Visualizing Kuypers’ Rhetorical Strategy and Symbolic Action Dialectic for Rhetorical Criticism

To the right, I have put an image of a painting of someone speaking to an audience. Though the artist of this painting is in contention, any viewer can see how the audience is diverse in their attention and activity. Some audience are looking in all directions while others are doing all manner of related and unrelated activities. This painting suggests how complex and daunting it is for speakers (and writers) might face difficulties when they attempt to persuade their audiences. But when someone rhetorically analyzes any kind of text, they pay attention to the strategies the writer uses as well as the symbolic actions the writing may be attempting, in terms of persuasion. So, before I explain what I mean here through this method I’m proposing, I want to tell a brief story.

Years ago while I was working at a four-year university in Southwestern Ohio, I told one of my colleagues that I loved teaching my writing students Aristotle’s rhetorical modes. For clarification, I’m talking about the rhetorical modes one would find in most first year composition textbooks (cite the textbooks: Cooley, Norton Sampler; etc.) All the same, these modes come from composition studies that consolidated these topoi as EDNA: exposition, description, narration, and argumentation (Nordquist, 2017). They are based on Aristotle’s Topoi. Though these modes simplify Aristotle, they do encompass many different categories of topoi, which I will expound on at a later time. Back to my story, this colleague told me that nobody teaches the modes anymore, attempting to disabuse me of their value and dissuade me from teaching and researching them any further. As I recall, we had this exchange in 2013.

To partially concede my colleague’s criticism, I couldn’t find then-current research that explored or even argued for why these modes were important. Other than online rhetorical resources and composition textbooks, these modes seemed extinct. Despite what he said and I found, I felt that I could make them extant again. So, I kept on teaching, researching, and contemplating these modes’ value. I would use these modes for my own work, including the paper I wrote to get into my Ph.D. program. After I got into a program, I chose to go to Ohio University. It was there that I started to see the value, thanks to a rhetorical criticism class I took with Dr. Roger Aden.

In the spring of 2017, I took Professor Roger Aden’s Rhetorical Criticism class. It was a Monday night, once a week class, from 6:30 to 10 or so. Besides loving the subject of the class, the class also gave me a productive way to think about something other than my wife going back to her apartment in Marion. To make a long story short, for the 2016-2017 school year, I lived in Athens, Ohio in my first year of my Ph.D. while my wife lived in Marion in her first year as a professor at Marion Technical College. She would come down one weekend, and I’d go up the next. This arrangement ended in May of 2017, and we moved to a half-way point between Athens and Marion. She was pregnant with our first child, so living apart was done.

But why do I digress on a somewhat painful memory instead of getting into how Aden’s class introduced me to a definitional and clear definition of rhetorical criticism? Well, I had a large mitigation factor to keep me motivated to pay even more attention, to dig into the details that Aden and my colleagues offered. I also wanted to make sure I could spread the gospel of learning about rhetoric and convince my wife to study it. (It eventually worked, but that’s for another time). Aden’s course introduced me to Kuypers and King’s (2015) definition of rhetoric from his Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action. He and King define rhetoric as:

When we use the term rhetoric in this chapter we mean: The strategic use of communication, oral or written, to achieve specifiable goals. There are two main ideas expressed by this definition. One involves the strategic, or intentional, nature of the language we use; the second involves knowing what goals we wish to reach through the language we use. This is an intentionally narrow definition of rhetoric, but we think using such is justified for now (Kuypers and King, 2015, p. 10).

Before I demonstrate how Kuypers and King’s definition of rhetoric gives new life to the modes, I want to parse out what their definition means. Though we can’t determine specific intent, we can conclude that when writers and speakers want to persuade, they have strategic ends in mind. In other words, Kuypers and King break rhetoric into a dialectical relation of strategies on the one side and goals (symbolic action) on the other side. We can expand this relation into quotes and examples of actual content, which supplies the sample text for analysis. We can then break down the rhetorical strategy to include the mode/form (aka Topoi) to connect to the larger, less specific forms that inform rhetorical strategies.

To illustrate Kuypers and King’s (2015) definition and the expansion I’ve offered, I have a chart below for breaking down the rhetoric and content of a piece of writing. For the example, I will put quotes and images into the “content” column. I will be using Roy Spencer’s 2012 blog post on how global warming is cargo cult science: https://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/03/global-warming-as-cargo-cult-science/

To be clear: I affirm that global warming is real and climate change science is legitimate. As I indicated in my earlier work, I analyze public writing and communication related to climate change science and climate change denial. I’m using Spencer’s blog for this chart to show how I use classical and modern conceptions of rhetoric to rhetorically analyze and critique a piece of climate change denial writing and rhetoric. Please note: even though I’m quoting large blocks of texts in the chart does not mean I will quote that much material in my written, long-form analysis. As such, the chart forces me to pinpoint specific linguistic evidence that jumps out to me as relevant to Spencer’s thesis, stated in the first two paragraphs of the blog.

