Universal Audience Research Articles

Rhetoric and Its Masses: An Introduction

In virtually every epoch of its history, the theory of rhetoric has been associated with large, anonymous groups of people. They appear sometimes as crowds and at other times as mobs. At still other times, these large, anonymous groups of people are figured as herds, (counter)publics, imagined communities, “the people,” the audience, or social imaginaries. In whatever guise they appear, these anonymous groups of people have played a major role in the development of the idea of rhetoric. A few examples will make my point. Plato (2001) defined rhetoric as discourse that would persuade an ignorant crowd (94). Augustine (2001) tailored rhetoric to the “multitude of the wise” (459). In the sixteenth century, Castiglione (2001) calibrated rhetoric to the tastes of “ladies or gentlemen” (663). In the eighteenth century, David Hume (2001) suggested that discourse must account for “man in general” (836). Thomas Sheridan (2001) developed his “Lectures on Elocution” from a consideration of “man in his animal state” (884). By 1828, Richard Whately (2001) could characterize the entire history of rhetoric as so many theories on how to persuade the “promiscuous multitude” (1007). In 1958, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca made a large, anonymous group of people—the “universal audience”—famous as the enabling presupposition of all rational argument (Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca 1991, 31–35). Finally, consider the vibrant subfield of public sphere theory. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, public sphere theory may be the most institutionally secured of rhetoric’s modalities. In this popular mode, rhetoric is understood as the democratic practice of engaging groups of people qua citizens. Administrators seem to love this vision of rhetoric. Basic courses in both writing and speech are often designed explicitly as training in civic engagement, and institutionalized centers for civic engagement are now a common feature of research universities. Rhetoric, we might say, has generated institutional security by tying its fate to (and betting its value on) a particularly resonant large group of anonymous people: the

Information Technology and an Audio Retrieval Method Based on a Novel Audience Rating System

A novel and universal audience rating system based on TV audio features is introduced. In this system, the audio signal is sampled from the audio outlet of TV set and high compressed into a specific spectrum features packages. The packaged audio features are high robustness for different types of television sets and sound volumes, and have no disturbance of surroundings. In the channel audio retrieval method, feature vector correlation analysis and pattern matching are adopted successively. The simulation test results show that the TV channel recognition rate is above 93%, and other sounds from non-TV channels can be detected reliably.

Cosmopolitics in Border Film: Amores Perros (2000) and Sleep Dealer (2008)

The complex Mexico city drama Amores Perros and the Latino science fiction film Sleep Dealer explore issues of transnational identification and critique on different levels of cinematic communication: as productions targeting a general, universal young audience; as visual texts that illustrate and negotiate the distribution of images and data in a world of accelerated globalization; as film narratives centred on questions of human mobility and migration; as works of art scripted and directed by individuals who live and work in different countries. This study reads Amores Perros and Sleep Dealer in the context of the history of border film and analyses how the two films position themselves in contemporary debates on critical cosmopolitanism and economic globalization. As border films, set in Mexico, their cinematic politics go beyond local and national perspectives. Both films provide self-reflexive narratives about the topic of resistance within the space of global capitalism and contribute to the contemporary discourse of cosmopolitics.

Inspirations and Limitations: Reason, the Universal Audience, and Inspire Magazine

This paper addresses the first issue of the English-language web-based Al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, which was released in the summer of 2010. The authors contextualize the magazine in the media aspects of the conflict between Al-Qaeda and the West, and examine an article attributed to Usama bin Laden through the lens of Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric. The authors demonstrate that political violence is a media-driven event, and that The New Rhetoric, taken as a method in such a context, becomes a petitio, since the very question raised by Inspire focuses on the definition and nature of the universal audience. This raises quite significant questions abut the nature of methodology at the intersection of communication and religion.

