A Discourse on the Combination of Argumentation and Rhetoric

Abstract

The article discusses the position that rhetoric occupies in Russian universities today. The current situation in which rhetoric is being forced out of teaching and research at the faculties of the humanities and being replaced by the theory of ar­gumentation is proposed to be regarded as a temporary injustice, which can be recast either through turning on to Perelman’s New Rhetoric or through the work in the spirit of the pragma-dialectics approach, which pays enough at­tention to rhetoric. This article proposes another mode to reverse rhetoric and to conjunct it with argumentation theory, which tends to be the most appropriate of all. It consists in viewing arguments not as pseudo-syllogisms, with premises, a conclusion and a connection between them, but as stories that embrace three elements: first, an initial state of affairs, then an action that is applied to this ini­tial state, and finally, some other state, that emerges from that one due to the im­plemented action. To consider arguments as three-part story-like structures means to have an ability to use in the analysis and the evaluation of persuasive tests and speeches the entire arsenal of rhetoric and argumentation, since the questions that a story raises are not limited to questions about the nature of the relationship between the initial and final states (as it holds in basic argumentation theories) and extend into the characters of the narrator, the story “cast”, and the listeners, as well as their reactions that the story evokes, including those that are not only affective. With this view, the content of rhetoric restores its relevancy, and the dis­cipline itself becomes again desired in the educational process and in society