Passages excerpted from The Realm of Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman, 1982.
Under the names dispositio in antiquity and method in the Renaissance, rhetoric and dialectic have dealt with the organization of subject matters and the order of arguments in a speech. Different parts were distinguished---the exordium, the narration, the proof, the refutation, the recapitulation, and the peroration---as if all speeches had the same structure, whatever their purpose, audiences, and time available. Aristotle had remarked that the traditional divisions worked only for this or that kind of speech. To him, there were only two indispensable parts: the statement of the thesis that one proposes to defend and the means of proving it. But on this interpretation the order will be essentially limited to that in which the arguments are laid out.
Let us note immediately that order has no importance in a purely formal demonstration; such demonstration is a matter, by means of a correct inference, of transferring to theorems the truth value attributed by hypothesis to axioms. However, order is important in argumentation aimed at obtaining the hearing of an audience. In fact, the order of the presentation of arguments modifies the condition of their acceptance.
The exordium, although in principle its subject may be irrelevant to the thesis under discussion, is the part of the speech that is treated by almost all the masters of rhetoric. For Aristotle, certain exordia resemble musical preludes, but their essential role in most cases is functional: to win the members of the audience to the speaker's side by creating or fostering among them an atmosphere of interest and good will. When time presses and the speaker is well known to his audience, the exordium can be put aside. To omit it affects the fullness but not the order of the speech. Besides, in our day the purpose of an exordium is often attained by the presiding officer's introduction of the speaker.
The exordium can be about the speaker, the audience, the relevance or importance of the subject, or about the opponent. Aristotle notes in this regard that an exordium which concerns the speaker or his opponent tries to set aside an unfavorable prejudice against the speaker or to create an unfavorable one toward his opponent. But he remarks quite usefully that when it concerns putting aside a prejudice against the speaker it is indispensable to begin the speech with it, because the members of an audience will not listen voluntarily to someone whom they consider hostile or reprehensible; but when it is a matter of crushing the opponent, the arguments must be placed at the end of the speech so that the judges will remember them clearly during the peroration. We see that for Aristotle the place of a development and of an argument is functional: it depends upon the sought-for-end and upon the most effective means of reaching it.
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Should argument itself follow or precede the thesis it is meant to support? Cicero advised different procedures depending upon whether the argument is meant to convince or to arouse the audience. In the first case, there is nothing against announcing at the start the thesis to be proved; in the second, it makes sense to prepare the audience by a preliminary argumentation and to give the thesis at the end.
In what order should arguments be presented? Three orders have been recommended, based on the strength of the arguments: the order of increasing strength, the order of decreasing strength, and the Nestorian order, wherein we begin and end with the strongest arguments, leaving the others in the middle.
The trouble with the order of increasing strength is that beginning with the weakest argument turns off the audience, tarnishes the speaker's image, harms his prestige, and diminishes the attention given to him. The order of decreasing strength ends the speech with the weakest arguments, leaving the listeners with a bad impression, often the last thing they will remember. For this reason most of the classical rhetoricians recommend the Nestorian order.
The trouble with this approach is that it presumes that an argument's forcefulness is constant, regardless of the circumstances in which the argument is presented. But this is not the case. The strength of the arguments depends upon the way the arguments are received. If the opponent's argumentation has impressed the audience, it is in the speaker's interest to refute it by beginning with clearing the field, so to speak, before presenting his own arguments. On the contrary, when one speaks first, the refutation of the opponent's eventual arguments never precedes the proof of the thesis defended; there may even be reason not to bring them up so as not to give the opponent's arguments a weight or presence which their evocation could only reinforce.
We must not forget that the audience, to the degree that speech is effective, changes with its unfolding development. Some arguments will have various weights depending upon whether certain facts, or particular interpretations of facts, are known. To the degree that the aim of the speech is to persuade an audience, the order of argumentation will be adapted to that purpose: each argument ought to come at the moment at which it can have the greatest impact. But since what persuades one audience does not convince another, the effort of adaptation must always be taken up anew.
Is there an unchangeable order, independent of the audience? It is to a similar inquiry that they are devoted who, on the one hand, extol a natural or rational order and, on the other hand, see in a speech only a work of art. In both cases they seek an objective order, determined by scientific or aesthetic considerations.