Content	Mode/Form	Rhetorical Strategy (How does the mode or form work?)	Symbolic Action (why is the rhetorical strategy persuasive, or what goal does the rhetorical strategy accomplish?)
“Science is all about establishing and understanding cause and effect. Unfortunately, there are few examples in science where causation can be easily established, since the physical world involves myriad variables interacting in different ways.”	At the core, this quote has both a definition of what science is along with classification that categorizes science as often missing the mark in determining causation.	Spencer defines science as concerning itself with cause and effect, though many physical phenomena elude such simple analysis.	Spencer offers a brief and limited definition of science so that he can ultimately confirm his own bias about climate change being false. In other words, he defines science in such a way that if a scientific endeavor fails to establish one-to-one cause/effect relationships, then that science does not qualify as a valid scientific study.
But many problems are not amenable to laboratory investigation. Global warming is one of them. There is only a single subject, or ‘patient’ if you will (the Earth), it apparently has a low-grade fever, and we are trying to determine the cause of the fever.	This quote illustrates a compare/contrast structure. Specifically, Spencer analogizes the earth to a medical patient.	Spencer analogizes the earth as a subject in climate change science to a patient with a low-grade fever.	Spencer’s analogy of the earth to a patient with a low-grade fever oversimplifies the complex set of variables that climate scientists must account for when they do global temperature measurements. Ultimately, analogizing the earth to a sick patient allows Spencer to dismiss climate science because, in his oversimplification, the data fail to determine the exact cause of global warming, which ends up being a point of his argument for why climate science fails to be science.
“The courts are increasingly deferring such matters of causation to the “expertise” of government agencies, such as the EPA. The Circuit Court of DC recently heard challenges to EPA’s 2010 endangerment finding (or ruling) that increasing CO2 is a threat to human health and welfare, and thus must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.”	On the surface, Spencer describes or summarizes the then recent court cases about climate change. However, he puts quotes around expertise to signal that he rejects government scientists as authorities while the courts accept the data and testimony of government scientists who affirm climate change.	Spencer uses the topoi of antirrhesis, which is defined as a strategy that rejects the recognized authorities. Though antirrhesis generally takes more of personal attack, the labeling of that strategy applies here because Spencer signals that he does not recognize government scientists as legitimate authorities without considering or sharing the evidence they presented in court.	Spencer instead uses quotes to signal an antirrhesis, which dismisses their expertise, so that his description of the court case focuses more on attacking character, allowing him to avoid presenting evidence from the actual court case, the Clean Air Act, or the experts’ testimony.
Yet the judges sitting on that court did not want to hear any challenges to the science(!) If the endangerment finding was based upon the science, how the hell can a court hear challenges to the Finding if it does not want to hear about the science? I’m not an attorney, but it seems like lawyers are so busy arguing procedural and obscure legal issues, they are not willing to go after the fundamental premise: that more CO2 in the atmosphere is bad for you.		This quote illustrates a nonsequitur. In his reasoning, judges and lawyers, who may or may not have scientific training, are supposed to determine what is good and bad science along with making arguments based on law. What’s more, this example could also be working as an argument from ignorance. As he admits, he is not a lawyer, which he admits. However, he hasn’t seemed to have bothered with reaching what lawyers do, which most likely is arguing about “procedural” and even “obscure legal issues.”	Moreover, he’s putting science and scientific knowledge is a higher place than law–a subject that transcends professional and academic boundaries.
Yeah, science is hard. It can make your head hurt. But if you are going to base policy on what some scientists claim, you’d better be prepared to address challenges to that science.	Here Spencer is addressing those who make policy. We know that because he talks about policy and policy making decisions. In the more sarcastic sense, Spencer is also belittling those who make policy, nearly saying that though they can’t understand the science, they still need to do better and base their decisions on it.	This move works like a moral to a fable, a warning to policy makers, as if policymakers who base their decisions on accepted climate change science have failed. However, this no-so-subtle warning demonstrates a false dilemma that Spencer invoked when he critiqued the judges. More plainly, he is saying that policymakers have to question and critique the data and scientific consensus. If they don’t, then they are not doing their job.	As he did with the lawyer and judges argument, Spencer is putting himself as a singular scientific authority who is allowed to warn policymakers about the fact that they need to know a lot about science and how to critique science. His condescending tone along with the false dilemma he has created elevates his profession and knowledge about all other professional and domains of knowledge.

 

As you can see in the chart above, both scholars and students of rhetorical analysis/criticism alike can parse out what they are thinking. In turn, if they start with the symbolic action and rhetorical strategy columns, they can then put the quote beneath it along with a summary of that quote.

Essentially, I see this chart as a way for students to separate the strategy or “how” the writer uses fallacies vs. them conceptualizing what ends or goals the writer is afforded when they use such fallacious strategies. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, I am using the traditional modes like compare/contrast and definition among all the different strategies and fallacies I listed in the chart. Using this thorough grid method encourages students to think more about what they are claiming, what evidence they find to support their claims, and why the claims they’ve made connect to the evidence they present. As such, I think an exercise such as this one breath new life into the old modes. I’m not ready to give these modes as analytical tools up quite yet.