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From Argument to Assertion by Michael S. Kochin 

Department of Political Science Tel Aviv University kochin@post.tau.ac.il 

  Keynes said of the British Conservative politician Edward Bonar Law that he was

unbeatable in debate, on the assumption that "the pieces visible on the board

constituted the whole premise of the argument." In my paper I will focus on the

way that facts enter or get excluded from discussion. I will claim that acceptance

or rejection of factual assertions is a far more important process than logical vali-

dation of arguments. Not only are assertions more persuasive than arguments;

this is desirable, since we want our beliefs and actions to be reasonable and not

just rational

When do we resort to argument? Real speeches heavy on arguments aim to

present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one ar-

gues not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but to show

that one shares the common prejudices or values that appear in the presupposi-

tions and conclusions of one's argument, and second, to demonstrate mastery of

the subject matter by displaying relevant knowledge in coherently organized de-

tail. Arguing is thus a way of presenting facts and principles so as to show one's

character as worthy of trust

Perelman and Beyond: From the Rhetorical Tradition to Argumentation Studies

7-9 January 2008 Tel Aviv University Electronic copy available at:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1121602

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In 1787 an old man was dying, a friend of Diderot, trained by the philosophers.

The priests of the neighborhood were nonplussed: they had tried everything in

vain; the good man would have no last rites, he was a philosopher. M. de Rolle-

bon, who was passing by and who believed in nothing, bet the Curé of Moulins

that he would need less than two hour to bring the sick man back to Christian

sentiments. The Curé took the bet and lost: Rollebon began at three in the morn-

ing, the sick man confessed at five and died at seven. "Are you so forceful in ar-

gument?" asked the Curé, "You outdo even us." "I did not argue," answered M.

de Rollebon, "I made him fear hell." --Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea2 Keynes said of

the British Conservative politician Edward Bonar Law that he was unbeatable in

debate, on the assumption that "the pieces visible on the board constituted the

whole premise of the argument." Argument, in other words, is an alternative to

doing the hard work of bringing new facts to the table. As Jay Heinrich points out,

"argument allows us to skip the facts when we have to."3 Argument helps in cla-

rifying the consistency, that is to say the rationality, of our beliefs and of others'

assertions. Yet to understand the place of argument in persuasive communication

it is crucial to distinguish between the "rational" and the "reasonable." Rational

actions are justified by plausible beliefs; reasonable actions take account of all re-

levant facts and principles. Argument has acquired much of its luster illegitimate-

ly, because rhetorical theorists have failed to clarify the difference between ar-

gument and factual assertion, between the rational and the reasonable. It is

usually more important that our actions be justified in the light of the facts, that

they be reasonable, than they be justified in the light of our beliefs, that they be

rational. As Walter Lippmann puts it, "useful discussion ... instead of comparing

ideals, re-examines visions of the facts."4 Insofar as political institutions see

truth or correctness, they are largely engaged in sifting claims of fact rather then

assessing arguments. 5 Thus we need to focus on the way that facts enter or get

excluded from discussion

Acceptance or rejection of factual assertions is a far more important process than

logical validation of arguments, and I have argued elsewhere that factual asser-

tions are accepted or rejected on the basis of our judgment of the character of the

speaker.6 Yet the fact about rhetoric, about persuading human beings, that as-

sertions are more persuasive than arguments should not be seen as some sort of

failure, as if we could not expect of mere mortals to live up to the transcendent

standards of logic and rationality. It is desirable that we be more persuaded by

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assertion than by argument, since we want our beliefs and actions to be reasona-

ble and not just rational

1. Starting with Enthymeme From Aristotle to Chaim Perelman and Jeffrey

Walker, rhetorical theorists have written an enormous amount about enthymeme,

about argumentation from premises to conclusions as it appears in discussions of

practical affairs. There are, however, two fundamental rhetorical difficulties with

laying out one's premises, reasoning, and conclusions. Since arguments are anti-

climactic if they are explicit, the speaker who is excessively explicit in his or her

reasoning is liable to fall into what one may call "the arguer's dilemma," with its

two horns, the horn of banality and the horn of incomprehensibility. Either the

audience can see where you are going before you get there (first horn), or they

can't (second horn). If they can see where you are going, they will lose attention,

since as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca put it, "an anticipated argument is a

banal argument," and the arguer has impaled himself on the horn of banality.7 If

the audience can't see where you are going, that is, in all likelihood, because they

can't follow the thread of your argument, and the arguer loses their attention as

he squirms unnoticed, gored and suspended on the horn of incomprehensibility.

If the audience can't follow your argument, this means that even if you have ma-

naged to persuade them, we cannot say that they are persuaded to adopt your

conclusion by accepting the argument you have offered for it.8 So if you want to

argue, you have to find some way out of the arguer's dilemma: either you have to

compose an argument that your audience is able to follow but not to anticipate9 -

-an extraordinary achievement --or you have to aim in arguing at some effect

other than persuading your audience of the truth of your conclusion by means of

your argument. Cases of the first type are exceedingly rare in public affairs. I will

conclude this paper by discussing a case of the second type: building on exposi-

tions by Leff and Mohrmann as well as the recent book by Harold Holzer, I will

discuss how Lincoln composed his most carefully argued public speech, the 1860

Cooper Union Address, not in order to persuade his audience of his views about

slavery and the Constitution, but to persuade them that he was the suitable

spokesman for these views as presidential candidate of the Republic Party

Until we get to Cooper Union, until we get to one of those cases when persuasion

was achieved by (though not through) argument, I am going to be interested

mainly in alternatives to arguing which avoid the arguer's dilemma entirely. That

