190 Informal Logic 

Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument 
By Christopher W. Tindale 
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 1-245. 
ISBN 0-7914-4388-4. Paper, US $18.95 

Reviewed by J. Anthony Blair 

The thesis of Acts of Arguing is, that of the three important models of, or 
perspectives on, argument the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical the 
rhetorical is fundamental: "the most appropriate synthesis of the main per-
spectives in argumentation theory is one grounded in the rhetorical" (6). Fol-
lowing Wenzel, Tindale hopes to "[trace] argument to its rhetorical origins and 
[develop] from there a model that integrates it with the other two perspec-
tives" (19). The book is an extended explanation ofthe rhetorical model and of 
what it means to situate it as foundational, and an extended argument for the 
importance of considering the rhetorical dimension of argument. The book's 
intended audience seems to be primarily philosophers, but could include any-
one trying to understand arguments, their interpretation and their assessment. 

The strategy of the book is to reveal the shortcomings of theories giving 
hegemony to the logical perspective or to the dialectical perspective, then 
show how conceiving the rhetorical perspective as basic solves those prob-
lems and how, moreover, "in its own right ... a rhetorical model of argumen-
tation offers the most complete and satisfying account of what arguing is, of 
what it is like to be engaged in argumentation, to be argued to, and to evaluate 
arguments" (7). In what follows I will sketch the contents of the book, chap-
ter-by-chapter, then briefly indicate some central critical questions that I have 
for the theory. 

The idea that any complete theory of argumentation will contain accounts 
of all three perspectives, the logical, the dialectical, and the rhetorical, has its 
roots in Aristotle, but in the recent past was independently revived by Wayne 
Brockriede and Joseph Wenzel in the late 1970s, and reiterated by Wenzel in a 
number of papers since then. In the Introduction (in effect the book's first 
chapter), Tindale reviews this tradition, and situates the rhetorical perspective 
in relation to the logical and the dialectical. He reviews Habermas's critique of 
Klein and Toulmin, taking it as support for a synthesis of all three perspec-
tives. He then reviews the Aristotelian notion of rhetoric as part of a triad with 
dialectic and logic. Tindale finds significant Burnyeat's and McCabe's inter-
pretations of the Aristotlean enthymeme, according to which, inter alia, the 
audience is actively involved in completing the argument. Among contempo-
rary treatments of rhetoric Tindale mention's Levi's and Farrell's sympatheti-
cally, but it is in The New Rhetoric of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, with 
its notions of the particular and the universal audience, that he finds the prin-

© Informal Logic Vol. 20, No.2 (2000): pp. 190-201. 



Book Reviews I C ompes rendus 191 

cipal inspiration for his own approach. He proposes "a development and 
adaptation of a number of [Perelman's] ideas within a rhetorical model of 
argumentation that meets the challenges experienced by contemporary argu-
mentation theory" (16). He believes he can construct from such ideas an 
account that meets Habermas's challenge to provide "both specific criteria of 
evaluation relative to the occasion and objective criteria that avoid a thorough 
relativism" (17). 

Chapter 1 is a critique of treatments of argument as product: the logical 
perspective, of which Tindale distinguishes formal and informal logic as two 
branches. He traces both back to Aristotle, who, he says, started the tradition 
of applying the deductive logic of proofs to arguments. Against some critics, 
Tindale holds that the argument forms of deductive logic can be usefully 
applied to arguments, so long as these are understood within a rhetorically 
based theory of argumentation (a claim explained later). StilI, he argues that 
formal logic alone is not adequate as the tool of argument appraisal, since 
deductive validity is neither necessary nor sufficient as the standard of good 
argument. He explains how he thinks the informal logic of Toulmin, Woods 
and Walton, Govier, Johnson and Blair and others remedies or ameliorates 
many of the problems of the product-oriented account that arise in formal 
logic. However, Tindale contends, any product- oriented account faces the 
two problems of "adaptability" and "relevance." The first is the problem of 
adapting the analytic tools of the theory to natural language arguments in 
context. For formal logic, this is the famous "translation" problem: the diffi-
culty of translating natural language into standard formal notation without 
remainder and with confidence that the original sense has been retained. For 
informal logic, it is exemplified by the problem of ensuring that the analytical 
"tree diagrams" used to expose the argument's logical structure are faithful to 
the context- embedded argument being evaluated. For formal logic the rel-
evance problem is that material implication yields counter-intuitive results when 
applied to reasoning or arguments in natural language. For informal logic, it is 
that the offered analyses of propositional relevance, even if adequate on their 
own terms, fail to account for contextual relevance. (For example, the irrel-
evance of a straw man attack is not at all propositional, but only contextual.) 
Tindale reviews the attempts of Anderson and Belnap, and of Read, to pro-
duce formal relevance theories, and of Walton, Govier and Freeman to pro-
vide informal analyses of relevance, and finds them all wanting to some de-
gree. The chapter ends with the introduction of Perelman's concept of quasi-
logical argument, which Tindale thinks provides a rhetorical setting for the 
application of deductive logical forms, and with an appeal to Perelman's dis-
tinction between the "rational" (a priori, mathematical reasoning) and the "rea-
sonable" (contextualized human faculties employed in the project of discovery 
and understanding) as marking the distinction between formal and non- for-
mal reasoning. 



