Argumentation

ARGUMENTATION

Argumentation comes down to us from the Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many others such as St. Augustine. Argumentation has three root parts that are inseparable. They are:

1. Rhetoric. The art of speaking to an audience with the goal of winning them to your viewpoint. Rhetoric is how we communicate knowledge. It must not be empty bombast, or phrases that don’t mean anything, but facts geared to prove your point or argument to the audience. Those facts must be presented clearly and in plain language, easily understood.
2. Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering the available means of persuasion in a given case.” All young men who wanted to enter government service or politics had to be schooled in rhetoric. Consider Cicero, Rome’s greatest rhetorician, who wrote on philosophy.
3. Logic.  Reasoning is logic, which may be formal logic, such as in mathematics and science, or informal logic, which doesn’t have a degree of certainty. It’s not mathematical in precision and may reflect the argument we are making. It is the close cousin of argumentation itself.
4. Dialectic. Though there are many differing ideas about dialectic, such as Karl Marx’s great dialectic about communism versus capitalism, the true meaning of the term is simply discovering and testing knowledge through a series of questions and answers. When you are cross-examining someone on the witness stand, you are engaging in dialectic. Any conversation that is critical and has people thinking about answers, such as between employer and employee, or husband and wife or parent and child, is using dialectical methodology.

We use argumentation every day in our dealings with family and co-workers. The art is in using it wisely, without sounding like a “know it all,” or pedantic.