Ways of Being Reasonable: Perelman and the Philosophers

Introduction

In 1958, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, the culmination of many years study. A seminal work in philosophy and rhetoric, it aimed to bring classical Aristotelian rhetoric into the modern era and present a model of argumentation that promoted action and reasonableness. One distinctive feature of the dense account found in this work is the claim that the success of argumentation can in part be measured by the responses of the audience for which it is intended. By that standard, the project of the new rhetoric appears unsuccessful, because the audience for whom Perelman (and Olbrechts-Tyteca) expressly wrote was the audience least captivated by his ideas. Writing as a philosopher for philosophers, Perelman strove to provide "for the sake of the logicians, a philosophical defense in favor of an enlarged conception of proof and reason," "to show that philosophers cannot do without a rhetorical conception of reason" (1979, 42). Against the backdrop of positivism's arid thought, he looked to establish, having emerged himself from an immersion in the intricacies of Frege's logic, what at the time seemed at odds with the direction in which philosophical thought was flowing—a logic of value.

Insofar as it did receive some acclaim in Europe and, subsequently, in the United States, the work did not exactly fall "deadborn from the press."¹ But what might be thought of as "main-stream philosophy," arguably the intended audience, seems to have been more muted in its response. In this paper, I am interested in exploring some central facets of that reception and suggesting some of the reasons behind it. To undertake such an investigation one has to appreciate not only Perelman's insistence on the importance of rhetoric (a claim toward which philosophers have been traditionally ambivalent) but also, and perhaps more so, his understanding of philosophy itself. Still, as I show below, it is from that conception that some of Perelman's richest and most promising ideas arise, ideas that testify to the durability and continued importance of the new rhetoric project.

Perelman and the Philosophers

Tom Conley (1990) notes the favorable reception the book received in Europe in 1958 and its unexpected (by Perelman) welcome in the United States.² The philosophical component of that reception has been rehearsed elsewhere, not least by some of the principals involved (Johnstone 1978; Perelman 1989). But even Henry Johnstone Jr.'s initial engagement with Perelman's ideas challenged their central component. Johnstone wondered, for example, "whether there is really any promise after all in the attempt to define philosophical argumentation in terms of rhetoric" (1978, 91).

Conley expresses surprise that The New Rhetoric was "praised even in Britain, in a review by Peter Strawson in Mind, a journal dominated by the 'ordinary language philosophy' current in Cambridge and Oxford" (1990, 297). The surprise, though, may be itself surprising. As Alan Gross and Ray Dearin aptly remind us, Perelman was first and foremost a philosopher: "His writings stress the interrelationships between rhetoric and philosophy at every turn, and anyone who essays to understand his rhetorical views must first examine the metaphysical axioms upon which they are based" (2003, 14). We might, then, expect other conceivably like-minded philosophers to be attracted to that aspect of his endeavors.

At least at Oxford, ordinary language philosophy was dominated by the figure of J. L. Austin, another philosopher with roots in the work of Frege (Austin had translated Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik in 1950). By the time of his association with ordinary language philosophy Austin had, like Perelman, traveled a long way from such roots.³ In the late 1940s, Austin organized a series of Saturday morning gatherings that attracted some significant younger Oxford philosophers, including Paul Grice, Strawson, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart, and Geoffrey Warnock, several of whom would later comment on Perelman's work. This group would study features of language and the way it was ordinarily used.⁴ They would, for example, draw up lists of words and then analyze their...