Rhetorical Theory, Argumentation, and Discourse Analysis

Vocabulary flashcards covering the rhetorical situation, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Toulmin argument components and fallacies, Fisher's Narrative Paradigm, Burke's Dramatism, Foucault's disciplinary power, and Bloom's Taxonomy.

Rhetorical Situation

The set of circumstances that makes a rhetorical response possible or useful, consisting of three main parts: exigence, audience, and constraints.

Exigence

An urgent problem or imperfection that communication might help change; a problem that cannot be changed through human action is not rhetorical.

Audience (Rhetorical Situation)

The people who can help address the exigence by making decisions or taking action.

Constraints

Factors that shape what the speaker can say and how the audience might respond, such as beliefs, values, laws, time, available evidence, and the speaker's credibility.

Adherence

An audience's agreement or willingness to act, which Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca emphasize as the aim of argumentation.

Presence

Making an idea stand out in the audience's attention by choosing to repeat, describe, or emphasize it to make it seem especially important.

Universal Audience

An imagined construct of reasonable people generally, used by a speaker to test whether an argument could seem acceptable beyond one specific group rather than being literally every person.

Particular Audience

The specific people a speaker is addressing, characterized by their own knowledge, values, and beliefs.

Rational World Paradigm

A perspective assuming that people make decisions mainly through logical arguments and evidence, contrasted by Walter Fisher with the Narrative Paradigm.

Claim

In Toulmin's model, the point or conclusion that the arguer wants accepted.

Grounds

In Toulmin's model, the reasons or evidence offered in support of the claim.

Warrant

In Toulmin's model, the reasoning connecting the grounds to the claim, which is often an assumption left unstated.

Enthymeme

A compressed argument with a premise or warrant left unstated.

Example as Evidence

A specific instance used to support a point or a broader claim.

Ad Hominem

A fallacy that attacks the person making an argument instead of addressing the argument itself.

Ad Numeram

A fallacy that treats the number of people who believe something as proof that it is true.

Ad Crumenam

A fallacy that treats wealth or financial success as proof that someone is right.

Straw Man

A fallacy that misrepresents someone's argument to make it easier to attack.

Tu Quoque

A fallacy that dismisses criticism by accusing the critic of doing the same thing.

Rhetoric

A broad field considering how communication functions in a situation—including audience, purpose, language, values, and persuasion—which can operate via arguments as well as storytelling, emotion, style, or identification.

Narrative Paradigm

Walter Fisher's framework treating people as storytellers who use stories and lived experience to understand experience, judge ideas, and make decisions.

Narrative Coherence

The standard of whether a story hangs together on its own, evaluated by whether its parts are consistent and whether the events and characters make sense within the story.

Narrative Fidelity

The standard of whether a story rings true to the audience's experience and values, evaluated by whether it seems believable and whether its reasons feel sound or humane.

Dramatism

Kenneth Burke's approach to studying human communication as symbolic action—as though people were performing a drama—to ask what people do, why they do it, and how they explain their actions.

The Negative

A distinctively human use of symbols identified by Kenneth Burke that specifies what is forbidden, required, or wrong; it can guide cooperation but also creates guilt, division, and hierarchy.

Comic Frame

A way of viewing human problems that treats people as fallible and mistaken rather than inherently evil, thereby encouraging self-correction, perspective, and cooperation.

Tragic Frame

A way of viewing conflict through guilt, blame, punishment, and sacrifice, which can lead people to assign blame to a scapegoat as if removing them resolves the larger problem.

Pentad

Kenneth Burke's tool for examining how people explain motives by focusing on differing emphases among act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.

Act

The element of Kenneth Burke's pentad that asks: What happened?

Scene

The element of Kenneth Burke's pentad that asks: Where or in what circumstances did it happen?

Agent

The element of Kenneth Burke's pentad that asks: Who did it?

Agency

The element of Kenneth Burke's pentad that asks: How or by what means was it done?

Purpose

The element of Kenneth Burke's pentad that asks: Why was it done?

Panopticon

Jeremy Bentham's proposed prison design, discussed by Michel Foucault as a model of disciplinary power in which prisoners can be watched from a central tower without knowing when, prompting self-monitoring.

Docile Bodies

Bodies shaped by discipline, training, routines, observation, and correction so that they become more useful, productive, and easier to control.

Norm

A standard or expectation used to judge behavior.

Normal

The category assigned to people or behavior that fits a standard.

Normativity

The process or system through which standards are created, enforced, and used to classify people as normal or abnormal within systems of power.

Remember (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A cognitive level involving the recall of a definition or term.

Understand (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A cognitive level involving explaining a concept in one's own words.

Apply (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A cognitive level involving the use of a concept in a new example.

Analyze (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A cognitive level involving the identification of how parts of an argument or situation work together.

Evaluate (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A cognitive level involving judging whether an argument or explanation is effective.

Create (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A cognitive level involving constructing an argument or question using concepts.