192 Informal Logic 

Chapter 2 reviews attempts to treat argumentation as fundamentally dia-
lectical in nature. The strategy of the chapter is to show that a predominantly 
dialectical perspective turns out to be either objectionably relativistic or, if not, 
then covertly rhetorical. Tindale treats the pragma- dialectical theories of van 
Eemeren and Grootendorst, and of Walton, as representative of dialectical 
approaches. He takes their conceptions of fallacies and of argument evalua-
tion, in particular, to demonstrate the vacillation he decries. Tindale argues 
that they treat agreement between dialectical partners as the standard of evalu-
ation, which is objectionably relativistic, but they also covertly make refer-
ence to a reasonable audience. The latter, he points out, represents a disguised 
appeal to rhetorical considerations. After a brief, perspicuous outline of what 
a dialectical approach is and of the recent history of that perspective, he pro-
vides a nice summary of the Amsterdam pragma-dialectical theory, both its 
initial statement and its more recent amplifications, including a useful defence 
of it against some common misunderstandings. Tindale then spells out the 
two pragma-dialectical approaches to fallacies, first the Amsterdam theory, 
and then Walton's significantly different version, clearly tracing the evolution 
of Walton's views over the past decade (and several books). He documents an 
ambivalence in the Amsterdam theory, and plausibly identifies, both in it and in 
Walton, appeals to a third party or audience not accounted for in the official 
versions. Tindale contends that it is precisely this rhetorical reference that 
saves the theories from a vicious relativism, a claim he promises to develop 
and defend in future chapters. This outline cannot do justice to the fairness of 
Tinda\e's expositions and the plausibility of his critiques ofthese dialectical 
theories of fallacy. 

Having reviewed the logical and dialectical perspectives, Tindale turns to 
the rhetorical perspective in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 introduces that per-
spective with a discussion of the new rhetoric, emotion and argumentation, 
context and audience; Chapter 4 presents Tindale's rhetorical accounts of the 
criteria of relevance and acceptability. 

The new rhetoric (of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca) focuses on arguer, 
audience, and context in general. Argument is conceived as aiming not at 
disagreement resolution, but at eliciting or increasing adherence. The arguer 
seeks to bring the audience to participate by persuading itself of the legitimacy 
of the reasoning. Adherence may be to a course of action or an attitude as well 
as to a belief, and to practical action-guiding commitment to beliefs; so grounds 
that move to action count as arguments. Thus, appeals to emotion can be 
relevant to the truth or reasonableness of conclusions, and Tindale quotes 
Brinton on distinguishing between arguing for (invoking) emotions and argu-
ing from (evoking) emotions, and when such arguments are reasonable. He 
also follows Brinton in holding that ethos can be a relevant (if not decisive) 
kind of support for a conclusion in argument. 

Few deny that considerations of "context" are essential for the interpreta-
tion of arguments, and hence for their assessment, but what precisely is con-



Book Reviews I Compes rendus 193 

text? Tindale suggests four components: locality (setting in time and place), 
background (what occasions the discourse, the prior argumentation, the rel-
evant events in public discussion, consequences at issue), arguer (beliefs and 
intentions though these might not be clear and they usually don't exhaust all 
the plausible interpretations), and expression (how the argument is presented, 
what's left unsaid, the arguer's mannerisms, the medium and its conven-
tions). In connection with "expression," Tindale contends there are limitations 
to the "speech act" approach of the Amsterdam school, and argues for an 
Austinian contextual, rather than Searlean formal, understanding of speech 
acts. Indeed, he proposes that arguers are fundamentally communicators, 
with speech just one of many possible modes of communication of argumen-
tation. 

Chapter 3 ends with a discussion of the importance of audience, and a 
review of the problems that Perelman's concept of "universal audience" en-
counters, because Tindale wants to be able to use (a form of) that concept 
himself. He notes that audiences are complex, that they change during the 
course of an argument or over time, that they are active participants in the 
argument, contributing assumptions, interpretations, and critiques, and that 
their adherence is necessary for the success of the argumentation. The last 
feature raises the problem of unpalatable relativism, for unless persuading by 
any means that moves the audience is allowable, what other criteria apply? 

Chapter 4 is to my mind the most original and the most contentious part of 
the book. Tindale begins it with a defence of Perelman's "universal audience" 
against the charge of vitiating relativism mentioned at the end of Chapter 3, to 
clear the way for his use of a Perelmanian concept of universal audience in his 
own theory of argument acceptability. He then takes up, as central to both the 
interpretation and the evaluation of arguments, the questions of what is con-
sidered relevant support and of what is (and should be) acceptable support by 
the audience. With the allegation of relativism answered, Tindale turns to his 
own, original and rhetorically- grounded analyses of relevance and acceptabil-
ity. 

