Comments on ‘Rhetorical Analysis Within a

Pragma-Dialectical Framework
The Case of R. J. Reynolds’

EUGENE GARVER
Regents Professor of Philosophy
Saint John’s University
Collegeville MN 56321
U.S.A.

RHETORIC, DIALECTIC, AND DEMOCRACY

‘Rhetorical Analysis Within a Pragma-Dialectical Framework’ raises three

questions. First, what is the relation between the methods of winning a
dispute and the methods of securing agreement studied in pragma-dialec-
tics? What is the relation between rhetoric and dialectic? This is a question
to which van Eemeren and Houtlosser offer a clear answer, but I will invite
them to reconsider in light of my other two questions. Second, how do the
methods of verbal manipulation in general, whether competitive or coop-
erative, relate to the methods used to arrive at something greater than agree-
ment, such as truth or the accurate representation of nature? This second
question could be posed as the relation between dialectic and rhetoric and
the methods of science. Third, discourse often has purposes that have
nothing to do with resolving disputes, and which therefore do not reach
the threshold at which dialectic, for van Eemeren and Houtlosser, begins.
Often people speak merely to be heard, to express themselves and create
their identities within a community. Just as I wonder about the relation
between both rhetoric and dialectic and science, I wonder about their
relation to purely expressive discourse, a connection perhaps hinted at
in Aristotle’s discussion of epideictic rhetoric, but surely needing more
analysis.
With a little massaging, the question of the relation of dialectic to
rhetoric can be seen as identical to that posed by MacIntyre about prac-
tical reason in general: ‘Both kinds of achievement, that of excellence and
that of victory, will require effective practical reasoning; and it will be
important to learn whether and, if so, how the kind of practical reasoning
necessary for the achievement of excellence differs from that necessary
for the achievement of victory.’1 What is the relation between living up to
the dialectical norms of reasonableness and communication and aiming at
victory for oneself, one’s clients, one’s favored party or policy?
The question of the relation between excellence and victory is especially
urgent, I think, in considering van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s empirical

Argumentation 14: 307–314, 2000.

 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
308 EUGENE GARVER

example. There are implicit judgments concerning the audience, the effect
on the audience, whether the appeal is successful and whether it should be
successful. In a way it seems to me that van Eemeren and Houtlosser take
for granted a rhetorical story that is itself divorced from dialectical con-
siderations. They seem to think that rhetorical intentions and effects are
fairly transparent, and need only be subject to dialectical judgment. I doubt
that audiences are as deceived and manipulated as they make out – although
how either of us would prove such a thing is another question – and wonder
how the rhetoric of these advertisements would look under the more dialec-
tical assumptions that audiences are perfectly aware of what is going on.
The relation between reasonableness and victory might force us to redefine
both those terms.
And thus my third issue. I don’t think that Reynolds is trying to fool
anybody. (This doesn’t mean that I have a higher opinion of their motives
or purposes than van Eemeren and Houtlosser do.) I offer the competing
hypothesis that Reynolds is aiming at the creation and presentation of a
corporate identity, that of the upright, thoughtful corporation, albeit one
engaged in selling a product of questionable value. They’ve given up on
trying to show that cigarettes are not dangerous, and instead are trying to
position themselves as corporate good citizens. Like van Eemeren and
Houtlosser, I base my hypothesis on the assumption that the advertorial’s
purpose must be connected to something it is doing reasonably well: ‘Since
it belonged to Reynolds’ dialectical commitments to make a real effort at
convincing young people that they should not smoke, whereas Reynolds –
being a tobacco company – cannot be expected to abandon altogether its
rhetorical aim of persuading people to smoke, it may be assumed that some
rhetorical maneuvering is going on.’ I disagree with the antecedent and
the assumption of that implication, but agree that we can only infer purposes
from how the appeal works. On my hypothesis, there is a sort of persua-
sion going on, but no aim at resolving differences of opinion. Of course
one can always reduce epideictic rhetoric to forensic, in this case by
claiming that Reynolds is trying to establish one corporate identity and
rebut another: ‘We’re good guys, not bad guys.’ But that does seem to be
letting the theory lead the data.
In the rest of these comments, I will try to understand the relation
between rhetoric and dialectic, both understood as being bounded by both
the more scientific or truth-oriented and more poetic or expression-oriented
uses of language. A further feature of van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s pre-
sentation is of interest. They make the dialectical task of resolving differ-
ences of opinion equivalent to ‘establishing methodically whether or not a
standpoint is defensible against doubt or criticism.’ A couple of things are
worth noting about this language. First, differences of opinion arrive fairly
late in the process of inquiry, resolving doubts and solving problems. Giving
an initial definition to the problem, gathering evidence, sorting through and
judging beliefs, all these things are likely to occur before we have articu-
 COMMENTS ON RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 309

