Rhetorical Reason

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! "Rhetorical reason" may be defined as the faculty of discovering the crux of the matter, endemic to rhetorical invention, that precedes argumentation. Aristotle's definition of rhetoric, "The faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion," presupposes a distinction between an art (techne) of speech-making and a cognitively prior faculty of discovery. That is so because, before one argues a case, one must discover what is at issue. How, for example, does one discover available means of persuasion? One does not simply frolic through fertile fields of topoi, randomly gathering materials with which to build lines of argument. There is a method endemic to rhetoric which guides the search for those lines of argument that speak most directly to the issue at stake.