I chose to read Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech by Partricia Roberts-Miller and Students Should Learn About the Logical Fallacies by Daniel Bommarito. I chose these two excerpts largely because their titles track with claims I encountered with varying regularity in my experience studying philosophy as an undergraduate. It behooves a student of philosophy to study logical fallacies perhaps more than other students because argumentative structure is often presented more explicitly. Or if it’s not presented out right, then extracted into some explicit form. The ability to extract or analyze these arguments is often seen as contingent on an ability to recognize an invalid argument. However, many professors and students in my experience would go further and exhort a nebulous population of bad arguers and politicians to study valid argument structure and excise logical fallacies from their lives.

The claim about rhetoric’s emptiness also arose in our conversations, which I think was a reflection of Plato/Socrates’ distrust of the “sophists” or “sophistry” as people who used the craft of speech-making to make money through teaching. In Socrates’ estimation they would distort truth with their words for personal gain.

Bommarito claims that we should not teach students logical fallacies for three (at least three) reasons. His first reason is that the process of identifying fallacies is too subjective to be universally accurate, and thus it’s not a useful skill. His second reason is that this process ultimately impedes communication, as it originated as means for wrecking an opponent’s argument in the public forum. If we are actually going to have productive dialogue we should not worry too much about fallacies. The third reason is that it stifles student creativity. If we foist the anxiety of fallacy avoidance on students then they won’t be able to fully stretch their creative abilities.

Miller begins by outlining a common view on rhetoric, that it is merely the superfluous and often distracting additional layer on plain speech. Plain speech gives us better access to truth and thus it is more honest, or better to use plain speech (she uses the example “The cat sat on the mat.”) She says that this is a false understanding of language and how it works. She illustrates how someone who says something as ostensibly simple as the cat and mat example, is still making a rhetorical choice, and that oftentimes simple language can be the most effective vehicle for deception. Like Bommarito she goes back to the Greeks to examine the origins of her study when she contrasts the views of Plato and Aristotle. Plato advocated against the use of rhetoric because he viewed it as exclusively concerned with speech-making, which was not productive in the pursuit of truth. Aristotle, however, viewed it as simply an alternative option to Plato’s conversation based truth seeking. In a public forum we don’t have the luxury of breaking things down into careful syllogisms, instead we have to start with something we’re pretty sure is true and work off of that. Miller ascribes more to this view although it seems that she would go further than Aristotle. She points out that pretty much every time we construct a sentence, we must make a rhetorical choice. We can hurt people or obscure truth if we choose to do so, but rhetoric isn’t inherently bent towards obscurity. It is up to its user to choose.

While it seemed a little harder to connect Bommarito with our assigned readings, I felt like there were some parallels between his points and the Butts reading. I saw this parallel come out where Bommarito is concerned with stifling creativity and production by resting too hard on the structure of argumentation, and Butts is concerned with stifling production more generally, by our heavy emphasis on writing as a labor intensive process.

Miller seemed to have more connections to our readings. Her point about how we must make a rhetorical choice felt similar to Wardle’s idea that we must opt for some specificity when we write, that we have to make decisions about what sort of language is appropriate in which context. It seems fair to say that the decisions we make about a biology paper vs. an art history paper are at least in part rhetorical decisions. I also felt parallels between the Miller piece and Brayson’s piece. The point where Brayson describes teaching first year writing as a sort of civic preparation, as a development of the capacity in students to encounter argumentation and politics, resonated with how I interpreted the close of Miller’s work. She lays out the potential for our use of rhetoric to influence public decision making to harm groups of people (referencing groups of people as diseases), and closes with the statement that we can’t escape rhetoric but we can choose the rhetoric we use. I saw a similar sort of exhortation for civic responsibility in both.

To be honest, I felt that the Bommarito work was unconvincing. I felt that in his argumentation against teaching logical fallacies he himself committed some dubious logical moves. His description of fallacies as inherently subjective seems like a straw-person argument. I can tentatively buy their subjectivity but I didn’t feel he illustrated it well at all. I also think that we can continue productive dialogue between opposing viewpoints if we pair our instruction with compassion and empathy.

Miller’s work on the other hand resonated much more with me. I thought she convincingly displayed the notion of empty rhetoric as anachronistic and narrow.