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is because (and this is the second difficulty with arguing) when you wish to move

your audience to action, setting forth explicitly your premises, your inferences,

and your conclusions often causes incredulity to creep back from your conclusions

to your premises

Here some of the differences between our logic and Aristotle's logic, which per-

haps for other purposes should be seen as improvements, serve principally to ob-

scure the issue. Our logic, the kind of modern logic many of were taught in our

first University logic course, is a nominalist logic of unasserted propositions, and

we were taught to see logic as the study of formal validity of putative inferences

linking such propositions. Aristotle's logic is an essentialist logic of assertions, in

which the concepts of truth, necessity, and probability take their place alongside

the concept of formal validity.10 Accordingly, Aristotle's logic distinguishes be-

tween the demonstration and the enthymeme according to what Irad Kimhi has

called the "logical-existential" character of their asserted premises: demonstra-

tive syllogisms have necessary premises, which assert essential causal claims

about real essences, and which one cannot help but accept when they are as-

serted.11 Such premises may be undeducible, primitive necessary premises unde-

rived from other premises, but which, Aristotle thinks, any reasoning being who

understands the premise has no choice but to accept, such as "All birds are ani-

mals." Such premises may instead be derived by necessary deduction from other

necessary premises; "No black swans bear live young" – I have left the derivation

as an exercise

Enthymemes, as distinguished from demonstrations, have probable or plausible

assertions as premises (Prior Analytics 2.27.2, 70a10-11). This means that the

audience of an enthymeme always has some way of rejecting the premises, either

by asserting that they are false or incredible, or, more important, by falsifying the

premise, by acting in the world so as to make them false

Consider the enthymematic syllogism (with a singular middle term, objectionable

to purists): + When a classroom door is locked, that classroom cannot be used

+ The classroom door is locked

ergo: The classroom cannot be used

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Faced with this enthymeme, one need not give up and look for another class-

room. Nor is the reasonable thing to do to dispute the major premise, and find

some way to use the classroom even though it is locked, but to falsify the minor

premise by bringing the key

In an important sense, outside mathematics, and certainly in practical affairs, the

facts are never all on the table: it is just a question of whether one has the re-

sources to challenge the factual assertions that lead to the conclusions one wishes

to reject --whether one can find the key or pick the lock. The issue is not relativ-

ism, but what the sociologist of science Bruno Latour has called a "trial of

strength": can you muster the resources required to overcome your opponents'

facts? This can be done by disputing the truth of your adversary's facts, that is,

by arguing, since "resource to argumentation is unavoidable whenever ... proofs

are questioned by one of the parties" (New Rhetoric, 8). More often, one puts the

adversaries' strength to the trial, by offering alternative facts that make your op-

ponents' claims seem irrelevant – that is, if one has not been bludgeoned into

aporia or absence of resources by the force of the adversaries' assertions into ac-

cepting their arguments. Appreciating the logical-existential nature of Aristotle's

distinction between enthymematic and demonstrative syllogisms leads us to think

about which premises are accepted and which are rejected. This is in fact what

Aristotle goes on to do in books 1 and 2 of the Art of Rhetoric, with proper allow-

ance for audience effects

2. Alternatives to Arguing "Examples," says Aristotle, "are most appropriate to

deliberative oratory, enthymemes more suited to judicial."12 Most criminal trials,

Aristotle presumes, are not like episodes of the old television courtroom drama

Perry Mason, where the defendant is always innocent and always acquitted based

on new evidence that Perry uncovers. The cases I study, political rhetoric and

scientific rhetoric, have no fixed record of evidence. The alternatives to arguing

that I am going to discuss, examples, stories, numerical data, vivid speech

(enargeia), are ways of using language to put facts, real or alleged, on the table.

Many of them are what Aristotle calls extratechnical, since they rely on presenting

things that come from outside the knowledge of the proper use of effective lan-

guage (see Rhetoric 1.2.2 1355b). For the politicians and scientists I study, their

actual extralogical knowledge or adeptness is precisely what they have to get

across in speaking or writing, so I have had to consider rhetoric more broadly as

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conscious reflection on all the available means of persuasion, not merely those

logical or stylistic means to which Aristotle confines his attention

The most straightforward alternative to offering an argument, one Aristotle con-

siders properly rhetorical, is to offer an example. Aristotle says that examples are

no less persuasive than arguments, but here we will take the side of Russell H.

Conwell, the man who built Temple University from his proceeds on the lecture

circuit: "people are more impressed by illustrations than by argument."13 An ex-

ample often takes the form of a story. Ronald Reagan, the "great Communicator,"

was a master of the anecdotal style: In Chicot County, Arkansas, James Wier

over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a $17,000 judgment,

and a U.S. marshal sold his 960 acre farm at auction. The government said it was

necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.14 One of Reagan's

strengths as a speaker was that he was never averse to making up details in order

to make a story even more moving, just as when he used to call an entire baseball

game with foul pitches and crowd news from the telegraph wire that reported on-

ly the results. The level of concreteness in the James Wier anecdote is striking,

and, as Reagan always said, "an example is better than a sermon."15 A sermon

gives us the alternative of disobedience, while an anecdote presents things to us

with such vividness that we feel that there is no alternative but to respond in the

manner in which the speaker has (perhaps invisibly) directed us.16 To quote

another great Californian, John Steinbeck, "It means very little to know that a

million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving."17 It is

the anecdote, like the photograph of the eight year old girl with hollow brown

eyes and a smudge on her cheek on the front of a brochure from Save the Child-

ren, that brings us face-to-face with a single victim and demands that we re-

spond.18 Ronald Reagan and his speechwriters understood well how to use his

ability to communicate things to help achieve their most important political goals,

