls that will help move that project in a needed direction. This re-reading will make the case that (1) Rawls’s conception of justice implies a commitment to the reasonable that is very like the new rhetoric projects, that (2) their differences regarding distance—in particular the distancing strategies of impartiality and objectivity—can be reconciled, that (3) the major difference between them—that is, the role of the rational—comes down to Rawls’s willingness to try universalizing the good, and that (4) such universalizing is a resource of rhetorical particularity that adds value to the construction of the universal audience.

This book is divided into two parts, "Argumentation in Critical Discourse Analysis" and "Questions and Doubts about Visual Argumantation", each part containing two chapters. In the first chapter, "Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis", I am concerned with how topoi are used (and misused) in the Discourse-Historical Approach. The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), pioneered by Ruth Wodak (see Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, Liebhart 1999; Wodak, van Dijk 2000; Wodak, Chilton 2005; Wodak, Meyer 2006; Wodak 2009), is one of the major branches of critical discourse analysis (CDA). In its own (programmatic) view, it embraces at least three interconnected aspects (Wodak 2006: 65): 1. 'Text or discourse immanent critique' aims at discovering internal or discourse-internal structures. 2. The 'socio-diagnostic critique' is concerned with the demystifying exposure of the possibly persuasive or 'manipulative' character of discursive practices. 3. Prognostic critique contributes to the transformation and improvement of communication. CDA, in Wodak's view, is not concerned with evaluating what is 'right' or 'wrong'. CDA ... should try to make choices at each point in the research itself, and should make these choices transparent.1 It should also justify theoretically why certain interpretations of discursive events seem more valid than others. One of the methodical ways for critical discourse analysts to minimize the risk of being biased is to follow the principle of triangulation. Thus, one of the most salient distinguishing features of the DHA is its endeavour to work with different approaches, multi-methodically and on the basis of a variety of empirical data as well as background information. (Wodak ibid.) One of the approaches DHA is using in its principle of triangulation is argumentation theory, more specifically the theory of topoi. In the first chapter, I am concerned with the following questions: how and in what way are topoi and, consequentially, argumentation theory, used in DHA as one of the most influential schools of CDA? Other approaches (e.g., Fairclough (1995, 2000, 2003) or van Leeuwen (2004, 2008; van Leeuwen, Kress 2006)) do not use topoi at all. Does such a use actually minimize the risk of being biased, and, consequentially, does such a use of topoi in fact implement the principle of triangulation? Judging from the works we analysed in the first chapter, there are no rules or criteria how to use topoi or how to detect topoi in the discourse/text; the only methodological precept seems to be, »anything goes«! If so, why does CDA need triangulation? And what happened to the principle stipulating that CDA »should try to make choices at each point in the research itself, and should make these choices transparent? « We have seen identical and similar bundles of topoi for different purposes or occasions; we have seen different bundles of topoi for identical and similar purposes or occasions; we have seen different bundles of topoi for different occasion; and we have seen pretty exotic bundles of topoi for pretty particular and singular purposes. Which leads us to a key question: can anything be or become a topos within DHA? And, consequentially, what actually, i.e., historically, is a topos? If a topos is supposed to connect an argument with a conclusion, as all the relevant DHA publications claim, one would expect that at least a minimal reconstruction would follow, namely, what is the argument in the quoted fragment? What is the conclusion in the quoted fragment? How is the detected topos connecting the two, and what is the argumentative analysis of the quoted fragment? Unfortunately, all these elements are missing; the definition and the quoted fragment are all that there is of the supposed argumentative analysis. And this is the basic pattern of functioning for most of the DHA works. At the beginning, there would be a list of topoi and a short description foreach of them: first, a conditional paraphrase of a particular topos would be given, followed by a short discourse fragment (usually from the media) illustrating this conditional paraphrase (in Discourse and Discrimination, pp. 75-80), but without any explicit reconstruction of possible arguments, conclusions, or topoi connecting the two in the chosen fragment. After this short "theoretical" introduction, different topoi would just be referred to by names throughout the book, as if everything has already been explained in these few introductory pages. It is quite surprising that none of the quoted DHA works even mention the origins of topoi, their extensive treatment in many works and the main authors of these works, namely Aristotle and