Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca

This chapter 4 reading focuses on the contributions of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in their work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumetation. They propose the idea that values should be able to be judged, like facts. They stress the idea of argumentation, emphasizing its characteristic of being personal. It is different from logic, because the audience does not accept argumentation as truth or certainty, but see it as a way of persuading them to accept or not accept an idea. Audience is an important element to consider in the process of forming an argument. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca talk about two kinds of audiences. A universal audience is the audience that consists of all “reasonable and competent people”, while a particular audience is the group that the speaker is trying to persuade. When I read about this, I was reminded of the example used in class about how Bush spoke, at times, addressing only the Republican voters. This would have been his particular audience.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca talk about starting points of an argument. According to them, the audience must enter the process believing a “premise”. Premises help bring the audience to the same level where they all start out agreeing with an idea. Premises can either deal with reality or the preferable. The article puts truths, facts, and presumptions under the category of dealing in terms of reality. Dealing with the preferable involves starting points that deal with values, hierarchies, and loci of the preferable.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca also go into great detail about the techniques an arguer can use to create a persuasive argument. They talk about techniques of liaison and techniques of dissociation. Using the technique of liaison is using the premise that is established at the beginning to reinforce the argument that is to be presented. This can be established through quasi-logical arguments, (I’m kind of confused about this one), arguments based on the structure of reality, and arguments that establish the structure of reality. Techniques of dissociation focus on showing how two ideas contradict each other or are separate from each other to reinforce an argument.

I found this article to be pretty interesting because I began to see different ways that I can structure my speech. With the upcoming Power Point presentation, it will be useful to reflect on these ideas of structuring an argument to make my speech more effective.