lated ideas explicitly enough to have a pair of opinions that we know are
different from one another. In fact, I wonder whether starting at differences
of opinion does not arise from neglecting my second issue, the relation
between methods of rhetoric and dialectic and scientific methods.
Consider these two possible relations between dialectic and rhetoric.
First, one could survey rhetoric and communication in general, and make
dialectic a subset of rhetoric. One might decide, for example, that among
the ways we influence audiences, rational discourse was particularly
useful in coming to agreements, while emotional discourse was especially
disruptive or agonistic. Dialectic would then be about rational communi-
cation. Similarly, we might single out unconstrained or undistorted com-
munication. I can read both the Platonic and the Aristotelian program this
way, to find within the given practices of persuasion and teaching those
adapted to get at agreement, progress, and truth.
As I understand them, van Eemeren and Houtlosser take the opposite
tack. Dialectic establishes ‘norms instrumental in achieving this purpose
[resolving differences of opinion] – maintaining certain standards of rea-
sonableness and expecting others to comply with the same critical stan-
dards.’ Those norms by themselves never determine what anyone will say.
They allow a certain freedom, and within that freedom lies the rhetorical
opportunity to ‘resolve the difference in their own favour.’ ‘Rhetorical aims
can, in principle, be realised within a dialectical framework.’
There is something else worth noting about this formulation of the
dialectical project. ‘Establishing methodically whether or not a standpoint
is defensible against doubt or criticism’ presupposes a judicial or forensic
model for rationality. We have a right to opinions only if we can justify
them. The burden of proof is on the holder of the opinion. It is popular
these days to blame everything on Descartes. His method of doubt was
the tree of knowledge that introduced the sin of skepticism into the world,
and so it has become natural for us to think that any opinion that is not
justified is unjustified, that all opinions stand accused of being prejudices
unless we can overcome that suspicion by showing that we are justified in
holding the belief. Popper’s theory of falsification fit in this mode of
thought.
For better or worse, I believe that Descartes as Satan wildly overesti-
mates the power of philosophy in our lives. I agree that skepticism and
the need to justify our opinions plays a major role in configuring our intel-
lectual lives. I propose as a hypothesis that this presumption that all our
beliefs need justification is a function of the democratic nature of our con-
temporary conceptions of rationality. Since everyone has a voice, there
would be anarchy and cacophony unless there were a means of silencing
opinions that are not worth hearing. The method of justification and the
method of doubt is precisely such a necessary means of silencing opinions
that are not worth listening to. Starting with the equality of democratic
voices, the problem becomes one of instituting a hierarchy of which voices
310 EUGENE GARVER

