People often have conflicting values, goals, and beliefs, and these present special challenges for those who seek to influence them. Kauffeld and Innocenti suggest that these situations of conflictedness are opportunities for a speaker to “exhort” the audience to resolve the conflict in favor of their highest principle. Exhortation, in their view, has high-mindedness as a constitutive feature. At Cooper Union, Lincoln exhorted Republicans to face their fear of disunion and steadfastly maintain the evil of slavery—a confirming example for the (...) Kauffeld and Innocenti account. But looking at a broader set of examples, it seems clear that exhortations do not always fit the pattern of appeal to higher principles. Exhortation may occur for any conflictedness the speaker imagines the audience as having, including mundane matters of self-interest. A speaker's attributions of belief, goal, motive, or other cognitive state to an addressee is always rhetorically risky, and these attributions may themselves become a space for disagreement. We can learn from speakers who manage this rhetorical risk well, but also from the much greater number of speakers who do it poorly. (shrink)

Contrary to current individualistic epistemology, Classical rhetoric provides us with a pragmatical and particularly dynamic conception of ‘testimony’ as a source made available for the orator by the particular community in which she acts. In order to count as usable testimony, a testimony to which one could appeal in further communications, any discourse must comply with specific rules of social sanction. A deliberate attention to the social practices in which testimony is given and assessed may offer us a more accurate (...) view of its epistemological role. (shrink)

Objectivity, Autonomy, and the use of Arguments from Authority Starting in the early modern era, the use of arguments from authority to support important factual claims began to be heavily criticized. Recent investigations into the nature of testimony, however, suggest that such criticisms are factually and normatively problematic. In this paper, the author argues for a model of testimonial authority that corrects this earlier, unrealistically individualistic picture of how person bear their burdens in the search for a common reality.

In argumentation, as elsewhere, speakers strategically engage favourable presumptions by manifestly making themselves accountable for their communicative efforts. Such strategies provide the addressee with reasons to regard the speaker as accountable in specific ways and, via that regard for the speaker, with situation-specific rationales for responding positively to what the speaker says. This paper identifies some resources available to arguers for strengthening, elaborating, and focusing such special presumptions. The paper offers an analysis of Barbara Jordan’s “Statement on the Articles of (...) Impeachment” as illustrative of these resources for strengthening a speaker’s ethos. (shrink)

The author argues that recent data suggesting an emerging culture of gullibility among young Internet users is best explained by the latter’s non-culpable misapplication of common testimonial norms to Internet settings. The author further argues for the likelihood that the norms relative to such settings will gradually change, basing this upon research done on the types of norms of trust that tend to evolve in repeated transactions involving significant informational asymmetries.

This essay explores ways arguers can afford potentially unsympathetic addressees good reason to empathetically entertain exhortative discourse. First, we illuminate the essential structure and underlying constitutive pragmatics of exhortation. Second, we show that the persuasive force of Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address derives from his use of exhortation. By doing so we add to recent scholarship that accounts for the persuasive force of civically significant speech acts.