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Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies
Reconceiving Argument Schemes As Descriptive And Practically Normative, Brian N. Larson, David Seth Morrison
Reconceiving Argument Schemes As Descriptive And Practically Normative, Brian N. Larson, David Seth Morrison
Faculty Scholarship
We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call practically normative assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the rationally or universally normative assessment that might be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be …
Bridging Rhetoric And Pragmatics With Relevance Theory, Brian N. Larson
Bridging Rhetoric And Pragmatics With Relevance Theory, Brian N. Larson
Faculty Scholarship
In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and semantics. Previous efforts to link these fields have failed, but Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (RT), an approach to experimental pragmatics grounded in cognitive science, offers the bridge. I begin by reviewing Gricean pragmatics and its incompatibility with rhetoric and cognitive science. I then sketch RT, but importantly, I identify revisions to RT that make it a powerful tool for rhetorical analysis, a cognitive pragmatic rhetorical (CPR) theory. CPR theory strengthens RT by clarifying what it means to be …