Paul Claudel et la langue by Emmanuelle Kaës

aussi parfois apporté à l’artiste émigré confirmation de la valeur de son art, ces voyages ne sont plus conçus aujourd’hui comme un déplacement de la périphérie vers le centre mais plutôt d’un centre individuel à la recherche d’un plus grand centre (Belanger, 267). Transatlantic Passages est une lecture indispensable pour qui désire mieux comprendre la richesse de ces échanges créatifs entre les deux continents; échanges parfois douloureux, souvent inégaux, mais toujours fructueux. Représentatifs de nos sociétés contemporaines où les mouvements accrus de population rendent de plus en plus caduques une notion étroite de la nationalité, les artistes et écrivains étudiés sont les symboles adéquats de cette nouvelle identité fluide. Ainsi que l’affirme Régine Robin dans Cybermigrance: “Les écrivains de la migration au Québec ou ailleurs, écrivains dont je suis, seraient alors les nouveaux nomades de notre monde fragmenté et éclaté” (cité dans Green, 188). Hope College (MI) Brigitte Hamon-Porter KAËS, EMMANUELLE. Paul Claudel et la langue. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-81240278 -4. Pp. 477. 56 a. Author of a previous book on Claudel and European painting, Kaës focuses here on two unique decades in Claudel’s career when his writing was at its most exuberant—even extravagant—and very different from his previous or later styles. How, she asks, can we understand this unusual period, between the two World Wars, when Surrealists claimed Claudel as one of their own and Aragon considered him a Dadaist? Kaës’s answer is really two-books-in-one. The first is a lively, often amusing account of Claudel’s sparring with critics on both ends of the literary and political spectra. Right-wing, nationalist, xenophobic, and neoclassical reviewers accused him of violating the French language, distorting grammar, disregarding rhyme, succumbing to the “brumes de l’étranger” (11), and creating bizarre, non-French neologisms under the barbaric influence of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, English, and Chinese. His sin, in short, was to betray “la clarté française” (8) and thus “l’esprit français” (53). One critic described his prose as “traduit du tartare mandchou” (41). A priest asked Claudel why he did not write like Racine; others reminded him that, as a Catholic, he had an obligation to address a universal audience in language they could understand. Even NRF friends and allies were reticent about a style that seemed so alien to their classical, measured aesthetic. Claudel, who knew his heavenly pantheon, reacted with colorful ire, declaring that he was no Saint Sebastian: “Quand je reçois des flèches, comme tout le monde, j’ai envie de les renvoyer à leurs émetteurs” (376). His sharpest weapon was the Soulier de Satin. As Kaës cleverly shows, the play’s two professorial characters, Don Fernand and Don Léopold Auguste, who decry offenses against “notre clair génie espagnol” (378), are caricatures of Pierre Lasserre, Paul Souday, and all those who lambasted Claudel’s supposed betrayals of “le génie de la langue française” (53). Kaës’s vivid account of attacks-and-revenge constitutes two bookends around a long, central section in which she details Claudel’s theories about words, sentences, rhythm, rhyme, register, and sociolinguistics, as formulated in theoretical texts he composed in response to his critics. Key tenets are: the primacy 1264 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 of sentences over words; sentences as action; the importance of natural, spoken, musical speech, free of the constraints of traditional rhyme and meter; the superiority of prose over poetry; a canon that includes Rabelais, Pascal, Bossuet, Balzac, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Rimbaud, and Aragon, but vehemently excludes Racine, Voltaire, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, and other representatives of “l’esprit français,” which Claudel equated with “sec, paillard, méchant, cynique, vaniteux, histrionique” (136). On first reading, the structure of this volume can be disconcerting: the narrative momentum of the first section is interrupted by a 300-page description of Claudel’s linguistic theories before Kaës reunites theory and practice in her analysis of the Soulier de Satin. For Claudel, as for all great writers, practice is more interesting than theory, and...