Cicero. Even the definition, borrowed from Kienpointner (mostly on a copy-paste basis), does not stem from their work either: it is a hybrid product, with strong input from Stephen Toulmin's work The Uses of Argument, published in 1958. All this is even more surprising because today it is almost a commonplace that for Aristotle a topos is a place to look for arguments (which is true), a heading or department where a number of rhetoric arguments can be easily found (which is true as well), and that those arguments are ready for use – which is a rather big misunderstanding. According to Aristotle, topoi are supposed to be of two kinds: general or common topoi, appropriate for use everywhere and anywhere, regardless of situation, and specific topoi, in their applicability limited mostly to the three genres of oratory (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic). With the Romans, topoi became loci, and Cicero literally defines them as “the home of all proofs” (De or. 2.166.2), “pigeonholes in which arguments are stored” (Part. Or. 5.7-10), or simply “storehouses of arguments” (Part. Or. 109.5-6). Also, their number was reduced from 300 in Topics or 29 in Rhetoric to up to 19 (depending on how we count them). Although Cicero's list correlates pretty much, though not completely, with Aristotle's list from the Rhetoric B 23, there is a difference in use: Cicero's list is considered to be a list of concepts that may trigger an associative process rather than a collection of implicit rules and precepts reducible to rules, as the topoi in Aristotle's Topics are. In other words, Cicero's loci mostly function as subject matter indicators and loci communes. Which brings us a bit closer to how topoi might be used in DHA. In the works analysed in the first chapter, the authors never construct or reconstruct arguments from the discourse fragments they analyse – despite the fact that they are repeatedly defining topoi as warrants connecting arguments with conclusions; they just hint at them with short glosses. And since there is no reconstruction of arguments from concrete discourse fragments under analysis, hinting at certain topoi, referring to them or simply just mentioning them, can only serve the purpose of »putting the audience in a favourable frame of mind. « »Favourable frame of mind« in our case – the use of topoi in DHA – would mean directing a reader's attention to a »commonly known or discussed« topic, without explicitly phrasing or reconstructing possible arguments and conclusions. Thus, the reader can never really know what exactly the author had in mind and what exactly he/she wanted to say (in terms of (possible) arguments and (possible) conclusions). In Traité de l'argumentation – La nouvelle rhétorique, published in 1958 by Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, topoi are characterised by their extreme generality, which makes them usable in every situation. It is the degeneration of rhetoric and the lack of interest for the study of places that has led to these unexpected consequences where »oratory developments«, as Perelman ironically calls them, against fortune, sensuality, laziness, etc., which school exercises were repeating ad nauseam, became qualified as commonplaces (loci, topoi), despite their extremely particular character. By commonplace- es, Perelman claims, we more and more understand what Giambattista Vico called »oratory places«, in order to distinguish them from the places treated in Aristotle's Topics. Nowadays, commonplaces are characterised by banality which does not exclude extreme specificity and particularity. These places are nothing more than Aristotelian commonplaces applied to particular subjects, concludes Perelman. And this is exactly what seems to be happening to the DHA approach to topoi as well. Even more, the works quoted in the first part of the articlegive the impression that DHA is not using the Aristotelian or Ciceronian topoi, but the so-called »literary topoi«, conceptualized by Ernst Robert Curtius in his Europaeische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1990: 62- 105, English translation). What is a literary topos? In a nutshell, oral histories passed down from pre-historic societies contain literary aspects, characters, or settings which appear again and again in stories from ancient civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories. These recurrent and repetitive motifs or leitmotifs would be then labelled literary topoi. The same year that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their New Rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin published his Uses of Argument, probably the most detailed study of how topoi work. Actually, he does not use the terms topos or topoi, but the somewhat judicial term “warrant”. The reason for that seems obvious: he is trying to cover different “fields of argument”, and not all fields of argument, according to him, use topoi as their argumentative principles or bases of their argumentation. According to Toulmin (1958/1995: 94-107), if we have an utterance of the form, “If D then C” – where D stands for data or evidence, and C for claim or conclusion – such a warrant would act as a bridge and authorize the step from D to C. But warrant may have a limited applicability, so Toulmin introduces qualifiers Q, indicating the strength conferr

