The New Rhetoric's argument schemes: a rhetorical view of practical reasoning.

• Author: Warnick, Barbara

In a lecture delivered in 1957, Chaim Perelman (1958) described the workings of practical reasoning and compared them to the structures of formal logic:

Why envisage proof always in terms of a single model? . . . |A~ final convergence |of a number of indications~ can lead to conclusions so sure that only a lunatic would ever think of doubting them. . . . When we have to reconstruct the past |for example~ the arguments which we use seem to me very much more like a piece of cloth, the total strength of which will always be vastly superior to that of any single thread which enters into its warp and woof.

In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) developed a description of the various threads making up this cloth; these include the starting points for argument, the conventions governing argument practices, and the mechanisms or schemes for making inferences.(1)

Each of these dimensions of argument is tied in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1969) theory to a conception of what the arguer believes that the audience will accept, since "it is in terms of an audience that an argumentation develops". For instance, the starting points of argument--facts, truths, presumptions, values, hierarchies, and the loci of the preferable--are derived from premises to which the arguer's anticipated audience presumably subscribes. The conventions for conducting arguments also grow out of practices and norms mutually accepted by interlocutors who participate together in a common culture. Likewise, the inferential schemes that move the audience to accept the arguer's claims are generated through commonplaces and structures recognized and accepted by Western society. Over two-thirds of The New Rhetoric was devoted to describing these agreed-upon liaisons that make inferences possible, for Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca believed that in practical reasoning, inferential moves are made possible rhetorically.

Yet The New Rhetoric's system of argument schemes has not received attention proportionate to its significance. While numerous studies have focused on the concepts of universal audience (Scult, 1976; Ray, 1978; Perelman, 1984; Golden, 1986), presence (Karon, 1976), and the rationality/reasonableness distinction (McKerrow, 1982; Laughlin & Hughes, 1986), attention to the argument schemes themselves has been infrequent, despite the fact that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) devoted the bulk of their treatise to the rhetorical nature of inference forms. Quasi-logical, analogical, and dissociative scheme types have been individually studied (Dearin, 1982; Measell, 1985; Schiappa, 1985). One critique of the system has appeared (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Kruiger, 1984), and various critics have made partial or tentative efforts to apply the schemes to argument practices (Siebold, McPhee, Poole, Tanita, & Canary, 1981; Farrell, 1986). While argument textbooks make general use of the scheme typology to describe argument practices (Katula, 1983; Herrick, 1991), precise study of the individual schemes has been sporadic and indeterminate. Two decades after The New Rhetoric was published, Olbrechts-Tyteca (1979) expressed disappointment at the lack of attention given to the study of specific schemes. And in 1986, Thomas Farrell could claim that The New Rhetoric's descriptions of practical reasoning practices "have been the singularly most neglected feature of Perelman's rhetorical theory".

The scheme typology is nonetheless of singular importance because it provides us with a rhetorical account of the operation of argument schemes. Prior to The New Rhetoric, our vocabulary for describing inference patterns was limited to formal logical patterns (e.g., categorical, disjunctive, and conditional syllogisms) and the standard classifications of inductive reasoning (analogy, generalization, cause, and sign). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) generated their schemes through a careful empirical process in which they collected discursive arguments for over ten years, typed them, and added new categories (dissociations, symbolic liaisons, and double hierarchy arguments, among others), thus providing a richer vocabulary for describing reasoning structures. In addition, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explicitly incorporated a rhetorical theory of argument by shaping audience-accepted commonplaces into the inference structure of schemes.

Our purpose in this essay is twofold: (1) to describe how schemes make use of culturally-accepted commonplaces in their inference structures, and (2) to respond to significant criticism of the schemes by clarifying and elaborating them and indicating their frequency in discourse. Our essay will establish that the schemes recognizably appear in discursive arguments. By showing how rhetors' knowledge of their expected audiences enables them to make use of audience biases, habits of thought, and forms of expression to transfer adherence to the claim, we will indicate the senses in which the schemes are rhetorical.

THE RHETORICAL WORKING OF THE SCHEMES

Because they lie at the very core of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's theory, argument schemes deserve further systematic study. In Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1969) view, a theory of argument must examine the ways in which discursive techniques induce the mind's adherence to theses presented for its assent. Such an analysis begins with premises already accepted by the audience; these premises form both the foundation and the starting point of argument. Arguers construct arguments from the coexistential, causal, and symbolic liaisons as well as hierarchies and loci recognized and accepted by particular audiences, or considered to be compelling in relation to a universal audience. While rhetors recognize many kinds of premises, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca divide them into two major types: premises that focus on the real and consist of facts, truths, and presumptions; and premises that focus on the preferable and consist of values, hierarchies, and loci about the preferable.

While arguments derive persuasive force from recognized premises, they also derive force from the ways in which rhetors connect opinions to these premises. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) posit that arguers connect premises to theses by way of inference forms, or argument schemes, that pass acceptance from the premises to the conclusion. Schemes create links either through processes of association, in which premises are brought together and unified in particular ways, or through processes of dissociation, in which previously unified premises are disengaged from each other. Thus argument schemes exploit the cultural and cognitive predispositions of the audience as construed by arguers. The schemes themselves are distinct, culturally-held beliefs about the ways we form new beliefs from already accepted premises. Hence, argument schemes are themselves loci about arguments in that they are different ways of relating observations to claims that gain force by being recognized and accepted by an audience. It is the recognizability of the forms themselves that gives arguments their persuasive force. The persuasive power of arguments, then, arises from these inference forms, as well as from the recognized liaisons, hierarchies, and loci of the preferable.

It is important to recognize that schemes are able to function persuasively because of the arguer's and the audience's mutual participation in a common culture. Perelman's (1958) opposition to a Cartesian model of proof was emphasized by his rejection of proof that is ahistorical or acultural. Perelman viewed argument as a culturally-constituted activity. (In his view, schemes work rhetorically because their inferences are jointly recognized by a culture common to the arguer and his or her audience.) Thus, Perelman held that the faculty of reason is constituted within us by means of a cultural apprenticeship and because of the rules we are taught and the changes we make in them as a result of their use.

This awareness of both the inference structure of arguments and of their cultural situatedness means that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's theory combines what Joseph Wenzel (1990) has called a logical approach to the study of argument with a rhetorical one. Arguments are indeed products produced by naive social actors that can, despite the equivocal character of language, be reconstructed and subjected to logical analysis and criticism. For instance, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) write extensively about the ways arguments containing particular schemes exhibit similarities in syntactic form and semantic content. Yet, because arguments are also efforts to win adherence, these theorists also understand premises and schemes as constituting and being constituted by functional processes of persuasion. Thus, much of The New Rhetoric is devoted to the ways symbolic resources can enhance the presence of premises and schemes and motivate persons to agree.

Further, by combining a logical approach with a rhetorical one, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) suggest that argumentation theorists should examine the conditions under which argument schemes are appropriately applied in relation to particular audiences, and also in relation to a universal audience. In Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's view, the audience is a systematized construction by the speaker. While argument schemes should certainly be studied for their effectiveness in anticipating particular audiences, it is often the universal audience that is invoked when a rhetor makes a judgment about how to use particular argument schemes. Yet since the universal audience varies according to the image formed of it by interlocutors, each culture "has its own conception of the universal audience." So Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest that "the study of these variations would be very instructive, as we would learn from it what men, at different times in history, have...