Just Rhetoric

Definitions of Rhetoric

Aristotle provided one of our earliest and, to this day, most influential definitions of rhetoric:

"Let rhetoric be defined as an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion"

On first glance, this definition may seem overly broad. If rhetoric is concerned with all instances of persuasion, then what are its practical limits? When Aristotle speaks of persuasion, is he thinking only of public persuasion (as when an orator aims to sway a crowd to vote for a candidate or adopt a religious creed)? Or is he thinking of other persuasive situations such as might occur in personal conversations or in public art? To this day, scholars continue to debate over just what sorts of communicative acts ought to be counted as rhetorical. Fortunately, we do not need to review those complex debates to make sense of Aristotle's definition. When placed in the context of his writings and of Athenian history, it becomes clear Aristotle was answering objections raised by his mentor, Plato to controversial rhetorical practices in the public fora of early Athens. Plato's argument in this respect was actually quite subtle and complex and can be traced over several Socratic dialogues, so it is important that we not write him off as someone who simply disapproved of the art of rhetoric. Nevertheless, he demonstrated a distinct concern for the integrity of public discourse. Put simply, Plato feared that rhetoric, as it was often practiced in the polis of his day, might ultimately prove corrosive to social order. More specifically, he worried that highly trained, but insincere speakers and writers could make a weaker argument appear to be the better argument and thereby convince a naive public to consent to bad public policy, or even despotism. His best known statement on the subject is in the Gorgias dialogue where (through Socrates) he calls the brand of rhetoric practiced among the Sophists a counterfeit art, mere "cookery" dispensed to a public in need of healing "medicine." And again, when reading such passages we should keep in mind that Plato had much more to say about rhetoric in other dialogues and that many scholars in his day and since have disagreed with his conclusions about Sophistic rhetoric. 

Plato's student Aristotle sided with neither his mentor nor with the Sophists, instead forwarding a highly influential view of rhetoric as a worthy "dialectical partner" to the academic study of logical discourse. In The Rhetoric and in Nicomachean Ethics, he argued that if a polis is to foster a just and thriving social order its citizens must be encouraged to practice excellence in public reasoning. More to the point, he believed that If we are to learn to live together without resorting to coercion, we had best place a high priority on the study and practice of public discourse. And because the "available means of persuasion" will vary from one community to another, rhetorical practices will be diverse.

The definitions on this page reflect that diversity.

PLEASE NOTE: Only those definitions with bibliographic citations have been double checked for accuracy. This list will be expanded and edited from time to time. If you have suggestions for other definitions -- or if you have reason to believe any of these quotations may be inaccurate -- please forward the information, along with supporting data to justrhetoric@justrhetoric.com.

Kenneth Burke "Kairos" by Lysippos

Early (before 1900)

Aristotle: "Let rhetoric be defined as an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion" (36).

Aristotle: Rhetoric is an antistrophos [counterpart] to dialectic [that is, philosophical disputation]; for both are concerned with such things are, to a certain extent, within the knowledge of all people and belong to no separately defined science. A result is that all people, in some way, share in both; for all, to some extent, try both to test and maintain an argument..." (29).

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford, 1991.

Socrates (via Plato): "In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word "flattery"; and it appears to me to have many other parts, one of which is cookery, which may seem to be an art, but, as I maintain, is only an experience or routine and not an art... Rhetoric, according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics" (43-44).

Plato. Gorgias and Timaeus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Courier Dover, 2003.

Gorgias: "The power of speech bears the same relation to the ordering of the mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies. Just as different drugs expel different humors from the body, and some stop it from being ill but others stop it from living, so too some speeches cause sorrow, some cause pleasure, some cause fear, some give the hearers confidence, some drug and bewitch the mind with an evil persuasion" (25).

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. Trans. Douglas M. MacDowell. London: Duckworth Publishing 1982.

Sappho: "Persuasion is Aphrodite's daughter: it is she who beguiles our mortal hearts" (fragment 90).

Sappho. Poems and Fragments. Trans. Josephine Balmer. Secaucus, NJ: Meadowland, 1984.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian):   [A rhetorician is] "a good man speaking well." "...what matters is not so much the act as the motive.”