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Editorial News

Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste Elinor Olin Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste. Edited by Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche, Michel Duchesneau and Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis. (MusicologieS, no. 3.) Paris: Vrin, 2010. [609 p. ISBN 9782711623167. €44.] Music examples, illustrations, index. The essence of good biography is found in the space between hagiography and apostasy, somewhere between a broad-stroke overview and a dry reporting of archival statistics. This is no small undertaking, even when motivated by the impulse to rehabilitate a good name to its well-deserved place in the musical—or in this case, humanist—pantheon. The task is more manageable, which is not to say simpler, when shared by a consortium of authors and when the subject has been generous enough to leave an abundance of evidence, written and otherwise. As editors Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche and Michel Duchesneau highlight in their introduction, the scope of this book is in itself evidence of Koechlin's "astonishing diversity" of interests and areas of intellectual expertise (p.11; translations throughout are mine). One of the founders of the Société musicale indépendante in 1910, Koechlin was a passionate advocate for musical modernism, yet refused to be limited by association with any aesthetic ideology or "school." A prolific author—of music criticism, public lectures, pedagogical treatises and radio broadcasts—as well as a composer of 226 works with opus number, Koechlin vigorously defied classification during his lifetime. This was no ordinary figure, as the twenty-four contributors to this volume make abundantly clear. Collectively, they present a nuanced portrait of a complex figure whose works contributed significantly to intellectual and musical life during the mercurial twentieth century. Their goal is to provide "the first French-language synthesis of Koechlin's oeuvre in the hope that new paths of inquiry will be opened" in exploring his extraordinarily diverse body of work (p. 14). If form follows function, it is no surprise that this work exceeds the boundaries of ordinary biography. After an introductory survey of Koechlin's life and works by Otfrid Nies, the body of this volume is organized into five sections, each focusing on a different facet of Koechlin's wide ranging, humanist contributions. The lead section, "Music and Society," examines his activities as politically engaged lecturer and critic. Liouba Bouscant's two chapters provide an excellent overview of Koechlin's conférences between 1909 and 1948, then a closer look at his political activities during the 1930s. Aude Caillet presents a candid investigation of the lectures between 1915 and 1918, in the context of prevailing anti-German sentiments in France. Even more specific is Michel Duchesneau's examination of Koechlin's encounter and sympathies with socialism. In all, these chapters shed light on fascinating contradictions: a "musical elitist" (p. 75) who, in his ardent defense of the avant-garde, sought to enlighten a universal audience about "[artistic] freedom conjoined with respect for musical instinct and sustained by deep knowledge of craft" (Koechlin, quoted on p. 124). Musical analysis takes the forefront in the next section, "Aesthetics and Compo sition," where specific works are discussed in detail. Sylvain Caron investigates Koechlin's religious ideology as manifested in his early work L'Abbaye for chorus and organ. Sylvie Douche makes the case for Koechlin as one of the most significant composers of the mélodie in the early twentieth century. Stéphan Etcharry's comparison of settings of Leconte de Lisle's "Colibri" by Ernest Chausson and Koechlin explores compositional characteristics of a single work, as does Patrick Otto's discussion of Koechlin's programmatic work for orchestra La Course de printemps. Christophe Corbier examines the influence of héllenomanie, or French enthusiasm for the spirit of ancient Greece. The strongest chapters in this section are [End Page 76] François de Médicis's assessment of Koechlin as "quartomancier" in a cogent analysis of the mélodie "Améthyste" and Danick Trottier's consideration of Schoenberg's considerable influence on Koechlin. Médicis is persuasive in suggesting that Koechlin integrated quartal harmonies not just for effects of sonority, but as essential to his compositional vocabulary. Trottier's essay is an excellent appraisal of the complex...

Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin'sThe Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872)

When Charles Darwin first published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals his purpose was to show continuity in emotional expression across species and thereby strengthen his theory of evolution. Surrounding the book’s illustrations, therefore, one finds descriptions of animal emotion designed to elicit our recognition as members of a universal audience. In this case our charm instantiates Darwin’s argument for emotional continuity across species at the same time that we as members of a historical audience may miss the sly provocation of contemporaries with which the passage concludes (fig. 1).

Balanço Crítico da Noção de Auditório Universal de Chaïm Perelman

The universal audience is a central concept in the New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman and indicates, in the same time, the rhetoric and universalistic nature that he attributes to the philosophical argumentation. So, this paper intends to make a critical balance of this notion. The critics from Manuel Atienza, Antonio Pieretti, Aulis Aarnio, Eemeren & Grootendorst and Tidale & Groarke, referred to a supposed ambiguity in the universal audience concept will be analyzed. In response to these critics, we will sustain that the supposed ambiguity reflects the nature of our argumentative practices and particularly of the philosophical argumentation that show contextual facts and ideal universalistic presupposes.

Who is the Addressee of Philosophical Argumentation?

Chaim Perelman invokes the idea of “universal audience” for explaining the nature of philosophical argumentation as rational rhetoric. As opposed to this view, centuries before Perelman, Socrates argues that philosophy should be conducted as a dialogue between concrete individuals with very specific qualities. The paper presents these different views in order to claim that the philosopher addresses neither a universal audience nor a particular other, but mainly and essentially the philosopher herself/himself. This brings to light the problem of self-deception as a central problem of philosophical thinking. In posing this view the paper uses Nietzsche’s definition of “the will to truth” as the will not to deceive, not even myself.

Reduction of Shape and Weight Concern in Young Adolescents: A 30-Month Controlled Evaluation of a Media Literacy Program