as one can see from Reagan’s most important speech, and if George H. W. Bush is

a competent judge, his most stirring speech as President, the speech given at

Pointe-du-hoc, Omaha Beach, Normandy at the 40th anniversary of D- Day on

June 6, 1984.19 The speech does nearly all of its work in two short sentences,

when the President pointed to the assembled Ranger veterans, seated in rows be-

fore him at the ceremony

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"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc, these are the men who climbed these

cliffs." These were the most moving lines in Reagan’s entire public career; these

lines move the reader of the speech more than two decades after it was given by

pointing to the aged veterans to recall their heroism. We imagine ourselves seeing

these men, and in seeing them we recall what they did, their actions, in the teeth

of Hitler’s army

Bill Clinton’s indication of Richard Dean provides a similar punch to his 1996

State of the Union address. Dean, a Federal civil servant, was a hero of the Okla-

homa City bombing, President Clinton asserted, but this did not keep him from

becoming a victim of the 1995-96 government shutdown brought about by the

Republicans. Clinton had lost the battle in the 1994 elections, but by using this

one concrete figure, Richard Dean, he was able to link together the Republicans

partisan zeal with anti-government fanaticism that most Americans had rapidly

learned to abhor.20 It took September 11th for the Republican Party to recover

from Richard Dean

To draw inferences in one's speech one must derive one's arguments from "the

necessities of the things themselves" (ipsa rerum necessitas) (Quintilian 7.1.35),

or at least present them as so derived. The rhetoric of modern scientific commu-

nication assumes that the way to communicate these necessities is an appropriate

selection of numeric facts. The early members of the Royal Society took as their

motto "nothing in words" (nullius in verba), thereby instructing would-be "expe-

rimental philosophers" to inscribe figures, numbers and illustrations into their

writing in order to persuade.21 In the world those Seventeenth Century men have

made for us, their advice on how to persuade is now understood even by politi-

cians, as Rudolph Giuliani's memoirs of his service as Mayor of New York witness:

"Throughout the book, I seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of the lessons I

have learned with hard evidence. I believe in proof more than theories, results

more than rhetoric, so I have included a range of before and after examples."22

Giuliani quotes crime statistics

Similarly, Calvin Coolidge, speaking as Vice President to the American Legion in

1921, informs the Legionnaires that: The Veterans' Bureau and the agencies now

included in it, up to October 1 have paid $71,000,000 for medical and hospital

services, $267,000,000 for compensation, $254,000,000 for insurance awards,

$582,000,000 for allotments and allowances, $171,000,000 for vocational edu-

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cation. The amount disbursed by this Bureau in September was $34,237,000.

This reaches a total of $1,345,000,000, about one-third of all pensions paid by

the government from its beginning up to our entry into the World War. The year-

ly expenditures of the Veterans' Bureau are running at a rate of about

$411,000,000, which is more than one-half the entire expense of the government

before this war.23 These numbers, in their place, are as eloquent in expressing

The Price of Freedom, the title Coolidge gave to this collection of his speeches, as

the more high-falutin' language of patriotism that Coolidge always had ready for

use

When numbers are put through their paces in the proper bureaucratic form of

cost-benefit analyses mighty dams spring from the earth or vanish into might-

have-beens, and the great persuaders of the American political class are stunned

into speechlessness as though they had attempted to trade repartee with Chur-

chill or insults with Demosthenes. Pity poor George Norris, the Giant of Nebraska

Progressivism, pinned down by the thin but unbreakable cords of Army Corps of

Engineers numbers: It was explained to Senator Norris … that the cost of these

reservoirs would be between 40 and 60 million dollars; and that the cost-benefit

ratio will not be better than 2:1, and will probably be nearer to 3:1 even with very

liberal assumptions as to benefits. He was told that we were making every effort

to improve the showing of the project, that we have not yet found a justifiable

project for him, have scant hope of doing so, but are exhausting our ingenuity to

make the report convincing to all concerned.24 The choice to speak or write

numbers is a rhetorical choice, a choice among the available means of persuasion,

even if the use of numbers to persuade often carries with it the choice to belittle

other ways of speaking as "rhetoric" rather than results. Numbers like those

thrust at Norris persuade not because the audience can assess their validity or

their relevance, but because they give the impression that the speaker or writer

has mastered the field

As Bob Woodward describes the thinking of Andrew Card, George W. Bush's

chief of staff, at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, "The president had to

be familiar enough with the details, sufficiently immersed in the tactics, so that

he never appeared ignorant in public. That would be a true disaster."25 "Tech-

nical explanations can add a great deal of credibility," counsels advertising copy-

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writer Joseph Sugarman, "but before you write them, make sure you indeed be-

come an expert

If not, the customer will see right through this ploy."26 Detailed factual presen-

tation thus persuades not because the audience absorbs the facts but because the

facts give them impression that the speaker knows all relevant detail, even

though the audience has neither the time nor the knowledge to assess the presen-

tation: "the sheer copiousness of information... may suggest to a potential voter

that there is substance in the candidate's position," and thus that there is sub-

stance in the candidate.27 As Sugarman puts it, more pithily, "By being specific,

you sound like you're an expert."28 A comparison of two numbers can make your

statement evident to all.29 A forest of numbers can persuade, however, not be-

cause they give the audience a sense of the things involved, but because numbers

persuade the audience that the speaker or writer has mastered the things in-

volved

Detailed numerical data does not invite the audience to think about the things

presented, but invites approval of the speaker in order to suppress thought about

