A sense of injustice is a powerful motivator. Notice the honor rightly paid to Rosa Parks, one of the few 'little people' to be accorded the honor of a ceremonial funeral at the nation's capitol. A sense of injustice turns you into a crusader, a person devoted to righting wrongs and correcting injuries. It is this sense that brings me to you today. Terrible crimes have been committed. Some of these crimes include mischaracterization, mistrust, and disrespect. In other words, we face violations of all the norms of liberal democratic discourse. These crimes are so grave that we are forced to pause at the triumphalism of liberal hegemony and acknowledge the necessity to re-think our commitment to its norms and values. Let's begin with the first crime:

1. In study 1 of Paul Ricoeur's _The Rule of Metaphor_(1975) we read,"the historical paradox of the problem of metaphor is that it reaches us via a discipline that died towards the middle of the nineteenth century, when it ceased to be part of the collegial cursus studiorum." What Ricoeur ends up asserting is that anyone we hopes to deal adequately with the problem of metaphor will need to gain access to the vocabulary that belongs to "a field" known as rhetoric. But such a field no longer exists. We would need to resurrect it from the ashes.
After committing this crime, Ricoeur goes on to write: "we have received the theory of figures of speech from a discipline that is not merely defunct but amputated as well." This is glossed as a separation of Invention from Style and Composition. Now where to put Invention remains a problem; it clearly does not belong to Composition. At best we can say that Composition is connected to Arrangement. But Invention should not be confused with Arrangement; if anything, Invention needs to be closely tied to a theory of proof, or logic. Ricoeur seems to acknowledge this crime and his own involvement in it. When he writes that "Rhetoric died when the penchant for classifying figures of speech completely supplanted the philosophical sensibility that animated the vast empire of rhetoric, held its parts together, and tied the whole to an organon and to first philosophy." I will put a Heideggerian spin on this: the crime against rhetoric is merely a consequence of the humanist's obliviousness to Being.

2. Our second crime takes us to the field of "communication." The uneasy relationship between Argument and Communication appears when you show someone that Argument is grounded in Logic. Now Toulmin, working with a jurisprudential model of reasoning, separated Argument and Logic. According to Charles Willard, "Toulmin wanted to check Logic's strain toward autonomy from the empirical world, but his work stimulated a renegade movement called Informal Logic, a new field called Critical Thinking, and the reinvigoration of an old one called Argumentation. This was a legitimation of pedagogical and therapeutic programs of applied logic dating back to antiquity. Amid all the talk of 'the demise of formalism,' all three fields remain concerned with the formal merits of inference and utterance." (page 14 of _A Theory of Argumentation_(1989)). Willard's crime is that his theory falls flat when he says that he acknowledges 'flesh and blood arguers.'

3. Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp commit a crime in their textbook, _Critical Thinking_(2002). Their credibility is predicated on a slander directed right at the heart of the rhetorical enterprise. Their first sentence encapsulates the entire effort of the rhetor: "The focus of this book is written and spoken ways of persuading us to do things and believe things." Here is their lamentable definition in full:

Rhetoric: Any verbal or written attempt to persuade someone to believe, desire, or do something that does not attempt to give good reasons for the belief, desire, or action, but attempts to motivate that belief, desire, or action solely through the power of the words used. (p.5)

They claim that rhetorical devices are amoral instruments for coercive and manipulative practices. The crime here is a total disregard for historical context. Perhaps they don't know about practical reasonableness, phronesis, praxis, prudence, good conduct, good habits? Could that be? How prudent is it to publish a book that gets the very essence of your topic wrong? Their position commits them to the proposition that rhetoric never attempts to provide good reasons, which is obviously false.

Conclusion: If you review these crimes and seriously think about them then you will stand with me, just as we all ought to stand with Rosa Parks, when the next anti-rhetorical bigot gets in our way and says go to the back of the bus.

Our simple, heroic response: "NO"

MGGreer