Blackwell Reference Online

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Logic and rhetoric are such broad subjects that in order to profit from their comparison we must make at least one division in each field. Logic in the narrow sense is mainly concerned with the consequence relation (“following from”), and a well-documented tradition exists from Aristotle's Prior analytics to the present that explores this question. In a wider sense, logic includes the study and statement of the principles of good reasoning and may be seen as taking as its central problem the question of what makes for a good argument or a good inference. Developments of logic in the wide sense can be found as long ago as Aristotle's Topics and more recently in twentieth-century informal logic. In the narrow sense, rhetoric deals with the study of persuasive discourse, especially argumentation. Aristotle's Rhetoric and Perelman's new rhetoric are prime examples of this (→  Logos and Rhetoric ; Rhetorics: New Rhetorics ). In a wider sense, rhetoric is the art of making things matter ( Farrell's 1998 phrase), especially (but not only) through the effects of language, and includes poetry, drama, narratives, instructional discourse, and the like. It is only when we consider logic in the wide sense and rhetoric in the narrow that their domains can overlap, and that it may become difficult to tell logical and rhetorical considerations apart. In Plato we cannot identify any logic ... log in or subscribe to read full text