Peirce’s “Ideas, stray or stolen, about scientific writing” and the relationship between methodeutic, speculative rhetoric, and the universal art of rhetoric

Abstract

Abstract This paper is a reading of Peirce’s manuscript “Ideas, stray or stolen, about scientific writing.” The latter text has been considered to be a key for understanding the relationship between speculative rhetoric and methodeutic. While I agree that it includes essential reflections on the third branch of Peirce’s logic, I will argue that the classification of rhetoric studies that it contains cannot be used to clarify the way in which methodeutic and speculative rhetoric are related to one another. I will first introduce the classification as it is presented by Peirce in “Ideas, stray or stolen, about scientific writing” and list some problems that immediately arise when we identify methodeutic with the rhetoric of science. Then, I will elucidate Peirce’s distinction between the universal art of rhetoric, speculative rhetoric, and ordinary rhetoric. I will argue that the classification of rhetoric studies in “Ideas, stray or stolen, about scientific writing” should be seen as a classification of the ways in which we can obtain different ordinary rhetorics specifying the contents of speculative rhetoric for different contexts of sign use. To finish, I will propose a different approach to support the claim that methodeutic is a subdivision of speculative rhetoric.