are worth listening to and which not. The judicial model of reasoning is a
response to that problem. Naturally, the problem with basing dialectic and
rhetoric on the judicial model will be to make sense of the traditional delib-
erative and epideictic functions.
My correlation between justification as the primary function of rea-
soning, both theoretical and practical reason, can best be seen by noting
how absent justificatory reasoning is from ancient models of rationality.
Moderns criticize ancient pictures of practical reason, of rhetoric and
dialectic, for being aristocratic.2 There only gentlemen were allowed to
speak. The aristocratic presumption is that speakers are worth listening to,
both because they were probably intelligent and because they were almost
certainly like us. The burden of proof, correspondingly, is on a challenger
to show why a given speaker or opinion is wrong. If we restrict the fran-
chise and have high costs of entry into a conversation, then justification
becomes less crucial, and a less natural feature of conversation. If we open
discourse to all, then each must pay a price by justifying whatever he or
she has to say.
I think that this difference between ancient and modern presuppositions
about practical reason accounts for some interesting differences between
van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s presentation of dialectic and rhetoric and
Aristotle’s. One of the striking things about the Topics and the Rhetoric is
that the Topics is the much more confrontational and agonistic work, with
a stress on strategies for winning, while the Rhetoric presupposes a much
more cooperative relation between speakers and their audience. In dialectic,
as in pragma-dialectics, there is no audience, only a pair of interlocutors.
In rhetoric, there are no interlocutors, only a speaker and an audience. 3 The
tasks of both rhetoric and dialectic are different from their contemporary
appearance because of the ancient aristocratic presumption. In the Rhetoric,
the aristocratic assumption is that speaker and hearer are engaged in a
common enterprise of trying to find the best policy. Deliberative rhetoric,
not judicial or forensic rhetoric, is the paradigm for practical reasoning.
Persuading and giving good advice are linked together (I.8.1365b22). ‘On
any important decision we deliberate together because we do not trust our-
selves’ (Ethics III.3.1112b10–11). Make deliberation and not justification
the model for practical reasoning, and rhetoric is no longer the manipula-
tive one of the dialectic/rhetoric pair. Rhetoric is reasoning by a speaker
directed at an audience, while dialectic concerns reasoning directed at
an opponent. If I assert a given proposition, I am committed, in dialectic,
to all its logical consequences. The Topics shows how to exploit this com-
mitment by enabling dialectical arguers to trip up their opponents, by
showing undesirable implications of their propositions, or to avoid being
trapped. The Rhetoric sees the rhetorical situation not as a confrontation
between opponents, as the Topics does, but as the construction of a rela-
tionship between speaker and hearers. The aristocracy of the Topics comes
in its source of opinions in ‘those which commend themselves to all or to
 COMMENTS ON RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 311

the majority or to the wise – that is to all of the wise or to the majority or
to the most famous and distinguished of them’ (Topics I.1.100b22–23).
Dialectic can include conflict in ways that rhetoric cannot because
dialectic is not practical. For Aristotle all practical conflict is stasis, a
negative term. There is nothing of what Kenneth Burke called the delights
of faction. Cicero aligned rhetorical and dialectical methods of arguing both
sides of a question with the skeptical program from philosophical enlight-
enment. Machiavelli read Livy as showing that factions led to stability
and progress, and that insight into the value of faction led to later
ideas that even truth could emerge from conflict, and eventually from the
‘marketplace of ideas.’4 But all that is much later than Aristotle. There are
refutative topoi, but persuasion itself is not an agonistic activity, and
dialectic not a practical one. This suggests that rhetoric and dialectic are
related in more ways than van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s configuration that
dialectic sets the norms within which rhetoric is free to operate. Pragma-
dialectics may well be more suited to a democracy than were Aristotle’s
methods. I am not upholding the existence of an Aristotelian alternative
as a reason to suspect van Eemeren and Houtlosser so much as to put their
project in context.
Aristotle contrasts dialectic and rhetoric in another way. They are both
universal faculties without the restricted subject-matter that a science
has. But rhetoric is restricted to the subjects of deliberation, judicial
disputes and epideictic situations. Dialectic has no such circumstantial
limitation. I wonder, though, about the dialectic of van Eemeren and
Houtlosser. And thus my second question at the beginning, about the
relation between dialectic and scientific method. Is there is a method for,
as they say, resolving differences of opinion? Is it the same method
which allows us to resolve our differences over whether scientific biology
and/or ‘creationism’ should be taught in public schools, disputes about
gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, whether individual organisms or
genes are the unit of selection and evolution, and over whether modern
evolutionary theory is compatible with divine revelation? Or is dialectic
restricted to the subjects on which democratic disagreement is allowed?
The pseudo-Augustine’s Rhetoric says that rhetoric is about subjects about
which we should be ashamed not to have an opinion. (See Gorgias 452d–e,
Protagoras 318e–319a.) Does dialectic have a subject-matter delimited in
this way, even if not delimited by the principles that make a domain into
a science? Or is dialectic about settling all sorts of differences of opinion?
Is there a difference between negotiation and inquiry? Is there a differ-
ence between aiming at agreement and aiming at truth?5
To begin with, I suggest that the story that van Eemeren and Houtlosser
draw from Toulmin, that the triumph of scientific method drew rhetoric
and dialectic apart, is too simple. As they note, as dialectic disappears from
the intellectual scene, logic and rationality itself become identified with
scientific method – and the development of ‘method’ itself is another part
312 EUGENE GARVER

