In "The Social Contexts of Argumentation," Chaim Perelman talks in the beginning about the relationship between argumentation and audience.
"The development of all argumentation is a function of the audience to which it is addressed and to which the speaker is to adapt himself." (or herself) (252-53)
Perelman is saying that the speaker (writer or orator) has an obligation to the audience. A speaker must adapt to his/her audience in order for argumentation to be successful and for it to be argumentation. The difficulty in this is analyzing a diverse audience and convincing those who are different of the same end.
“The diversity of audience is extreme. They can vary quantitatively from the speaker himself… right up to the totality of beings capable of reason – that universal audience which is then not a concrete social reality but a construction of the speaker based on elements in his experience.” (253)
I think Perelman is pointing out a skill that is not only useful to a writer/speaker, but to an individual functioning in a society.
Perelman also points out the importance of language in argumentation and how we must change it as our audience changes:
“The effective exercise of argumentation assumes a means of communication, a common language without which there can be no contact of minds.”
The author also points out the importance of rationality in argumentation:
“Precedent plays a quite primary role in argumentation, the rationality of which is linked with the observance of the rule of justice, which demands equal treatment for similar situations.
Again this ties into the overall theme of audience. You must (as a writer) decide what each audience holds to be true as a precedent and appeal to that which is already assumed. The author is speaking about the rule of justice in relation to history; therefore the obligation lies with the speaker in knowing the past precedents. Learning how each audience fells and thinks about similar situations depends on research into the past.
Perelman says, “These precedents, just like the models by which a society is inspired, make part of its cultural tradition, which can be reconstructed on the basis of the argumentations in which they have been employed.” On the basis of which audience is being spoken to. (254)
There is a reason the core of composition papers is based on getting students to make an argument and know how to back it up. In order to do this, instructors ask for research as evidence and provide the tools of persuasion in the form of ethos, logos and pathos. Everything a student does in preparation for their comp papers is based on supporting their argument of making it convincing. It’s my belief that recognizing audience is an important life skill, and part of my personal pedagogy. We must consider our audience in everything that we do while functioning in the world.
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Audience does play a very important role in the form of an argument whether spoken or written. One of the things that I responded to is this essay is the use of rhetoric as an art that is seperate from the subject matter. Perelman is concentrating on how to structure your argument effectively rather than the subject matter itself. When I personally think of rhetoric, these are the kinds of issues that come to mind. The ability to read your audience and modify your argumentative approach to appeal to them is a skill that would be useful in many different modes and subjects of discourse. This is also an issue that is more practical then some of the others we have seen in the Norton book. I use things like this every day. When I am making a change in a process at work, I present the arguement for that change very differently to my boss who decides whether the change will be made, than to the collectors on my team upon whom the change will be made.
ReplyDeleteI agree, this is totally what I'm trying to get my classes to understand. First, it's important to understand what the terms (audience, purpose, etc.) mean but it's even more important to apply the concepts of those terms.
ReplyDeleteYou needn't think on a daily basis, "my audience/purpose today is ______," but understand that you face, and have faced, the choices proposed by the concepts behind those terms. I believe in connecting those pre-existing encounters with the concepts to these concrete terms so students can discuss them in a more economical way.
I agree that composition students need to consider their audience when presenting an argument. If the audience is not reached, the argument cannot be heard. An argument must have support for an audience to accept it and it is that support that will provide the writer/speaker with ethos. I believe ethos is very important when presenting an argument because it would be difficult for an audience to believe someone who they felt had no true understanding of the subject. I always tell my students that they can argue any point they would like to, but they must support their claims.
ReplyDeleteNot that Perelman doesn't have his critics. It sounds great (for a composition class, moreover), but the idea that rationality is purely audience-based-reasonableness has been too relativistic to be swallowed by all theorists. His "spirit", though, of regarding the context and disregarding analytic thought (i.e. formal systems), is pretty much end-to-end accepted.
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