Progress, but Slow Going: Public Argument in the Forging of Collective Norms
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Progress, but Slow Going: Public Argument in the Forging of Collective Norms Lisa S. Villadsen1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Rhetorical argumentation is a craft: collective, processual, and circulating, and it partakes in the indeterminate evolution of public norms. Official apologies can illustrate how rhetorical modalities over time can reflect change in civic sensibilities and effect collective moral reflection and evolution. Rhetorical citizenship, understood as encompassing both critical production and reception of publicly circulating arguments, is a way of conceptualizing the interaction between the individual and the collective in the ongoing discursive formation of the community and the norms that inform it. Keywords Rhetorical citizenship · Public norms · Craft · Rhetorical argumentation · Celeste Michelle Condit · Chaïm Perelman · Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca · Public morality · Official apologies · Justin Trudeau · Hans Blumenberg Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo.
1 Rhetorical Argumentation and Public Values This article is about argumentation in a broad sense.1 It concerns the use of appeals and reasons to influence other people’s thinking and action, but not particular argument schemes or specific argumentative moves. Instead of being concerned with the unique, game-changing, clever, or watertight argument-to-end-a-discussion, the topic here, rather, is the nature of the multiple, various, protracted—and often 1
Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto IV, 10, 5. “The water drop hollows a stone not by force but by falling often”.
The article is based on a keynote lecture entitled “Rhetorical citizenship and public moral argument: A quaint idea for turbulent times?” given at the 2nd International Rhetoric Workshop held in Ghent, Belgium, 2018. * Lisa S. Villadsen [email protected] 1
Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 8, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
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controversial—discursive efforts it usually takes to effect change in people’s views. The article revisits the question of the relation between rhetoric and public morality, understood as norms and values held by (a majority of) a community, asking what brings about shifts in public2 assessment of moral questions. The claim is that rather than argumentation in a narrow sense as “demonstration”, “inference” or “resolution of a dispute”, rhetorical discourse, or argumentation in a broad sense, drives the formation and development of collective public norms. Given the age-old charge against rhetoric that it aims at persuasion at any cost and in so doing bypasses rational contemplation by addressing the emotions (thus rendering it a tool of distortion and manipulation), the association of rhetoric and ethics has traditionally been considered tenuous. This raises the question: What is, or can be, the role of rhetorical practices in the shaping of public norms? This article suggests that rhetoric is central to the formation of public morality and that rhetorical argumentation
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