the subject.30 Numerical data presents reasons and therefore presents the

speaker as reasonable, but does not invite the audience to reason with the speak-

er. John F. Kennedy, recalls the reporter James Reston, "either overwhelmed you

with decimal points or disarmed you with a smile and a wisecrack."31 Speeches

would therefore be less numerate if speakers aimed to make the audience under-

stand.32 But to present a plethora of numbers is often the right rhetorical choice

when the speaker invites the consent of the audience to actions he or she has al-

ready undertaken

To reason with others is to offer them reasons that they can make their own. In

scientific communications such an invitation is offered in principle, as when a so-

cial science paper, in keeping with present norms, states that the numerical data

on which the paper is based is available to readers through a data repository. Yet

the author does not expect that he or she will persuade the readers if and only if

that invitation is acted upon

To move your audience through sight of the things themselves, and not just

through deference to your knowledge and expertise, one must argue on the basis

of things that one has made present for the audience and thus available to their

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contemplation. Not words, not rhetorical figures, but things made vivid in words

though concrete depiction, though example, or through analogy. The ancient rhe-

toricians knew the power of detailed circumstantial description as enargeia. Quin-

tilian explains the matter pedantically: I am complaining that a man has been

murdered. Shall I not bring before my eyes all the circumstances which it is rea-

sonable to imagine must have occurred in such a connection? Shall I not see the

assassin burst suddenly from his hiding place, the victim tremble, cry for help,

beg for mercy, or turn to run? Shall I not see the fatal blow delivered and the

stricken body fall? Will not the blood, the deathly pallor, the groan of agony, the

death-rattle, be indelibly impressed upon my mind? From such impressions aris-

es that enargeia which Cicero calls illumination and actuality.33 Enargeia is de-

fined by Joseph Williams as "the extensive use of concrete description, instead of

abstract nominalizations."34 In the process of taking in the speaker's concrete

description, the listeners create for themselves the images that the speaker de-

scribes

Enargeia requires renouncing the ineffective, ornamented weapons, easily dis-

missed by the audience as mere rhetoric, in favor of the concrete, vivid, style of

depiction that rarely fails of impact.35 "What can rhetorical depiction (rhetorike

phantasia) do?" Longinus asks, and his answer is, "Much, but especially it adds

persuasive pull and fellow feeling to your speeches, and mixed with the facts that

are ready to hand it does not just persuade your listener but enslaves him" (On

the Sublime, 15.9, my trans.)

In the speech that won the 1981 election for Likud Prime Minister Menachem Be-

gin, what every Israeli recalls is the inflammatory conclusion, in which Begin

compared the disparagement of Moroccan immigrants by Israel’s Labor elite, with

the acceptance, honor, and responsibility these immigrants found in Begin’s

movement. Begin devoted much of this speech to a highly purple account of the

Iraqi nuclear threat that no one can remember. But every Israeli of even modest

political awareness knows of the end of the speech, in which Begin describes how,

at the Labor party rally the previous night, a celebrity entertainer used an ethnic

slur to silence hecklers: Last night, in this square, a young actor got up, what was

his name? Dudu? Dudu To…Paz, Dudu Topaz. Here he said the following words -

-(To the crowd:) Silence, not even a fly should be heard, absolute silence. Listen:

--Dudu Topaz, in the ears of 100,000 members of the [Labor] Alignment, he

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said these words: "Tzach-Tzachim [dirty Moroccans], those in Metzudat Ze'ev

[Likud HQ], those who with difficulty make it as Battalion MP's, if they go to the

Army at all. Here are the soldiers and the officers of the combat units." I will ad-

mit and confess before you that until today I never heard the word "Tzach-

Tzachim" and I didn't know what it meant. In the Underground, in the days of

the movements of the Revolt [against the British], [Israel] Galili [of the Labor

Zionist- dominated Haganah] asked me, after taking counsel with Nathan Yellin-

Mor, may his memory be for a blessing, of the Lehi, when we planned an opera-

tion together against British rule, and he said to me in these words exactly, Galili

said to me: How did you solve the problem of the Oriental Jews in the Irgun? And

I look at him in surprise and I say to him: Israel, what are you asking? What

problem? And he says: Nu, you don't know, you haven't heard? The problem of

the Oriental Jews. So I say to him: What problem? We don't have such a problem.

We are all brothers, we are all Jews, we are all equal, all of us… The principal

commander in the districts was a Yemenite Jew, Uzi was a Sephardic Jew, Gidi,

who did the historic operation at the King David Hotel, was a Sephardic Jew, the

commander of the prisoners in Latrun was a Yemenite Jew, and all our young

men stood at attention before him. What problem? We had no such problem. We

are all Jews. All brothers. All fighters

But listen, when that fellow, what's-his-name, Du-Du To-Paz, said that

wretched word, that vain language and empty wind of his, the whole crowd that

was here last night cheered. Now I will tell Dudu Topaz who he had in mind. The

Oriental Jews among us were brave fighters, in the underground, too. There are

among them [the men] who ascended the gallows, who until the last moment of

their lives sang [the Zionist anthem] "HaTikva" and made the whole world stand

astonished before their extraordinary bravery. And they went to prison, to con-

centration camps, they fought and they did not break, they shouted before the

British judges these words "We do not recognize your rule at all, you must leave

here, leave the Land of Israel." Feinstein was of European origin, how do you say

it, "an Ashkenazi"; Moshe Barazani was a Sephardic Jew from Iraq. On the night

after [Feinstein and Barazani] were sentenced to death, and early in the morning

they would be brought down from hanging, and the Rabbi was an old man, he

said that he would come to take their bodies down, they didn't want to cause

harm to the Rabbi, they took to their hearts a hand-grenade, they pushed the

trigger. Ashkenazim? Iraqis? Jews. Brothers

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Fighters! Shall every hired actor of the Alignment rant and blaspheme God's

name? Oriental Jews are among the best fighters in the IDF. Together with Arik

Sharon, they crossed the Suez Canal and passed to the other side. He commanded

them, among the best of Israel's fighters. And you stand before the nation, and

the people, and before the wild crowd of the Alignment shouting cries, what did

he say there? Tzachtzachim, tzach-tzachim, that is what he called them – those

tzach-tzachim are fit only to be battalion m.p.'s. Battalion m.p, that's like a "job-

nik" [i.e., a poorly esteemed non-combat position]? "Job-niks" don't fight at all.

