- Argumentation proceeds informally, not according to the forms and rules of formal deduction and induction.
- Arguments are always addressed to audiences (possibly the arguer’s self) for the purpose of inducing or increasing those audiences’ adherence to the theses presented.
- To achieve any degree of success with their audiences, arguments have to proceed from premises that are acceptable to the audiences. The arguer may or may not include himself or herself among the audiences that are immediately addressed.
- The arguing always includes procedures by which ideas and values can be given special presence (in the French sense of being made present) in the minds of those addressed.
- Ambiguity is never entirely avoidable in arguments because the language which must be used in inevitably equivocal in some degree and because the terms that are available are often open to more than a single interpretation.
- The relationships (liaisons) of concepts and attitudes are created and dissolved by verbal techniques which are distinguishable from one another (x).
“The audience is not necessarily made up of those the speaker expressly addresses…[Instead], we must regard it as the gathering of those whom the speaker wants to influence by his or her arguments” (14).
It is important that “the claims we make in arguing are not self-evidently true; they must be made to seem reasonable” (xi). For this reason, “a dialectical argument can not be impersonal, for it derives its values from its action upon the mind of some person” (Perelman 2-3). This also means “generally accepted opinions” – which is how Aristotle defines the dialectic – must be argued through the use of rhetoric. This breaks down the binary of rhetoric and dialectic. Because rhetoric must be used to “establish these [self-evident] truths…the new rhetoric becomes the indispensable instrumental for philosophy” (7). (Ancient rhetoricians defined philosophy as the student of intuition or self-evident truths.)
Perelman states that Aristotle (the ancient rhetoric) believes that “rhetoric concerns the orator’s technique in addressing a crowd gathered in a public square – a group of people who lack both specialized knowledge and the ability to follow a lengthy chain of argument. In contract to ancient rhetoric, the new rhetoric is concerned with discourse addressed to any sort of audience- a crown in a public square or a gathering of specialists, a single being or all humanity” (4-5). Additionally, the new rhetoric “is not limited to formally correct inferences or to more or less mechanical calculations. [It] covers the whole range of discourse that aims at persuasion and conviction, whatever the audience addressed and whatever the subject matter” (5). “The new rhetoric is not limited to the sphere of practices,” but also includes theoretical understandings of language as well (8).
He defines rhetoric as “the theory of persuasive communication” and claims that “as soon as a combination tries to influence on or more persons, to orient their thinking, to excite or clam their emotions, to guide their actions, it belongs to the realm of rhetoric” (162). “Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience, to modify an audience’s conviction or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will through constraint or conditioning” (11).