ObjectiveRecent eating disorder prevention efforts have targeted high-risk females in late adolescence (>15 years). Methodologically rigorous evaluations of prevention programs directed to younger, mixed-sex, universal audiences are largely absent. The primary objective was to evaluate a theoretically informed media literacy program delivered to a mixed-sex, universal, young adolescent audience. MethodFive hundred forty Grade 8 students (mean age 13.62 years, SD 0.37 years) from 4 schools participated with a total of 11 classes receiving the 8-lesson media literacy program (126 girls and 107 boys) and 13 comparison classes receiving their normal school lessons (147 girls and 160 boys). Shape and weight concern (primary outcome variable) and seven additional eating disorder risk factors (e.g., dieting, media internalization) were measured with validated questionnaires at baseline, postprogram, and 6- and 30-month follow-up. ResultsLinear mixed model analyses were conducted using a 2 (group: media literacy program, control) × 3 (time: postprogram, 6-month follow-up, 30-month follow-up) × 2 (sex: girls, boys) mixed within-between design, with baseline entered as a covariate. Main effects for group, favoring the media literacy program, were found for shape and weight concern (effect size [ES] = 0.29), dieting (ES = 0.26), body dissatisfaction (ES = 0.20), ineffectiveness (ES = 0.23), and depression (ES = 0.26). Conclusion: Media literacy can be an effective intervention for reducing shape and weight concern and other eating disorder risk factors long-term in a universal mixed-sex, young adolescent population. More evaluations of methodologically sound prevention programs are required with this demographic. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry, 2009;48(6):652-661.

Black Jewish Identity Conflict: A Divided Universal Audience and the Impact of Dissociative Disruption

This article makes a two-part argument. First, I show how a dispute over authentic Jewish identity demonstrates the limits of The New Rhetoric's “dissociation” and “universal audience” as tools for the expansion of existing identities, communicating across particular audiences, or resolving conflict when identity is the issue at stake. Through careful analysis of the 1971 Black Jewish identity conflict, I then develop a new theoretical concept, “dissociative disruption,” which names and theorizes an interim step between “breaking the links” and full “dissociative restructuring” to better account for the ways power and authority affect the relative rhetorical possibilities for particular rhetors and audiences.

Interpreting Perelman’s Universal Audience: Gross versus Crosswhite

While still subject to differing interpretations Perelman’s theory of audience has potential as an evaluative tool in rhetorical criticism as demonstrated by Gross and Crosswhite. I compare their explanations of how politicians address the universal audience and the respective implications for evaluating the argumentation and then argue that although Gross provides a more immediately applicable theory, Crosswhite’s interpretation recommends itself by virtue of its wider scope in regard to deliberative rhetoric.

Perelman's Theory of Argumentation and Natural Law

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.

The Kabbalah Centre and Contemporary Spirituality

AbstractThis paper focuses on the Kabbalah Centre, an international new religious movement that popularizes formerly esoteric Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and attempts to spread it to a universal audience. Like many new religious movements, its cultural and social nonalignment fosters intense opposition as well as attraction, the latter most notably from celebrity followers such as Madonna. I summarize portions of my ethnographic and historical research to illumine some basic aspects of the movement: its connection to Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, its postmodern social structure, and its appeal to both people seeking a spiritual outlook and practice seemingly unconnected to normative, organized religion.

Comments on ‘Strategic Maneuvering in Question Time in the British House of Commons’

I would like to thank Dima Mohammed for doing exactly what she said she would do: offering a careful and systematic study of a particular context of political argumentation that demonstrates how considerations of strategic maneuvering can be incorporated into a pragma-dialectical analysis. The strategic maneuvering project is valuable because it aligns what traditionally have been concerns of dialectic with what traditionally have been concerns of rhetoric. For the dialectician, the approach explains how arguers try not only to resolve disagreements but to resolve them in their favor. For the rhetorician, the emphasis on dialectical purpose offers a standard of validity more precise than appeals to vague concepts such as the ideal speech situation or the universal audience. In turn, the incorporation of institutional perspectives in the study of strategic maneuvering is valuable. It extends the study of persuasion in argumentation beyond the basic situation of two people engaged in interpersonal dialogue within a shared context. It thereby permits a more complete mapping of actual arguments while normatively evaluating them against the rules for a critical discussion. In the first one-third of her paper, Dima Mohammed makes the case for considering strategic maneuvering and for taking institutional factors into account. I am prepared to stipulate these claims, for the reasons I have just described. But we have to be careful. First, as Mohammed points out, we must understand the argumentative activity type in relation to the aims of the institution. One must characterize argumentation as a means to achieve institutional goals. Second, one must have a good working notion of what an institution is. Mohammed leaves the term largely undefined. In my own paper I suggest that the term refers to patterns of expectations governed by rules and conventions which it often requires training and experience to grasp fully.

From Jew to Israelite: Making “Uncomfortable Communions” and the New Rhetoric's Tools for Invention

The question “Who is a Jew” provokes intense argument about identity. Answers to this question attempt to define what Gorenberg calls “family boundaries” and have significant consequences. Such attempts invite argument by dissociation and involve the notions of communion and the universal audience, key notions in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric. In this essay, I consider a heated exchange between a Black and a white Jew (Benjamin/Simon) over contested terminology and Chaïm Perelman's 1958 letter to David Ben Gurion as attempts to provide definitions of Judaism. Through careful analysis of letter correspondence, I demonstrate that arguments about identity which use dissociation may result in uncomfortable and contested communion.

