Tindale's Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument

The thesis of Acts of Arguing is, that of the three important models of, or perspectives on, argument the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical the rhetorical is fundamental: "the most appropriate synthesis of the main perspectives in argumentation theory is one grounded in the rhetorical" (6).Following Wenzel, Tindale hopes to "[trace] argument to its rhetorical origins and [develop] from there a model that integrates it with the other two perspectives" (19).The book is an extended explanation ofthe rhetorical model and of what it means to situate it as foundational, and an extended argument for the importance of considering the rhetorical dimension of argument.The book's intended audience seems to be primarily philosophers, but could include anyone trying to understand arguments, their interpretation and their assessment.The strategy of the book is to reveal the shortcomings of theories giving hegemony to the logical perspective or to the dialectical perspective, then show how conceiving the rhetorical perspective as basic solves those problems and how, moreover, "in its own right ... a rhetorical model of argumentation offers the most complete and satisfying account of what arguing is, of what it is like to be engaged in argumentation, to be argued to, and to evaluate arguments" (7).In what follows I will sketch the contents of the book, chapter-by-chapter, then briefly indicate some central critical questions that I have for the theory.The idea that any complete theory of argumentation will contain accounts of all three perspectives, the logical, the dialectical, and the rhetorical, has its roots in Aristotle, but in the recent past was independently revived by Wayne Brockriede and Joseph Wenzel in the late 1970s, and reiterated by Wenzel in a number of papers since then.In the Introduction (in effect the book's first chapter), Tindale reviews this tradition, and situates the rhetorical perspective in relation to the logical and the dialectical.He reviews Habermas's critique of Klein and Toulmin, taking it as support for a synthesis of all three perspectives.He then reviews the Aristotelian notion of rhetoric as part of a triad with dialectic and logic.Tindale finds significant Burnyeat's and McCabe's interpretations of the Aristotlean enthymeme, according to which, inter alia, the audience is actively involved in completing the argument.Among contemporary treatments of rhetoric Tindale mention's Levi's and Farrell's sympathetically, but it is in The New Rhetoric of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, with its notions of the particular and the universal audience, that he finds the prin-

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