One way of disregarding the importance of the audience is to be preoccupied with only one type of audience, whose adherence is a guarantee of truth. To Plato, philosophical rhetoric is the one that would convince the gods themselves (Phaedrus, 273e), a rhetoric based on truth. It is the same in Descartes' Discourse on Method, which continues by radicalizing Agricola's and Ramus' efforts, which questioned whether there does not exist a unique order which compels recognition since it is based on the nature of things, and to which rational discourse ought to conform. To the method of prudence, which is relative to opinion, they opposed the method of doctrine or nature "where that which is naturally more obvious should come first" (Pierre de la Ramee, Dialectique, p. 145).
Instead of opposing what is more obvious to what is less so, Descartes, taking as a model "the method of geometers," sets himself against traditional rhetoric and dialectic, which are satisfied with probability. Aiming for a certainty beyond opinions, he writes in the first part of the Discourse on Method: "Reflecting on the number of different opinions that can be maintained by learned men on a single topic, although only one of these can ever be true, I came to regard as almost false whatever merely looked like the truth" (p. 42). From this follows the first rule of his method: "To accept as true nothing that I did not know to be evidently so;" then the second: "To divide each difficulty I should examine into as many parts as possible, and as would be required the better to solve it." The third rule expressly treats our concern, namely, how "to conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, starting with what was simplest and easiest to know, and rising little by little to the knowledge of the most complex, even supposing an order where there is no natural precedence among the objects of knowledge." To this he added a final rule: "To make so complete an enumeration of the links in an argument, and to pass them all so thoroughly under review, that I could be sure I had missed nothing" (p 50).
There would be no reason to find fault with these rules if Descartes had wished to limit their application to mathematical discourse. However, he makes a daring move which leads him to a controversial philosophy when he ventures to mix typically philosophical imagination with mathematical analyses, by transforming the rules inspired by the geometers into universally applicable ones. The following passage expresses his hopes for a truly rational philosophy.
These long chains of reasoning, all quite simple and quite easy, which geometers are wont to employ in reaching their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to imagine that all the possible objects of human knowledge were linked together in the same way, and that, if we accepted none as true that was not so in fact, and kept to the right order in deducing one from the other, there was nothing so remote that it could not be reached, nothing so hidden that it could not be discovered.
The aim of philosophy, for Descartes, is the discovery of truth in all things, and its basis is the self-evident truth of "the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly" (p. 62). His method would give birth to a completely new philosophy, a true science wherein we proceed from one self-evident truth to another.
But as long as he had not arrived, through this method, at knowing the truth of all things and in order, he writes that "in order that I might not remain irresolute in my actions while reason obliged me to suspend my judgment, but might continue to live as happily as I could, I devised a provisional morality for myself, composed of only three or four maxims" (p. 53). These maxims derive more from the reasonable than the rational, as characterized by self-evidence, and are so indistinct that he hesitates to state whether their number is three or four. If the first three maxims, concerning moderation, perseverance, and self-mastery (rather than mastery of the world) are of universal applicability, the fourth---that of using his whole life to cultivate reason and to advance in the knowledge of truth---cannot have the same bearing because he cannot recommend that each man lead a scholarly and philosophical life.
While rhetoricians spoke of a natural order outside of discourse, they were in fact thinking of the chronological order which is suited to narration, the order which relies on customs and tradition and which must be followed so as not to attract attention. In contrast, Descartes adopted a unique order inspired of the geometers, an order which always moves from the simple to the complex. Thus the methodological problem ceased to be the rhetorical one of adaptation to an audience and became instead the scientific one of conformity to the nature of things.
From this perspective, rhetoric (according to the view of Ramus) no longer aims to convince but to please; at best, rhetoric makes it easier to accept, through the magic of words and presentation, truths that are known independently of the art of persuasion. From this point of view a tendency developed, the premises of which were already to be found in the Platonic conception of rhetoric: a discourse was essentially thought of as a work of art, as "a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet" (Plato Phaedrus (Jowett trans.) 264c). Equally, in this case, even if the order of a discourse is not based on ontology but upon an aesthetic---in that it concerns satisfying the demands of creating such a work---one is separated from the proper rhetorical order, which is the order best adapted to any given audience.
Reducing the problems of order to a scientific or aesthetic methodology separates questions of content from questions of form and discards the problematic proper to rhetoric: the adaptation of discourse to the audience. To separate questions of truth from those concerning adherence is to see in rhetoric only a simple technique of communication. This is a view that led to rhetoric's degeneration, and to the subsequent transformation of ancient rhetoric, a technique of persuasion, into a rhetoric of figures, purely ornamental, and, at best, literary.
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