Rhetoric

Animals communicate to manipulate the behavior, present or future, of other animals. The most basic mood is the imperative: "Do this!" Animal communication is one nervous system reaching out for control over another.

In some animals, the nervous system controls behavior not through direct reflex action, but through the mediation of representations of the world --- ones which are more or less sophisticated and enduring. In such animals, an effective way of manipulating behavior is manipulating these representations. Such animals are accordingly very likely to have evolved ways of communicating that affect representations. These are still commands, but the action being commanded is now "Think this!"

This is still true of human beings, though our representational power, and our dependence on it, is (apparently) unique. Rhetoric is, classically, the art of persuasion; human speakers (and writers and signers) intend their audiences to come to believe and feel certain things. (The distinction between beliefs and feelings is so porous that I shan't keep on making it, and just speak of "thoughts".) That is to say, we are still, like our forebearers these last several hundred million years, engaged in manipulating the behavior of our fellow creatures; the behavior we want to manipulating is that of thought, because thought drives action. There are, of course, cases where we want to manipulate behavior directly: the historically most important form is military drill and words of command, where we learn to associate words with automatic actions, essentially by means of conditioning which also work on pets.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, that is, of the manipulation of thought. It thereby takes, implicitly, all the communicative acts people make as its domain. In practice, rhetoric has focused, reasonably, on linguistic communication --- speech, writing and signing. By saying that rhetoric is the art of persuasion, I mean (following the tradition) that rhetoric is a practical body of knowledge, which seeks to teach people how to persuade better --- to elucidate the practice of effective persuasion. Obviously, to gain this knowledge, one must study something of how people are actually persuaded, but

To get someone to think P, you don't have to tell them "think P", or even tell them "P". It is often much more effective to tell them something else, Q, say, which will cause them to think P. Thus if you want me to rush into my office and pull out as many things as I can, it is much more effective to tell me that it is on fire, than to tell me that to do that. It is for this reason that rhetoric impinges so closely on psychology. There are very pronounced regularities in how people interpret statements, or draw inferences from them (as you like), and these are important for rhetoric. One, well-known since ancient times, is that we tacitly supply premises which seem relevant, so that the speaker needn't say them. (Aristotle is clear, if characteristically dull, on this point.) If the tacit premises are sufficiently common and sufficiently tacit, they may pass utterly unremarked, and be all the more effective thereby. Hence cliches, even implicit cliches, are very effective rhetorical tools.

Conversely, if you want to know what people "think for granted", a good place to start is arguments they find compelling, but taken literally are non sequiturs.

(One could argue that the logical, propositional model implicit in my talk of premises and inferences is inappropriate to what actually goes on in the brain. I don't mean to make any neuropyschological claims by talking like this; it's merely a way of describing the performance --- certainly people act very much as if they had implicit premises. But one could implement the same behavior with a radically different architecture, one where tacit premises are either not represented as propositions (e.g., a production system), or not explicitly represented at all (e.g., a connectionist neural net). To say that such an agent "had" premises could only mean that "we find it convenient, as a short-hand, to speak as if it had premises, and used a different architecture than it really does". Nobody, I think, knows enough to even have an opinion about whether human beings fall into this category, though as Stephen Turner says, a lot of "social theory" explicitly assumes propositionality. In any case, let us return to our sheep.)

Relevance.

Fiction.

Logic and systems of argumentation.

Aristotle, Rhetoric
Raymond Boudon, The Art of Self-Persuasion
Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays on the Sociology of Literary Forms
I. A. Richards
- Practical Criticism
- Principles of Literary Criticism
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Cognition and Communication
Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices
Williams, Style: Towards Clarity and Grace

Abelson, Statistics as Principled Argument
N. Asher and A. Lascarides, Logics of Conversation ["People often mean more than they say. Grammar on its own is typically insufficient for determining the full meaning of an utterance; the assumption that the discourse is coherent or 'makes sense' has an important role to play in determining meaning as well. Logics of Conversation presents a dynamic semantic framework called Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, or SDRT, where this interaction between discourse coherence and discourse interpretation is explored in a logically precise manner. Combining ideas from dynamic semantics, commonsense reasoning and speech act theory, SDRT uses its analysis of rhetorical relations to capture intuitively compelling implicatures. It provides a computable method for constructing these logical forms and is one of the most formally precise and linguistically grounded accounts of discourse interpretation currently available."]
Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition [Rhetoric as techne]
Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology [blurb]
Ian Bogost, Pesuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games [blurb]
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
Sue Campbell, Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings
Frank L. Cioffi, The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers [Blurb, first chapter]
Peter Dear (ed.), The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies
James Freeman, Acceptable Premises: An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem [blurb]
Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics
David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler, Designing Interactive Worlds With Words: Principles of Writing As Representational Composition
Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empricism: Language and Perception, from Locke to I. A. Richards
Giandomenico Majone, Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process
Prashant Parikh, The Use of Language ["game-theoretic account of communication, speaker meaning, and addressee interpretation, extending this analysis to conversational implicature and the Gricean maxims, illocutionary force, miscommunication, visual representation and visual implicature, and aspects of discourse." Sounds promising.]
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book
Frederick Schick, Ambiguity and Logic [blurb
Christopher W. Tindale, Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument
Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument
Mark Turner
- The Literary Mind
- Reading Minds

Notebooks

Rhetoric