The most substantial and the most important of Chaïm Perelman’s writings on justice is a long essay,De la justice,first published in 1945. It is a powerful piece of work which has had a wide influence, and for these reasons it calls for critical examination even though Perelman himself might have thought that some aspects of it were superseded by his later publications. For example, the English translation that appeared in 1963 w1der the title ‘Concerning Justice’ includes a footnote implying that Perelman had modified his view that values are ‘logically arbitrary’. The footnote says that, since writing those remarks about values in the essay on justice, ‘the author has tried to present, through his theory of argumentation, a way of reasoning about values’, indicating that his later theory of argumentation (developed particularly in a book calledTraité de Pargumentation: La Nouvelle Rhétorique)qualifies the earlier bare statement that values are arbitrary. I shall take account of this in what I have to say. Even in the original form of the essay on justice there is a clear link with Perelman’s views on logic and rhetoric, for his distinction between formal and concrete justice illustrates the difference that he saw between the reasoning of formal logic and the kind of debate that goes on in the area of rhetoric. He uses the term ‘rhetoric’ in the wide sense given to it by Aristotle, meaning not just the devices of persuasive language but the general character of reasoning, other than that of formal logic, which is used to support a case.

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: Introduction

Those who resisted the Nazi tyranny, Jonathan Glover observes in his Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, tended to come from homes in which children were encouraged to reason through argument (382). Children raised by parents who used physical means of gaining compliance or an authoritarian style of childrearing were much less likely to rescue Jews. Glover cites research conducted by the Oliners, who carefully document why some chose the moral path during World War II. Glover and the Oliners conclude that habits of reasoning, expressed through argument and questioning, elicit concern for the other and recognition of values beyond one's own. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca detected this connection between argumentation and moral action. Seeking a philosophical balm for the wounds of post-war Europe, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca re-discovered rhetoric and argumentation, seeing that they could foster the contact of minds necessary for the reconstruction of civil society. This is an odd phrase, but it reflects their aspiration that reasoning rather than violence should be the primary means of dealing with disagreement. Between 1947 and 1984, Perelman, alone and in collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated this aspiration into the New Rhetoric Project (NRP), which was expressed in a number of books, articles, and conference papers. The most complete expression of the project was published in 1958 as Traite de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhetorique (known in French speaking countries as Traite), which was translated into English in 1970 as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (known in English speaking countries as The New Rhetoric). Perelman set the agenda for the collaboration, as his solitary writings on a host of subjects before his collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca identified the key issues and problems addressed in the NRP. Olbrechts-Tyteca played a major role in the development of the examples and middle range theory (Warnick, 1998; Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1963). In this article, I consider the influence of the NRP on studies of twentieth-century argument in our field, and its relevance in the new millennium. My rehearsal of the argument in the NRP is not meant to duplicate the fine surveys of Perelman's work in Foss, Foss, and Trapp; Conley; and other anthologies and overviews of rhetoric. Rather, my purpose is epideictic in the Perelmanian sense in that I hope to strengthen a commitment to the study of argument as a humane art with philosophical and pragmatic expressions. I seek to recall the larger purpose Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca envisioned for argumentation and to trace the influence of the NRP on argument studies in the United States. In so doing, I will call attention to some key books and scholarship that draw from the NRP to develop insights on argument. In the conclusion, I suggest the NRP is the most important system of argument produced in the twentieth century and can serve as an ecumenical site for the development of argumentation theory. My purpose may seem benign, but it directly confronts two movements in the field. The first is the continued fragmentation of the field into a set of case studies with little shared sense of purpose, which David Zarefsky has rightly lamented as a failure of disciplinary coherence. Another movement, pragma-dialectics, originating in the Netherlands, begins with a misreading of the NRP to launch a system of argument with quite different goals than those set forth by Perelman. The pragma-dialecticians seek uniform standards for all argument and see conflict resolution as the objective of argumentation. I believe the NRP's system navigates between fragmentation and enforced uniformity, and remains the most ethical and powerful framework available to scholars of argument. The NRP is a blueprint for civil society, with a strength and coherence lacking in other systems. To better understand the tension among these movements, it is necessary to resituate the NRP and its influence on argumentation studies in the United States. …

This paper is divided into three sections. The first describes how Perelman's general approach in The New Rhetoric, particularly his emphasis on the role of audience and the epistemological claims he makes for his treatise, cause him to become an uneasy participant in the age old debate between philosophy and rhetoric. Perelman's attempt to resolve this dilemma via the universal audience is described in the second section, which argues for the general failure of this construct to fulfill the role Perelman assigns it. Finally, the third section addresses the implications of this failure for the work as a whole, particularly the question of whether the problematic status of the universal audience invalidates Perelman's claims that The New Rhetoric articulates a truly audience‐based theory of argumentation.

