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In classical rhetoric, the Common Topics were a short list of four traditional topics regarded as suitable to structure an argument. ... 1971 book Classical Rhetoric ...
In his treatise Topics, Aristotle does not explicitly define topic, though it is "at least primarily a strategy for argument not infrequently justified or explained by a principle". [2] He characterises it in the Rhetoric [3] thus: "I call the same thing element and topic; for an element or a topic is a heading under which many enthymemes fall."
Modern writers and students use these topics, as well, when discovering arguments, although today more emphasis is placed on scientific facts, statistics, and other "hard" evidence. Classical rhetoricians saw many areas of inquiry that today's writer might view as being purely in the province of "logic", developing syllogisms, finding ...
The study of rhetoric was contested in classical Greece: on one side were the sophists, and on the other were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The trio saw rhetoric and poetry as tools that were too often used to manipulate others by appealing to emotion and omitting facts.
Ernst Robert Curtius studied topoi as "commonplaces", themes common to orators and writers who re-worked them according to occasion, e.g., in classical antiquity the observation that "all must die" was a topos in consolatory oratory, for in facing death the knowledge that death comes even to great men brings comfort. [2]
Dispositio is the system used for the organization of arguments in the context of Western classical rhetoric. The word is Latin , and can be translated as "organization" or "arrangement". It is the second of five canons of classical rhetoric (the first being inventio , and the remaining being elocutio , memoria , and pronuntiatio ) that concern ...
The study of argument in the field of argumentation theory since Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric and Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument, [16] both first published in 1958, has been characterized by a recognition of the defeasible, non-monotonic nature of most ordinary everyday arguments and reasoning.
In the argument above, the statement, "Fred's cat has fleas" is up for debate (i.e. is a claim), but in the explanation, the statement, "Fred's cat has fleas" is assumed to be true (unquestioned at this time) and just needs explaining. [19] Arguments and explanations largely resemble each other in rhetorical use.