Boethius: "Rhetoric treats of and discourses upon hypotheses, that is, questions with a multitude of surroundings in time and place, and if at any time it brings up a thesis, it uses it in connection with its hypothesis. These are its surroundings: Who? What? Where? By whose help? Why? In what manner? At what time?"

Francis Bacon: "The duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will."

George Campbell:  [Rhetoric] "is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its end.  The four ends of discourse are to enlighten the understanding, please the imagination, move the passion, and influence the will."

John Locke: [Rhetoric is] "that powerful instrument of error and deceit."

Edward T. Channing: [Rhetoric is] "a body of rules derived from experience and observation, extending to all communication by language and designed to make it efficient. It does not ask whether a man is to be a speaker or writer, --a poet, philosopher, or debater; but simply,--is it his wish to be put in the right way of communicating his mind with power to others, by words spoken or written. If so, rhetoric undertakes to show him rules or principles which will help to make the expression of his thoughts effective."

Contemporary (1900 and beyond)

I. A. Richards:  "Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies."

Kenneth Burke: "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols."

Kenneth Burke: "Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning."

Kenneth Burke: "The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents."

Richard Weaver: [Rhetoric is that] "which creates an informed appetite for the good."

Wayne Booth: "The art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse."

Judith Butler: [Rhetoric is] "concerned with the question of how ... we come to accept and transform our sense of reality through the means by which it is presented."

Thomas B. Farrell: Rhetoric is an acquired competency, a manner of thinking that invents possibilities for persuasion, conviction, action, and judgment" (16).

Farrell, Thomas B. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Erika Lindemann: "Rhetoric is a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on assumptions people share as members of a community."

Donald C. Bryant: [Rhetoric is] "the function of adjusting ideas to people and of people to ideas."

Andrea Lunsford: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication."

Gerard Hauser: "I use rhetoric broadly to mean the symbolic inducement of social cooperation" (14).

Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

Sonja and Karen Foss: "Rhetoric is an action human beings perform when they use symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another . . , [and it] is a perspective humans take that involves focusing on symbolic processes."

Marc Fumaroli: "Rhetoric appears as the connective tissue peculiar to civil society and to its proper finalities, happiness and political peace hic et nunc."

C. H. Knoblauch: "...rhetoric is the process of using language to organize experience and communicate it to others. It is also the study of how people use language to organize and communicate experience. The word denotes…both distinctive human activity and the "science" concerned with understanding that activity."

William Covino and David Joliffe: "Rhetoric is primarily a verbal, situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and practical and gives rise to potentially active texts."

Paolo Valesio: "I specify now that rhetoric is the functional organization of discourse, within its social and cultural context, in all its aspects, exception made for its realization as a strictly formal metalanguage--in formal logic, mathematics, and in the sciences whose metalanguages share the same features.  In other words: rhetoric is all of language, in its realization as discourse."

George Kennedy: "Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication:  the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expanded in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message."

David Bender and John Wellbery: [Rhetoric is] "that sea of communicative transactions…the impersonal drama of what occurs among us, unnoticed and without deliberation or grandeur…the dense tangle of our triviality.

Lloyd Bitzer: "In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action."

Douglas Ehninger: [Rhetoric is] "that discipline which studies all of the ways in which men may influence each other's thinking and behavior through the strategic use of symbols."

Ernest Grassi: [Grassi provides an extended definition of rhetoric and and explanation of how it fits in with other types of human thought and communication]

To sum up, we are forced to distinguish between three kinds of
speech: (1) The external, "rhetorical speech," in the common meaning
of this expression, which only refers to images because they
affect the passions. But since these images do not stem from insight,
they remain an object of opinion. This is the case of the purely
emotive, false speech; "rhetoric" in the usual negative sense. (2) The
speech which arises exclusively from a rational proceeding. It is true
that this is of a demonstrative character but it cannot have a
rhetorical effect, because purely rational arguments do not attain to
the passions, i.e., "theoretical" speech in the usual sense. (3) The
true rhetorical speech. This springs from the archai, non-deducible.
moving, and indicative, due to its original images. The original
speech is that of the wise man [sic], of the sophos who is not only
episthetai but the man [sic] who with insight leads, guides, and attracts.

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1969, p. 214.