Dear All,

The conversation of teaching argumentation to design students has taken several turns. Within that thread, there has been a lively debate on rhetoric as an issue totally distinct from teaching argumentation. There have also been lucid comments on the relationship between emotion and logic in effective decision making. I wish to address these issues, and not the question of teaching design students to argue effectively. 

As I see it, there has been a real problem understanding that rhetoric is a range of tools with several purposes. 

Rhetoric is bad! Rhetoric is a tool used in marketing and persuasion. Rhetoric is a tool used in political discourse. 

Rhetoric is good! Rhetoric is a tool used in effective reasoning. Rhetoric is a tool used to generate ideas for productive inquiry.

This argument can be compared with a discussion about water.

Water is good! People need water to live. Ocean transport is a cheap and effective way to move goods between continents. 

Water bad! People drown in water. People use water to torture other people. 

Carlos Pires has been criticising rhetoric for its uses, not its nature. To some degree, David Sless did the same, giving in evidence a book that specifically criticises the uses of rhetoric in political discourse — a fine book, but a book that gives no consideration to the value of rhetoric as a generative art of inquiry in philosophy, science, or design. I observe that both Carlos and David are sparkling rhetors, using metaphor, logic, exaggeration, and the play of words as it suits them in posts to the list and — in David’s case — the elegant and politically masterful entries in his blog.

Susan Hagan is describing rhetoric from the viewpoint of a scholar who studied rhetoric while earning her PhD in design at Carnegie Mellon University. Susan is both a professional rhetor and a scholar of the sciences of rhetoric. She knows that rhetoric has good uses and bad, much as water does. To condemn rhetoric on the basis that some people abuse rhetoric when they speak is rather like condemning water because some sailors drown. It also neglects that value of water for ocean transport, brewing, hydroponics, and nearly everything else connected with life on this water-bound planet.

Carlos is partly right but mainly wrong to say that logic and emotion would exist without rhetoric, but rhetoric could not exist without emotion and logic. It is right that rhetoric could not exist without emotion and logic. Whether or not we identify rhetoric by a name, rhetoric is a property of the communicative nature of human beings. We build our understandings of the world through the language we speak. For those who do not know his work, I suggest an excursion through George Herbert Mead and the symbolic interactionist philosophy and psychology that grew from Mead’s work as one of the four founding figures of philosophical pragmatism. Rhetoric, from Aristotle on, has been the term that we give to the scientific and scholarly study of many aspects of human communication, purposive speech and writing, and the arts of discovery that arise from using language to create the world by creatures who use language to understand the world. Logic and emotion might well exist without the designated field of inquiry and action known as rhetoric — but human beings would not be human beings without rhetoric. They would simply use these arts under a different name.

I appreciated Viveka Weiley’s comments on logic and emotion in human decision making. And Don Norman’s comments. Don did not remember the book where he read that we must use logic and emotion together to create meaning. Mead said that, and I also remember the book Don may have been thinking of. It is the Book of Proverbs, Chapters 22, 23, 24. These chapters capture and embed material from an even earlier book by an ancient Egyptian writer known as Amenomope. A 21st-century designer and cognitive scientist wrote something quite similar in a more recent book .... if only I could remember his name.
    
Warm wishes,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

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