Blasphemy. And the whole crowd cheered! Where was Mrs. Shoshana Arbeli, who

stands in the second spot on the Alignment list? And where were the others? Why

didn't they leave that demonstration in protest? Never has a man blasphemed to

that extent, never has a man so wounded the honor of an entire tribe in Israel, as

the Alignment did last night here on this very spot

What I request of you, tomorrow, from morning til night, do a coordinated tele-

phone operation. What has to be done, what is important that it be done, is call

all your acquaintances in Jerusalem and in Haifa and in Rishon Letzion and Nes

Tziona and Rehovoth and Be'er Sheva. Just tell them what Dudu Topaz said here.

The whole people of Israel have to know this. It is one sentence, that's all: "The

tzach-tzachim are all in Metzudat Ze'ev." And we are happy that they are all in

Metzudat Ze'ev!36 Begin's conclusion is effective rhetoric because it is factual,

concrete, and direct. It is little more than a string of anecdotes and a recitation of

names, intended to demonstrate to his audience that at crucial moments in the

history of Israel those whom Begin's opponents labeled as Oriental Jews have

served their country by serving under Begin. But precisely because it was effec-

tive rhetoric, the speech and its factual style are transparent, and thus the actual

words are forgotten: here too, Israelis recall falsely, Begin swayed the crowd be-

cause he indulged his taste for loaded adjectives and overblown comparisons. Ra-

ther, the end of the speech works, as the beginning does not, because Begin

avoids the turns we usually think of as "rhetorical." 3. The Manipulation of Con-

creteness Persuasiveness frequently comes from the power of assertion, which is

generally more convincing even than actual proof (Quintilian 11.3.154). The fac-

tual style can, therefore, take advantage of our tendency to accept what people

say without additional reasons, if they say something at all. Gary Wills describes

the stratagem thus: Hal Evry says that the most specific thing to say about one’s

own candidate is "Three cheers for Joe Smith," while the approach to one’s ad-

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versary should be "end the parking meter racket!" (Let the other fellow explain,

in ridiculous detail, that there is no such thing as a parking meter racket. Every-

one will suspect him of a cover-up).37 As Kenneth Burke has said, the power of

reason in speech is revealed in negation, in being able to deny, in contradicting or

besmirching what has already been posited. What is negative actuates our critical

faculties in a way that what is positive does not. One can use concrete assertion

not to invite one's audience to reason about one's assertions but in order to lull

the audience into nodding agreement with a drone of irrelevant detail. Therefore,

those with positive messages can get away with more shading of the truth.38 This

inference from the specificity of an assertion to its truth has some ground in that

liars tend to speak less specifically, concretely or directly than persons telling the

truth.39 As Quintilian suggests: We shall secure the vividness we seek, if only our

descriptions give the impression of truth, nay, we may even add fictitious inci-

dents of the type which commonly occur

He who desires to obscure the situation will state what is false instead of the

truth, but must still strive to secure an appearance of greatest evidence for what

he relates (Quintilian 4.2.65)

The big lie is therefore a lie in the style of truth, with all the specificity of detail

we expect in the truth. Aeschines accuses Demosthenes of lying in concrete detail:

"And on this account, too, he is greatly worthy of being hated, that he is such a

wicked man as to destroy the signs of honesty."40 Sometimes, too, one uses fac-

tuality not to substitute for the supporting reasons one prefers not to proffer, but

in order to distract from vagueness. Saying nothing, I have argued elsewhere, is

an important weapon in the politician's arsenal: it is one way of "not activating

your opponents' potential supporters."41 But saying nothing is not always

enough. In particular, it cannot get you a hearing, but is intended to avoid the

consequence of a hearing you would prefer not to take place. If you must have

something that looks as if it supports your case to put forward but cannot afford

to say to say anything relevant, you better say something – irrelevant. This is

what Bernays called "the technique of presenting favorable facts," or the situa-

tion Quintilian categorizes as "when we have a bad case which requires to be sup-

ported by matters foreign to the case."42 Advertising copywriters describe the

features of their products in detail in order to conceal from us their refusal to

promise any particular benefit from using them.43 As Walter Lippmann notes,

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when this technique is used, "On the noncontentious record, the detail is over-

whelming; on the issue everything is cloudy."44 "The job of political discourse is

to open up the mind to new thoughts and to fully occupy the mind with those

thoughts," Roderick Hart writes. "Rhetoric gives us something to think about as

well as something not to think about."45 Menachem Begin’s 1948 speech provid-

ing his version of the sinking of the Altalena, the Irgun arms-running ship, by the

newborn Israel Defense Force is a masterful example of the manipulation of con-

creteness.46 Begin’s speech gives the listener or reader a sense of place: every-

thing is situated carefully in space. Begin speaks of the land of Israel as opposed

