Rhetoric, Dialectic and Logic: The Wild-Goose Chase for an Essential Distinction

TY - JOUR

T1 - Rhetoric, Dialectic and Logic

T2 - The Wild-Goose Chase for an Essential Distinction

AU - Jørgensen, Charlotte

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - Taking Blair's recent contribution to the debate about the triad as its starting point, the article discusses and challenges attempts to reduce the intricate relationship between rhetoric, dialectic and logic to a trichotomy with watertight compartments or to separate them with a single clear-cut criterion. I argue that efforts to pinpoint an essential difference, among the various typical differences partly grounded in disciplinary traditions, obscure the complexities within the fields. As a consequence, crosscutting properties of the fields as well as the possibilities for theoretical bridging between them are neglected.

AB - Taking Blair's recent contribution to the debate about the triad as its starting point, the article discusses and challenges attempts to reduce the intricate relationship between rhetoric, dialectic and logic to a trichotomy with watertight compartments or to separate them with a single clear-cut criterion. I argue that efforts to pinpoint an essential difference, among the various typical differences partly grounded in disciplinary traditions, obscure the complexities within the fields. As a consequence, crosscutting properties of the fields as well as the possibilities for theoretical bridging between them are neglected.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Argumentation theory

KW - Christian Kock

KW - dialectic

KW - fields of argument

KW - J. Anthony Blair

KW - logic

KW - rhetoric

KW - Wenzel's perspectives on argument

U2 - 10.22329/il.v34i2.4062

DO - 10.22329/il.v34i2.4062

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0824-2577

VL - 34

SP - 152

EP - 166

JO - Informal Logic

JF - Informal Logic

IS - 2

ER -