Morally and Politically Responsible Rhetoric: how does reason persuade?

Arguments are effective as weapons only if they are logically cogent, and if they are so they reveal connexions, the disclosure of which is not the less necessary to the discovery of truth for being also handy in the discomfiture of opponent. — Gilbert Ryle (qtd. in Garver below)

The title of my latest bibliography is (yes, it’s a mouthful) “Toward Assessing the Apparent Imperatives and Possible Constraints of Digital Media and Artificial Intelligence (AI): communication, speech, and rhetoric in a fragile technocratic capitalist and constitutional democracy.” Whenever I compose these lists, I try to read a substantial amount of what appears by my lights to be the crème-de-la-crème of the literature in English. Hence this quote from Eugene Garver’s indispensable work, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994):

“Reasoning does not automatically persuade, yet, if artful rhetoric [which speaks to or implies character] is argumentative, nothing but reason persuades.”

As Garver elsewhere explains, it is “obvious why character or ēthos persuades: the end of rhetoric is belief or trust, and belief and trust attach primarily to people whom we trust, and only derivatively to propositions which we believe.”

Garver now states something which I suspect rubs more than a few professional philosophers the wrong way insofar as they hope or believe that sound, valid, or even quite plausible (i.e., coherent or well-formed) arguments should have some corresponding measure of persuasive capacity (I am not saying they fail to distinguish valid or sound arguments from persuasive ones, only that there is a tendency to think the former has some necessary connection to the latter):

“There is no reason to expect a correlation between degrees of persuasiveness and degrees of validity or coherence, or any other strictly logical value, as there is for ēthos and pathos [emotion or passion, for Aristotle, with regard to emotions in the Rhetoric, did not refer to any or all emotions but certain emotions in particular].”

There is of course more to this argument but suffice here to say that perhaps philosophers who profess belief in the values and purposes intrinsic to democracy (which has of late exposed its weaknesses and fragility in this country), especially those keenly interested in moral psychology and ethics, “public reason” (John Dewey, John Rawls, Gerald Gaus, Amartya Sen, et al.) and the various forms of communication in a—participatory, deliberative and representative—democracy, will come to appreciate and thus help cultivate the possibilities for and the various fora of morally and politically responsible public rhetoric.