to the lands of exile, the homeland as against the prison camps in Cyprus and

Eritrea where the British sent political prisoners and security detainees. No place

in the speech is referred to by pronouns, all are instead particularized; Begin

gives a roll-call of the towns and settlements which the Irgun is trying desperate-

ly to defend from the Arab enemy, and describes the final journey of the Altalena,

under fire from shore, in complete detail

Begin speaks of the pier at which the ship initially dropped anchor, the sandbank

where the unloading of the Altalena began, though the sandbank is both literal

and metaphorical: the metaphorical sandbank of the Irgun's relations with the

Hagana, as they, like a sandbank, obstruct the national purpose just as they send

their boats to blockade the Altalena and use their men to obstruct, rather then

assist, the unloading (157). Begin speaks of the voyage under fire from the sand-

bank near Herziliya to Tel Aviv, but it was not in the Port, Begin tells his radio

audience, but opposite Frishman Street, that the Altalena finally sank, burning.

Even the Altalena has parts, a deck, a belly, a door, an anchor, and a mast (161)

The factuality of Begin’s speech, to which he himself alludes, is made possible by

this list of places. One could say that Begin demonstrates his superior patriotism

by speaking of all of the places in the Jewish Motherland. The sense of time is

much looser: the speech has very few dates, and the passage of time during the

last voyage is noted only in relative terms rather than by clock-time. This serves

Begin’s purpose by downplaying and even blurring the issue of the cease-fire

with the Arabs, whose clauses the landing and unloading of the Altalena violated.

Begin reminds us of these places and thereby makes us put out of mind or forget

that the cease-fire had already commenced. Begin manipulates what we keep in

mind in order to persuade us to approve of the actions of his organization, and

15  

thus condemn Ben-Gurion. Begin nonetheless has the chutzpah to use "cease-

fire" as key terms in the speech, when he asserts that Ben-Gurion’s forces had a

cease-fire with the Arab enemy, but not with Begin’s Irgun (161)

Sometimes one uses this device of "displaced concreteness" where the nature of

one's point is such that specificity is impossible. In the address to the March on

Washington, Martin Luther King is specific about the unjust constraints on Black

American citizens, but at the high point of the speech, he indicates the locations

of freedom instead of the content of freedom, playing on the well known line from

the patriotic hymn, "My Country ‘tis of thee", "from every Mountain-side, let

freedom ring": Let freedom ring from the Prodigious Hilltops of New Hampshire

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York Let freedom ring from

the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, Let freedom ring from the snow-

capped Rockies of Colorado Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of Cali-

fornia

But not only that

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee

Let freedom ring from every from every hill and molehill of Mississippi

From every mountainside, let freedom ring

Martin Luther King's address to the March on Washington is a call to struggle to

realize freedom for all. Yet freedom is hard to get across because it cannot in its

essence be pinned down to this or that activity, this or that achievement. Freedom

is a relation to possibilities rather than to actualities, but it includes the possibili-

ty of reconceiving our possibilities.47 That is to say, with J. M. Coetzee, "freedom

is another name for the unimaginable," the unrepresentable.48 "There is nothing

to be said about freedom, except that within its space we construct our ethics and

our lives."49 King chose to specify the places where Blacks and whites would live

free lives, rather than attempt the impossible task of making concrete the content

of free lives

4. Let Events take their Course

16  

More effective than arguments or assertions, however, is to let things take their

course, so that everyone can, without argument, see that the course of action you

propose in response to those things is "self-evidently" justified. The whole work

of persuasion as communication is done if we can get the facts or things to speak

for themselves. To quote Gerald Rafshoon, Jimmy Carter's principal advertising

man in Carter's 1980 Presidential reelection campaign: "If we had to do it all over

again, we would take the 30 million dollars we spent in the campaign and get

three more helicopters for the Iran rescue mission."50 One could claim, with Sa-

muel Popkin, that Rafshoon's statement shows the limits of image-making as

against political reality. But we will better understand the gravity of Carter's and

Rafshoon's problem if we remind ourselves that the most effective image of Pres-

ident Carter would have been his receiving the freed hostages. Rafshoon is saying,

only half in jest, that the "permanent campaign" for Carter's reelection should

have invested in creating that image

It takes a lot of work, of course, to get things in order to persuade others, and no

one has expounded the ways in which that work is accomplished better than the

sociologist of science Bruno Latour: "There is only one way in which an actor can

prove its power. It has to make those in whose names it spoke speak and show

that they all say the same thing." Through graphs and charts the facts themselves

speak in a presentation or article. To make things have a stable existence re-

quires getting people together on what these things should be like, and conversely

it is only what exists that can stabilize viewpoints. Science works, says Latour, be-

cause we invest in making it work. "It is pointless to claim that Pasteur's discove-

ries were believed because they were convincing. They ended up being convincing

because the hygienists believed and forced everybody else to put them into prac-

tice."51 Science is effective at persuasion because part of our investment in

science is our indulging the scientist in experimentation. As Bruno Latour and his

collaborators have shown, the scientist works on the things in private, in the la-

boratory, until he can get them to work so that the public demonstration is not a

surprise. It is the very distance between the laboratory, where the facts were

produced, and the outside, where they were applied, that gives the impression of

a miraculous correspondence between science and the world, Latour has shown.