of that story that needs to be told – and so rhetoric becomes style and
arrangement, and deception. Missing from that story is the fact that when
dialectic is about methods of securing agreement and resolving disputes,
the relation between whatever agreement we come up with and truth seems
to become secondary. If dialectic as a means for resolving differences of
opinion has nothing to do with truth, then its function is more limited than
van Eemeren and Houtlosser suggest.
I am not suggesting that we should go back to Aristotle. I do not think
we ever have that kind of freedom to choose philosophical models of ratio-
nality. I think that van Eemeren and Houtlosser are right to make practical
reason basically a matter of justification. Democracy itself requires a
hermeneutics of suspicion and a method of doubt. Deliberation becomes
colored by this democratic requirement and its judicial model. Instead of
a problem-solving activity, deliberation becomes ideologized into another
forum of resolving differences of opinion. Thus, in the Prometheus myth
in Plato’s Protagoras, everyone gets to speak in political deliberation
because the assumption is that everyone has something worth saying. In
contemporary democratic deliberation, everyone gets to speak because
everyone has a right to speak. Aristotle’s famous argument in favor of
democratic deliberation in Politics III says nothing about rights and nothing
about resolving differences of opinion:
It is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come
together may be better, not individually, but collectively, than those who are so, just as
public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s
cost; for where there are many, each individual, it may be argued, has some portion of
virtue and wisdom, and when they have come together, just as the multitude becomes a
single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one
personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties (III.11.1281b1–10; cf.
13.1283b27–34).6

Moreover, it makes sense for democratic methods for practical reason to

search for rules for resolving disputes, instead of means and resources, such
as the virtues, more suited to aristocratic conceptions of practical reason.
Thus dialectic is favored over rhetoric. Rules make morality more demo-
cratic. When the moral virtues are political virtues they depend on a polit-
ical community of friendship and homonoia, irreducible to law while the
democratic morality of rights and rules is codifiable. The companion charge
to Aristotle’s ethics being aristocratic is that modern morality is legalistic.
Open communities and their corresponding moralities must be legalistic.
Only closed communities with tacit knowledge – virtue is acting as the
phronimos would act – can be communities of virtue.
The relations between democracy and scientific method are manifold,
but I wonder if consideration of van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s paper hasn’t
led to an unexplored relation between them. I agree that something like van
Eemeren and Houtlosser’s sense of dialectic is necessary for democracies
to function. But for dialectic to do its work, it cannot be a universal method,
 COMMENTS ON RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 313

