Even when what we say is correct and true, an audience may not be persuaded. And the reverse also happens: a speech can move people even though it distorts or conceals the truth or somehow fails to show it. Rhetoric is the art that concerns persuasion toward truth, and it raises three questions. What persuades someone to accept something as true? How can we best find the means to persuade others of what is true? And how can we guard against those who use the same art to persuade us of what is false?
What rhetoric is
Aristotle calls rhetoric the counterpart of dialectic, since both concern matters that can be otherwise and reason from accepted opinions. He defines rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Rhetoric I.2). So, the principal task of rhetoric is not to persuade the audience but to see what can be said in this case to this audience to convince them of what is true in the relevant case. A speech or article may be well crafted and still fail to persuade its audience, in the same way that a physician may use medicine well and still not cure the patient.
Rhetoric reasons in its own forms. The enthymeme is a syllogism about matters that can be one way or another, often with a premise left for the hearers to supply; the example is a kind of induction. Demonstration and proof, where they can be made in speaking and persuading, remains the highest forms of argument.
The means of persuasion
Aristotle names three means of persuasion that the speech itself provides.
- Ethos: the character of the speaker, as the speech shows him to be trustworthy.
- Pathos: the disposition of the audience, since we do not judge in the same way when we are pleased at something and when we find it painful.
- Logos: the argument of the speech itself, when it shows something true or apparently true.
The kinds of speech
There are three kinds of speech, according to what the audience is asked to judge. A deliberative speech asks an assembly of some kind what should be done; a forensic speech asks a court or deciding board what in fact has already been done, a judgment on something that already happened; and an epideictic speech asks a gathering or assembly to praise or blame something or someone, e.g. a great person or a meaningful event. After we discover what can be said we must take what must be said and arrange it and decide what style to use.
Rhetoric and truth
Rhetoric is ordered to the true and the good. Aristotle says that we study how to argue both sides of a question not in order to persuade people of what is wrong but in order to see the facts clearly and to refute unfair arguments; what makes someone a sophist (i.e., a manipulator who uses rhetoric in order to deceive) is not his technical skill in speaking and style but the purpose he has in using that skill. Aristotle and the tradition teach also that what is true and good is by nature easier to prove and to believe. But some audiences are not ready to be instructed the way a student of geometry is instructed, and so the art of rhetoric is needed even by those who already know the truth, since they may well be called upon to teach others.
Continue to Studying Rhetoric.