Rhetoric beyond Arguments: Thinking about the Role of Fictional Audiences in Plato’s Gorgias

In this piece, I propose a reading of Plato’s Gorgias that pays special attention to the role that the fictional audience plays in the unfolding of the dialogue. To this end, I use some of the insights that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts–Tyteca conveyed in their seminal work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation in order to argue that thinking about the way in which Socrates’ arguments are shaped by the different audiences that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles aim to address and represent provides us with a new hermeneutical understanding of what is at stake in each of the different interactions Socrates engages in throughout the dialogue. In unpacking the way in which Socrates appropriates Gorgias’ particular audience, transforms Polus’ universal audience, and challenges Callicles’ elite audience, I provide an outline of the difficulties that Plato’s Socrates has to overcome in order to achieve the ‘community of minds’ that Perelman and Olbrechts–Tyteca identify as the bedrock of fruitful argumentation. Having done this, in the last section I turn to Plato’s Phaedrus, for the purpose of making evident that thinking about Plato’s deployment of rhetorical audiences is a crucial step in the effort to expose the implicit continuity that links the discussion of rhetoric delivered by the Gorgias to that of the Phaedrus.

Perelman’s phenomenology of rhetoric: Foucault contests Chomsky’s complaint about media communicology in the age of Trump polemic

The analysis explores the main arguments of Noam Chomsky’s short book, Media Control that also reprints the monograph “The Journalist from Mars: How the ‘War on Terror’ Should Be Reported.” The problematic is Aristotelian rhetoric and Enlightenment rationality (justice) in civic discourse (Lógos) as compared to the thematic of dialogic reasonableness (Eulógos). Chomsky’s assumption of, and critique of, “old rhetoric” [Aristotle’s rhētorikḗ] is followed by a discussion of Chiam Perelman’s “new rhetoric” [presocratic poiētikḗ / epideiktikos / gērys] and his “incarnate adherence” (giving voice to) concept of the Universal Audience as a function of Epideictic argumentation. This is also a critique of Stephen Toulman’s neo-Aristotelian model of rhetorical “warrant” and its connection to Charles S. Peirce’s normative semiotic of the “argument cycle.” Heidegger’s and Lakoff’s concept of discourse framing is associated with Michel Foucault’s rhetoric concept of an ethic of social discourse for the common good (parrhesia) in the age of Umberto Eco’s hyperreality media that displays Baudrillard’s simulacra, such as Donald Trump.

The Practice of Transmedia Storytelling Edutainment in Media-Rich Learning Environments

Transmedia (cross-media/cross-platform/multi-platform) storytelling edutainment involves the use of narratives as a critical-creative approach to learning. The storytelling framework is a viable solution to engage a universal audience in both seated and online environments. The inherent interactivity of the internet and interaction with story is a method that can reach learners with both focused and short attention spans in media-rich environments. An e-module case study and slide presentation is offered to demonstrate narrative practice.

Others and Imagination in Reasoning and Argumentation: Improving our Critical Creative Capacity

Contemporary argumentation theories highlight the importance of Others for contributing to and critiquing an individual’s reasoning and/or argumentation. Reasoners and arguers are encouraged to interact with imagined constructs such as a community of model interlocutors or universal audience. These model interlocutors are theoretically meant to bring to mind reasons and counter-considerations that may not have been conceived of otherwise so as to improve the overall quality of an instance of reasoning or argumentation. Overlooked, however, is the impact of differing individual’s imaginative abilities. This paper argues that more important than relying on an Other, real or imagined, reasoners and arguers would do just as well to improve their own creative abilities first. Consulting a real or imagined Other may help in some cases help, but such a strong reliance on Others comes with serious limitations.

John Locke on Inference and Fallacy, A Re-Appraisal

John Locke, long associated with the “standard” approach to fallacies and the “logical” approach to valid inference, had both logical and dialectical reasons for favoring certain proofs and denigrating others. While the logical approach to argumentation stands forth in Locke’s philosophical writings (such as the Essay Concerning Human Understanding), a dialectical approach can be found in his contributions to public controversies regarding religion and toleration. Understanding Locke’s dialectical approach to argumentation not only makes his work more relevant to the contemporary discipline of informal logic, but this understanding also prompts a reconsideration of Locke’s rhetorical purpose. He approached argumentation dialectically (and logically) because he wanted to appeal to a universal audience of free rational subjects, people not unlike the real historical audience whom Locke addressed: radical Whigs, latitudinarian Anglicans, early-Enlightenment philosophes.