The article deals with the process of founding and further development of the new rhetoric, a theory of argumentation developed by the Belgian philosopher Chaïm Perelman (1912-1984) and his co-worker Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1899-1987). The intellectual and philosophical backgrounds of the authors and some key characteristics of their theoretical approaches are described. The new rhetoric: (а) is primarily concerned with argument or practical reasoning, (b) suggests that figures of speech may be arguments instead of merely ornaments, (c) with its goal to influence minds, new rhetoric is a dynamic field of study, (d) it is complimentary rather than in opposition to formal reasoning. According to Perelman, the theory of argumentation conceived as a new rhetoric or dialectic, covers the whole range of discourse that aims at persuasion and conviction, whatever the audience addressed and whatever the subject matter. Perelman presents his new rhetoric as a much better form of logic than Cartesian deductive, stringent reasoning, at least where law and other values-based systems are concerned. Perelman challenged the unwholesome assumption that what we cannot know with mathematical certainly is necessarily arbitrary, irrational, and subjective. Perelman recognized "reasoned conviction" as a bridge to knowledge, although he was aware that it was a less perfect source of cognition than verified certainty. It is explained how the idea of developing the new rhetoric was born out of dissatisfaction with logical positivism or neopositivism (The Vienna Circle’s theories and ideas) and which classical and modern sources inspired the authors in developing a specific logic of value judgments that could deal with argumentation about actions, choices, decisions and without dismissing such argumentation as irrational. The rhetorical framework of the theory is expounded and an overview is provided of the key notions and concepts of Perelman’s ‘new rhetoric’ – the notions of adherence, audience (particular and universal audience), persuasion are explained. According to Perelman, the new rhetoric is based on the idea that since argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced. Рerelman's position on the difference between formal logic and argumentation is analyzed.

In ‘The making of argumentation theory’ van Eemeren and van Haaften describe the contributions made to the five components of a full-fledged research program of argumentation theory by four prominent approaches to the discipline: formal dialectics, rhetoric/pragmalinguistics, informal logic, and pragma-dialectics. Most of these approaches do not contribute to all components, but to some in particular. Starting from the pragma-dialectical view of the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness – the crucial issue in argumentation theory – van Eemeren and van Haaften explain the positions taken by representatives from the approaches discussed and indicate where they differ from the pragma-dialectical approach. It transpires that approaches focusing on dialectical reasonableness are, next to pragma-dialectics, formal dialectics and informal logic; approaches focusing on rhetorical effectiveness are, next to pragma-dialectics, rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, and the informal logician Tindale. When it comes to the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness, some interest in it is shown in rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, but only in pragma-dialectics and in Tindale’s work is it a real focus. The main difference between Tindale’s view and the pragma-dialectical view is that in pragma-dialectics the decisive role in deciding about reasonableness is assigned to a code of conduct for reasonable argumentative discourse and in Tindale’s approach this role is assigned to Tindale’s interpretation of the Perelmanian universal audience.

This monumental work is an English translation (by Tim Personn in cooperation with Michael Weh) of the German edition that was first published in 2008. The need for this book, as the author recounts, arose as a result of work undertaken with the Hamburg Group on Argumentation Theory (p. vi). The book is intended to be a contribution to contemporary argumentation theory. Wohlrapp’s main goal in this book is to provide a philosophical foundation for a theory of argumentation, since he thinks that contemporary conceptions of argumentation fail to do justice to the importance of the practice of argumentation, and since he finds extant theories of argumentation, including pragmadialectics, neither sufficiently pragmatic nor sufficiently dialectical (p. lvii).

