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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Argumentation theory, Christian Kock, dialectic, fields of argument, J. Anthony Blair, logic, perspectives on argument, rhetoric