"The impression disappears … if one considers the long, continuous sequence of

experiments." Public experiment is the scientific version of the trial lawyers’ ad-

vice never to ask a witness a question in court to which you do not already know

17  

the answer, that is to say, in which you have not already invested time and re-

sources so as to know what the witness is going to say. Even Richard Feynman

"cheated" by trying out the famous O-ring and ice water experiment in his hotel

room, before he faced the media and gave his explanation of the Space Shuttle

Challenger disaster.52 The surprising result of Latour’s analysis is that the dis-

tinction between political action and the craftwork of the scientific laboratory

turns out to be quantitative: The respected expert is indistinguishable from the

politician who is scorned by everyone. The expert makes large numbers of secret

small-scale mistakes and confidently emerges from hiding at the end of the day.

The politician makes really grand mistakes and has to perform in front of every-

one. Here the decisions are made – before the mistakes

53 The politician "is limited to a single shot and has to shoot in public," and if he

or she shoots and misses, the failure is as public as the effort that failed.54 Pub-

licity not only makes it easier to spot failures, the very size and diversity of your

audience makes it more difficult to escape the consequences of failure for your

reputation: as Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann points out "there is… no way to explain

or excuse one's actions, when an anonymous public is involved."55 The culture of

experiment and the theatricality of public scientific demonstration show extreme

cases of the work required to let things speak for themselves. Yet sometimes that

work must be negative: to persuade, you must let things go the way they are

going until they make your point

In this way the speaker lets the narrowing of possibilities take place in the world,

rather than in his or her speech, and then speaks to present how these circums-

tances make clear that your preferred alternative is the necessary one --that is to

say, the only reasonable one. Calvin Coolidge as Governor of Massachusetts, faced

with the Boston police strike, refused to commit troops until rioting had begun.

Before order had begun to fray, Coolidge writes, explaining his seeming inactivity,

"the issue was not understood, and the disorder focused public attention on it,

and showed just what it meant to have a police force that did not obey orders."56

Coolidge needed actual violence in order to persuade, he needed to let the facts

speak for themselves, in their own time. As Thomas Silver has observed, Coo-

lidge's exemplar could well have been Lincoln’s passivity from his election to his

inauguration, when he allowed the war to come by allowing the South to strike

the first blow.57 Still controversial is Eisenhower's decision to wait on events in

18  

implementing the judicial order for school desegregation at Little Rock. Eisen-

hower did nothing until the city had shown that it was unable to enforce the dese-

gregation order and the state, under Governor Faubus, had shown that it was un-

willing. By letting things take their course, Eisenhower could claim "the law and

the national interest demanded that the President take action."58 But perhaps

the most striking example of waiting on events is Franklin Delano Roosevelt's

conduct regarding the banking crisis in the four month "interregnum" between

his election in November of 1932 and his inauguration in March of 1933. Roose-

velt refused to make any statements on his policies or appointments in order to

avoid responsibility for the crisis while taking all the credit for its solution. By al-

lowing tension to build as the inauguration came closer and the runs and panics

continued, Roosevelt prepared both Congress and the country to accept the ne-

cessity of the measures he was to propose and build decisive momentum for their

emergency adoption.59 "Selling a cure is a lot easier than selling a preventative"

advises Joseph Sugarman.60 Fenno summarizes the matter thus, in his book in

praise of New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici: "Leadership involves both waiting

on events and seizing the day. Domenici demonstrated skill in both respects. And

that added to his influence, his reputation, and his independence."61 The power

of letting things take their course is the source of the persuasive power of the

suppressed premise: by omitting what everyone can fill out for themselves you let

the facts speak for themselves in the minds of the listeners, without ever making

your strongest claim yourself

A 1980 Reagan advertisement on Carter's foreign policy failures doesn't even

mention Iran, "so that the most damaging indictments are invited from but not

forced on the audience."62 In other words, if your case depends on drawing infe-

rences, let your audience do the inferring

This means that supposed distinction between verbal and extra-verbal or rhetor-

ical and extra- technical modes of persuasion, such as letting things take their

course, is irrelevant when one is reflecting on the means of persuasion available

in practical affairs. Here it is worth noting that classical Chinese theorists of poli-

tics and rhetoric put most of their effort into teaching their readers how to ar-

range matters so that there is no need to act or speak.63 5. But why argue? While

one's assertions should be as specific, concrete, and detailed as possible, they

should not necessarily be put forward with supporting arguments. Indeed, one

19  

who would persuade ought generally to elaborate the assertion, using the alterna-

tives to argument that I have discussed above in sections 3 and 4, rather than

elaborate the argument. This is because the constraints on public debate (includ-

ing the time constraint) are such as to make the fullest disclosure of reasons im-

possible. If the arguments used in deliberation "happen not to be entirely plain

and conclusive, it is the business of the orator to make them appear so," Adam

Smith advises.64 Yet if reasons can only be partially disclosed or clarified, the

reasons that are disclosed will always be insufficient. If the audience can spot the

insufficiencies but cannot fill the gaps on their own, giving reasons may make

one's claims less persuasive.65 As Nietzsche counsels: "Assertion safer than

proof. --An assertion produces a stronger effect than an argument, at least

among the majority of mankind; for argument arouses mistrust. This is why pub-

lic speakers seek to hammer home their party's arguments with assertions."66

Nietzsche here is faithful to the rhetorical tradition he knew better, perhaps, than

any other classicist of his time. Quintilian writes: "In speaking there are certain

things which have to be concealed, either because they ought not to be disclosed

or because they cannot be expressed as they deserve" (Quintilian 2.13.12). Quin-

tilian's first category is just a special case of the second: you should not give an

explanation where the explanation will just be one more action that has to be ex-

plained.67 Kathleen Hall Jamieson has noted that network news coverage of

speeches tends to edit out the evidence and leave the assertions.68 This may very

well have the effect of making the politicians into more effective speakers! In

particular, one should not offer explanations in defense of challenged factual as-

sertions. if your facts are disputed don't argue for their verity, rather, offer new

facts. Scientific controversy is resolved not by reinterpreting old experiments, but

by creating new experiments, by presenting other, new facts, that make the same

point.69 When, then, do we resort to argument? Arguing is a way of presenting

facts and principles so as to show one's character as worthy of trust.70 Real

speeches heavy on arguments, like real speeches heavy on numbers, seem to aim

to present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one ar-

gues generally not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but

in order to show one's ethos, that one has the character required to be a reliable

leader or decision- maker. Two components of Aristotelian ethos can be displayed

through argument, homonoia, or shared values, and phronesis, uncommon prac-

tical knowledge. One presents homonoia through argument, one shows that one

values what the audience thinks it ought to value, by displaying the values in the