and in particular can function only against a background of a distinct

scientific method. The growth and success of science makes democracy
possible in the following way.7 Democracy, as a method of deliberation
that centers on van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s sense of dialectic and
rhetoric, is possible only if methods of resolving differences are segregated
from methods of discovering and establishing truth. Of course, even in
ancient Greece, as the Prometheus myth itself illustrates, not all questions
were open for democratic deliberation. Architects and generals made
professional decisions that were not subject to majority vote. But when
everyone has a right to speak, and when everyone is expanded through the
succession of extensions of the franchise, the decisions available for demo-
cratic deliberation are restricted to those where we value, or can afford,
agreement rather than truth. Democracy and democratic deliberation are
possible only when science is secure and successful enough that its work
is left untouched by deliberation, dialectic and rhetoric. For just one
example, when Rawls talks about reflective equilibrium, a general method
for resolving political differences, all one’s opinions are available for com-
promise and negotiation. But that set of opinions does not include the truths
of neoclassical economics. Rawls holds them as fixed and not subject to
debate. I do not offer that example in criticism of Rawls, but rather as a
symptom of the connection between science and democracy. It is no
accident that van Eemeren and Houtlosser rehabilitate dialectic by limiting
it to agreement rather than truth. But such an art of dialectic can function
only against a background of settled science and scientific method. Science
makes the world safe for democracy.

NOTES

1
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, University of Notre Dame Press,
1988, p. 28. For one example, see H. Jefferson Powell, The Moral Tradition of American
Constitutionalism, A Theological Interpretation, Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993, p. 119. ‘Largely because of the slavery issue, individual legal arguments and judicial
decisions in the antebellum period are often marked by conflict between the pursuit of the
internal goods of the tradition (logical argument, textual fidelity, and so on) and the external
goods of maintaining the Union and the institutional power and prestige of the courts.’
2
Nothing in this contrast of ancient and modern denies the democratic origins of ancient
rhetoric, for which see, e.g., Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual
Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 and Harvey Yunis,
Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1996.
3
Plato shows how to complicate these contrasts. In the Protagoras, after the Simonides
interlude, the audience becomes an interlocutor as one of the speakers in an imaginary
dialogue with Socrates and Protagoras together as the other party. For Plato, dialectic must
neglect the audience because only between speakers can there be the friendship necessary
for the discovery of truth. Modern science discovers how one can have truth without friend-
ship, a very democratic procedure.
4
Nor did the sophists advance the idea that truth emerges from the conflict of opinions,
314 EUGENE GARVER

and so that factions were good things. They simply thought that competition was a given,
and they were going to help their clients get the best out of it.
5
One can resist the reduction of inquiry to negotiation and rationality to civility either by
distinguishing science from both rhetoric and dialectic, or by showing how scientific ratio-
nality infects rhetoric and dialectic too, so that they are not only about agreement and decision
but agreement and decision oriented to truth. Rather than inquiry being a form of negotia-
tion, Aristotle ultimately sees negotiation as a form of inquiry.
6
For similar claims, see Politics III.3.11.1282a14, a34–41, III.13.1287b23–28, IV.4.
1292a10–14. See also Metaphysics II.993b1–6: ‘No one is able to attain the truth adequately,
while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about
the nature of things, and while individual we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the
union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like
the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, in this respect it must be easy, but the fact
that we can have a whole truth and not a particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of
it.’ III.15.1286a27–31: ‘When the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should
the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet,
sit in judgment, deliberate, and their judgments all relate to individual cases. Now any
member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the same
is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better
than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things
than any individual.’
Yack, 1993, p. 167. ‘Although Aristotle does claim genuine knowledge of the human
good and does construct a utopian regime in which the human good is best realized, he
never suggests that we should measure the justice of laws and public acts by asking how
close they come to realizing the states of affairs found in the best regime.
7
Historically, there are two principal preconditions for democracy. I focus here on the rise
of science. But equally the retreat of religion is a necessary condition for democracy. This
can be seen in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Political Treatise, and in
Hume’s essay on ‘Parties in General.’ For the latter, see my ‘Why Pluralism Now?’ Monist
73 (1990): 388–410.