Rhetoric and the Reception Theory of Rationality in the Work of Two Buddhist Philosophers

Although rhetoric is not a category of ancient Indian philosophy, this paper argues that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, 2 eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosophers, can nonetheless be seen to embrace a rhetorical conception of rationality. That is, while these thinkers are strong proponents of rational analysis and philosophical argumentation as tools for attaining certainty, they also uphold the contingent nature of all such processes. Drawing on the categories of the New Rhetoric, this paper argues that these Buddhist thinkers understand philosophical argumentation to be directed at a universal audience of rational beings, where this universal audience is not an actual audience but a rhetorical one constructed through the author’s particular and historically contingent conception of what counts as rational. A reception theory of rationality is one that holds that the rationality of an argument depends upon its acceptance by a rational audience. When philosophers recognize the historically contingent nature of what counts as rational, they can embrace a reception theory of rationality that neither reduces the rational to mere opinion nor restricts it to a single, absolute, and timeless standard.

Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument

Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument Scott F. Aikin I The notion of universality in argumentation is as fecund as is it is controversial. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s notion of universal audience (UA), given their requirement that all arguments be evaluated in terms of their audiences, clearly promises a rich account of argumentative norms. It equally yields a variety of questions. For the most part, the questions come in three forms: what, precisely, is the universal audience; whether it is, in the end, a coherent notion; and how its norms actually constrain argument. Many objections to the notion claim that it is either incoherent or too empty to constrain. My objective here is to provide an account of Perelman’s notion of UA that avoids these objections. I will argue that the UA can be clarified with a distinction between two functions it plays in argumentation— one pragmatic and another epistemic. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca do not explicitly disambiguate these roles themselves, though they do use the notion in two distinct ways in The New Rhetoric (TNR [1969]), and so it seems clear that although the view in the end may be Perelmanian, it is arguably not Perelman’s. No matter. The purpose of this essay is not to exhume Perelman but to resurrect and exercise his views. That is, historical work in philosophy must straddle the demands of two distinct goals— fidelity to the author in question and defensibility of the views developed. My case [End Page 238] will jointly depend on the comparative plausibility of my account as an interpretation of Perelman’s universal audience and of the view as correct regarding argumentative norms in relation to the other competing interpretations of Perelman’s UA. So if my argument for a divided universal audience is at least Perelmanian in spirit, and if it survives the objections to UA that other interpretations do not survive, it should be the philosophically preferable interpretation. II The first principle of Perelmanian rhetoric is that arguments are addressed to audiences for the purpose of inducing or increasing adherence to a view (TNR, 14). Consequently, the less reliant arguments are on a specific audience’s idiosyncratic commitments, the more effective the arguments will be in generating assent and resolving disagreements in wider and wider groups of people. Perelman describes the universal audience in The Realm of Rhetoric (RR [1982]) as “itself . . . made up of an infinite variety of particular audiences” (14). The UA is the regulative ideal of maximal intersubjective agreement. That is, we see both the relative weakness of arguments that depend on the commitments of particular audiences and “the value attached to opinions that enjoy unanimous approval” (TNR, 31). This unanimity is reached at its highest point in the universal audience. As such, UA is an agglomerative notion that functions as a criterion for how widely an argument may be given credence. Call this trajectory toward unanimity the pragmatic element of UA. However, the universal audience’s assent is used to define facts for arguments, and as such, it is a marker of the objectivity of a conclusion, not just the breadth of the effectiveness of an argument. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca stipulate that “from the standpoint of argumentation, we are confronted with a fact only if we can postulate uncontroverted, universal agreement with respect to it” (TNR, 67). Facts and truths are defined in terms of the “agreement of the universal audience” (TNR, 67). This, of course, is not to say that arguments make facts but, instead, that their universal acceptability is a criterion for whether some purported fact is or is not the case. Agreement on this level does not play a metaphysical role of explanation but, rather, a cognitive role of justification for taking a commitment as a premise for further argument. The agreement in a universal audience, further, must be uncontroverted, which means that this UA must have some shared commitment that survives scrutiny (or at least is [End Page 239] not defeated): “The agreement of a universal audience is . . . a matter, not of fact, but of right” (TNR, 31). And further, this right has a very powerful normative element: “Argumentation...

Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument

Research Article| January 01 2008 Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument Scott F. Aikin Scott F. Aikin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (3): 238–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655315 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott F. Aikin; Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (3): 238–259. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655315 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.