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published The New Rhetoric fifty years ago, renewing interest in the rhetorical tradition and generating a diverse body of scholarship. This article draws from a plenary talk delivered at the international conference, The Promise of Reason, held at the University of Oregon to mark the publication anniversary. I argue that Perelman's insistence on the absence of certainties and the need for argumentation in matters relating to law and justice has interesting, even if surprising, connections to the natural law tradition. I contend that there are at least three points of convergence: (1) natural law claims are important, and perhaps unavoidable, commonplaces in legal practice; (2) natural law claims can be viewed as invoking Perelman's famous, and often misunderstood, idea of a universal audience; and (3) the natural law tradition can be reconceived by naturalizing rhetoric, by which I mean recognizing that human nature is rhetorical. A naturalized rhetoric embraces the paradox that non-essentialism is essential to our being, and that we can find a foundation for reflection in anti-foundationalism. I conclude that Perelman's theory of argumentation provides a way to resuscitate natural law theorizing while moving beyond the false certainties that Perelman understood only impede our quest for justice.

For more than thirty years, semantics and pragmatics have benefitted from descriptive studies on discourse connectives, the argumentative function of which has been recognized in different theoretical frameworks: theory of linguistic argumentation (Ducrot et al. in Les mots du discours. Minuit, Paris, 1980), Relevance Theory (Blakemore in Semantic constraints on relevance. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987; Carston in Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Blackwell, Oxford, 2002), cognitive semantics (Sanders and Nordmann in Discourse Processes 29(1):37–60, 2000), Rhetorical Structure Theory (Taboada in Journal of Pragmatics 38(4):567–592, 2006). However, an issue has not been deeply investigated: What is the difference between discourses with and without connectives? In this chapter, I raise the issue of the function of connectives in discourse, the different ways of defining connectives, the paradox that cognitive approaches to connectives give rise to, the role of mais in argumentation, and the issue of the contribution of connectives to argumentation. In the analysis I show how the contrast between sequences with and without connectives can be thought in a more general framework: argumentation sequences with connectives are more efficient because they make argumentation relations explicit, and have as side effects the minimization of processing costs and the maximizing of relevance; moreover, they are stronger because connectives introduce new focal information, which has more contextual implications than a non-focal one.

Notes on Contributors

Legal argumentation, as originally outlined by Aristotle under the notion of rhetoric (and topic) and by Chaim Perelman under the new rhetoric since the 1950s, occupies the mid-area “between the evident and the irrational”, i.e. between the analytical truths cherished by logic and mathematics, on the one hand, and any forms on sheer irrationality that evade the grip of rational argumentation, on the other. The key concept of the new rhetoric is that of the intended, universal audience. According to Perelman, the universal audience is a subjective thought construct of the speaker with the help of which he adjusts his arguments so as to convince the audience, while observing the general prerequisites of rationality. Because of the inherently subject-bound nature of the universal audience, it is argued that the universal audience is expressive of bounded rationality only, as modified by the diverse “scenes”, frames, settings, contextures, or approaches to the realm of reason and argumentation as conceived by the speaker. Aristotle’s classic rhetoric and Perelman’s notion of the new rhetoric both exemplify the ars disputationis, or the art and skill of argumentation and, possibly, reasonable disagreement among the participants to a dispute even after the full round of arguments presented. Aulis Aarnio’s quest for value-cognitivism in his reading of Perelman’s legal philosophy is open to critique, since it turns the realm of rhetoric into a domain of objective values, thereby leaving behind Aristotle’s idea of rhetoric is an expression of an ars disputationis, or the art or skill of reasonable disagreement that takes place “between the evident and the irrational”.

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement

Contemporary argumentation theories highlight the importance of Others for contributing to and critiquing an individual’s reasoning and/or argumentation. Reasoners and arguers are encouraged to interact with imagined constructs such as a community of model interlocutors or universal audience. These model interlocutors are theoretically meant to bring to mind reasons and counter-considerations that may not have been conceived of otherwise so as to improve the overall quality of an instance of reasoning or argumentation. Overlooked, however, is the impact of differing individual’s imaginative abilities. This paper argues that more important than relying on an Other, real or imagined, reasoners and arguers would do just as well to improve their own creative abilities first. Consulting a real or imagined Other may help in some cases help, but such a strong reliance on Others comes with serious limitations.