Rhetorical invention

My own work shares with Aristotelian theorists a belief that rhetoric is an inventional art—an art of finding out the available means of persuasion. It couples this Aristotelian perspective with a postmodern and feminist awareness that existing communication practices within industries are shaped and constrained by political and economic assumptions that may inadvertently silence or render invisible the kinds of information that decision makers need to assess and manage risk in hazardous environments. The problem of rhetorical invention—-revisited as problem of discovering or finding... 

The elisions that Forbes makes here that deliberately or inadvertently assimilate Watt to nineteenth-century physical science are remarkable and important. Thus the phrase the relations of heat to matter is used to describe the subject of Watt s experiments with the steam engine. For Watt heat is matter, but the phrase assumes its separate identity and easily gives the impression that there is no discontinuity involved between that fact and the beliefs of the author of the invention. It would be too big a stretch for Forbes to assume continuity with Watt when he writes about the work of Carnot, Clapeyron and Thomson, yet even here the rhetoric minimizes the gaps - consider the impact of the key phrase, probably unimagined even by its sagacious author - and encourages the reader to entertain the possibility that Watt did in fact anticipate in some fashion the laws of energy and thermodynamics.23... 

The pretense that creating a new psychiatric diagnosis is an act oidiscovering a disease—that inventing a name is discovering a phenomenon, that a rhetorical trick is an empirical finding—underlies the entire apparatus of psychiatric nosology. 

Prelli, L. J. A Rhetoric of Science Inventing Scientific Discourse University of South Carolina Press Columbia, SC, 1989. 

Readers familiar with rhetorical theory will recognize the influence of two important mentors in my work. Richard Young s work in invention has... 

I erelman and Olbrcchts-Tyteca (1969) reenergized the study of Aristotelian rhetoric and argumentation with their New Rhetoric, but their work does not invent a new rhetoric. Much of the rhetoric of. science has borrowed trt>tn Aristotelian frameworks in order to demonstrate the presence of rhetoric in scientific texts and activities. 

Readers more comfortable with statistical methods may perhaps be uneasy with what they see as the attempt to build theory from isolated instances of the oral, written, and gestural production of meaning in these chapters. If, on the other hand, we view each instance as one individual s momentary solution to a problem of communication, we can then see how each isolated instance provides a new possibility for extending our understanding of the rhetorical strategies available to individuals in hazardous worksites. With a limited number of examples, we cannot determine the frequency of this instance within an extended discourse community. Instead, we must see the discovery as both epistemic and inventional. Each time we attempt to interpret and document a new instance, we extend our knowledge of workplace discourse. 

From its beginnings in classical theory, rhetoric has been concerned with questions of probability, for, as Aristotle said, we do not argue about things that are certain. Conceived as a theory of public discourse, rhetoric was defined as an inventional art—an art devoted to the study of a method to find out the available means of persuasion. In simple terms, rhetoric distinguished Itself from analytic methods (dialectic) that promised to probe the truth of propositions through rigorous logical method. Instead, rhetoric provided the-... 

With the invention of three-dimensional perspective, print made possible the kinds of rhetorical practices (such as mapping) that were necessary for technological expansion in Europe." A new interest in tmth became possible because printed texts increased the dissemination of knowledge and revealed the contradictions, disagreements, errors and difference that were not visible in individual (and widely dispersed) manuscripts. It was easy to extend this research to draw parallels between the emergence of print culture and the emergence of new media at the dawn of the new millennium. 

Miller, C. (1990). The Rhetoric of decision science, or, Herbert A. Simon says. In H. W. Simons (Ed.), The rhetorical turn Invention and persuasion in the conduct of irufuiry (pp. 162-184). Chicago University of Chicago Press. 

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