20  

premises and conclusions of one's argument. Second, one presents phronesis

through argument, one demonstrates mastery of the subject matter, by displaying

relevant knowledge in coherently organized detail. Abraham Lincoln, appearing

before a sophisticated New York Republican audience in his February 1860 Coop-

er Union address, displays his conservative commitment to constitutional govern-

ment and his radical commitment to slavery restriction with a view to slavery ex-

tinction

Lincoln displays these values or judgments he shares with his audience by giving

a detailed argument purporting to show that a majority of the members of the

Philadelphia convention believed that putting slavery in the course of eventual

extinction by preventing its territorial expansion was both desirable and compati-

ble with the constitutional limitations on Federal power. Lincoln does not need to

convince his audience of the merits or constitutionality of slavery restriction – ra-

ther, Lincoln needs to convince his audience that he is solid on slavery restriction

while concerned (and competent) to manage the eventual extinction of slavery in

a manner compatible with the Constitution. As Michael Leff and Gerald Mohr-

mann showed, the point of Lincoln's prosopopoieia, his gesture of address to the

South, is not to persuade the South, but to show Lincoln's intended Northern au-

dience that he cares about persuading or reconciling the South. The knowledge,

commitments, and sobriety of Lincoln's speech revealed him to possess the traits

of character which Americans then and now describe as "Presidential." To quote

Leff and Mohrmann, Lincoln "presents himself as the voice of Republicanism,"

that is to say, "the text constructs Lincoln as persona for his party."71 Speakers

or writers who feel compelled to argue should keep in mind, however, a few max-

ims about when not to argue. Never talk at all except when things aren't going

your way (admittedly a maxim very hard for academic rhetorical theorists to un-

derstand since faculty meeting aren't run on that principle). Second, as Perelman

and Olbrechts-Tyteca write, "To agree to discussion means readiness to see

things from the viewpoint of the interlocutor, to restrict oneself to what he ad-

mits, and to give effect to one's beliefs only to the extent that the person one is

trying to persuade is willing to give his assent to them" (New Rhetoric, 55). To

argue is to admit that consent matters; that is why we are generally unwilling to

discuss with our students the merits of our choices of reading and writing assign-

ments, while why are hopefully happy to receive their feedback on their merits

once the course is finished

21  

In our life together discussion is instrumental to action: discussion is a cost, not a

benefit, and so we can only afford some discussion, whether that discussion con-

sists of facts or of arguments

Any new factual assertion threatens the solidarity we have achieved, and thus the

ability to act which that solidarity has fostered.72 But arguing has a peculiar cost:

As Perelman wrote, "to give reasons in favor of a thesis is to imply that the thesis

is not self-evident and does not compel everyone" (The Realm of Rhetoric 139)

In general, if you do not expect to be able to maintain, with fair success, that

your thesis is self- evident, you should probably reformulate your thesis until it is

self-evident, or rather, self-evident to your audience. Your factual assertions, in

particular, must be asserted rather than reasoned-to since "a fact loses its status

as soon as it is no longer used as a possible starting point, but as the conclusion of

an argumentation" (New Rhetoric, 68)

It is true that in practical affairs one cannot always wait until one has something

self-evident to say. Sometimes the best one can do is argue. My point is merely

that one is unlikely to succeed in persuading unless what one is saying is self-

evident. One should not be surprised that those who lost the debate often have

the better argument --the eventual losers frequently have no choice but to devel-

op the better argument because they lack more effective means of influence

6. Concluding Logical Meditation A follower of Perelman could claim merely that

my concerns are those of a "master of eloquence" or persuasion rather than those

of a logician "desirous of understanding the mechanism of thought" (see The New

Rhetoric, 6). This, I must admit, is true enough, even if I have a BA in mathemat-

ical logic

Yet the challenge for the argumentation theorist is to show that the mechanisms

of argumentation

22  

are internal to our actual mechanisms of thought. Here the first person plural

must be taken seriously: "our thought" must be understood as collective thought,

collective discussion and deliberation

I am not (or at least, I hope I am not) gesturing toward psychologism, that nine-

teenth-century view in which the mechanisms of argumentation supposedly get

their logical force from the actual ways the human mind thinks. Rather, what I

want from the argumentation theorists is something that stands to universal logi-

cal rules as virtue ethics stands to the supposed universal moral law. What is

needed --and if it has been developed, please tell me where to find it – is a kind

of "virtue logic." "Virtue logic" would show that people – in the plural, not just

individuals --can think together, do think together, and think they should think

together according to whatever argumentation theorists are going to claim are the

mechanisms of thought. My hunch, or prejudice, is that when this is done with

appropriate attention to the weight of facts in our deliberations, the role of argu-

ment in thinking together reasonably will turn out to be exactly as limited as its

role in persuasion. This will be because the role of argument in thinking together

reasonably will turn out to be precisely its role in persuasion