He identifies two types of relevance, "premise-relevance" and "contextual 
relevance" and distinguishes two sub-types of the latter, "topic" and "audi-
ence" relevance. Premise-relevance is the immediate bearing of a premise on a 
conclusion in a premise-conclusion set. Topic relevance is a premise's prop-
erty of sharing the subject-matter of the conclusion (discussed by Walton and 
others). Audience relevance is the rhetorical property that connects the argu-
ment or reasons with the audience, and Tindale argues that it underlies the 
other two types of relevance. 

In his analysis of audience relevance Tindale makes use of the concept of 
a "cognitive environment," which he borrows from Sperber and Wilson's 
Relevance (1986). "(A] cognitive environment is a set of facts and assump-
tions that an individual, or, in the case of shared cognitive environments, a 



194 Informal Logic 

number of individuals, is capable of mentally representing and accepting as 
true (although they may be mistaken in doing so)" (106). The (shared) cogni-
tive environment tells us not what people know or assume, but what they 
could be expected to know or assume. It replaces the concept of "common 
knowledge," for we don't know what others know or what's widely known 
or assumed, "but we do know that we share environments in which facts, 
information, and assumptions are readily accessible" (106). "We 'are rel-
evant' insofar as we take into consideration this environment of the audience 
and construct our argument so that it relates to its features;" in a way that "is 
not inconsistent with any of the facts made manifest there, and can generally 
be understood in terms of what is already available to the audience" (l07). 
Tindale adds that information is relevant if it creates the possibility of modify-
ing the audience's cognitive environment. More specifically, "information is 
relevant to the cognitive environment ... where it has contextual effect" 
(109), that is, if it (a) allows a conclusion to be derived (contextual implica-
tion), (b) provides evidence to strengthen an assumption, or ( c) contradicts 
an existing assumption. 

Tindale argues for four implications of audience relevance so construed. 
(1) A statement can be relevant to one audience but not another even when the 
same conclusion is at issue for both. (2) Irrelevant premises can be made 
relevant by the addition of information (added premises) that has contextual 
effect. (3) Such relevance comes in degrees; it isn't an onloffmatter. (4) The 
concept of audience relevance opens the way for a new account of hidden 
premises. Knowing the audience's cognitive environment, or better, the mu-
tual cognitive environment of arguer and audience, we know the domain from 
which relevance-adding information (the hidden premises) must come. Audi-
ence relevance is "prior" to topic relevance and premise-relevance, Tindale 
argues, making the point that it is a necessary condition (my term) of each. 

From an audience-relative perspective, premises must be not only relevant to 
the audience, but also acceptable to it and to the whole person, emotionally as 
well as intellectually. As Perelman put it, the speaker must adapt to the audi-
ence. Tindale proposes that we can identify what the audience will accept by 
appealing to what belongs to its cognitive environment. Moreover, there is a 
presumption in favour of such appeals. However, without further qualification 
there is a flavour of impermissible relativism and Tindale notes the need for 
objective standards of acceptability. The solution, he thinks, is via the con-
cept of a universal audience. 

Following an account of Blair and Johnson's idea of a community of 
model interlocutors, which he finds helpful but flawed, Tindale proposes his 
own version of Perelman's universal audience as the required objective con-
straint on acceptability. While we cannot evaluate an argument independently 
of the audience for which it was intended, we can require the audience to be 
reasonable. The audience is expected to distance itselffrom its prejudices. "A 



Book Reviews I Compes rendus 195 

key test is whether something can be universalized without contradiction" 
(l18). (This test rules out fallacies, and racism, for example, according to 
Tindale, presumably because one would not want fallacies committed or rac-
ism exhibited against oneself.) There are various ways of constructing, from 
the particular audience one is addressing, its corresponding reasonableness-
demanding universal audience: by bracketing out all the features of the audi-
ence that attach to its particularity, to try to reduce it to the common elements 
that unify its members; by identifying the highest or most reasonable elements 
within the audience, excluding those that are clearly unreasonable; by banning 
practices such as ignoring experience, refusing to allow two sides of an issue 
to be heard, or cutting off the opposition from responding (which one would 
not want others to visit on oneself); and by imagining the audience distributed 
across time, beyond the confines of particular occurrences. 

Tindale notes three results of constructing a universal audience out of a 
particular contextualized audience. (I) It raises a series of questions against 
the reasoning involved, the satisfactoriness of the answers to which indicate 
the quality of the reasoning. (2) It guides the arguer in the selection of premises, 
and it guides the interpreter in deciding what to take the argument to be, that 
is, what its most reasonable interpretation is, when that's in dispute. Both are 
to be guided by what the universal audience would agree with. (3) Construct-
ing the universal audience involves considering what is reasonable in each 
case. There is no external conception of the reasonable that is imposed. "We 
do not transport in notions of reasonableness. We describe it; we do not pre-
scribe it" (120). Tindale here seems to be saying that what is reasonable is 
relative to the particular audience. We must find ("describe") its values and 
beliefs. We cannot tell it what to value and believe ("we do not prescribe it"). 
How all this works in practice is not explained. Tindale refers the reader to 
thenext chapter, in which the theory as a whole is illustrated by application to 
two actual cases. 

Chapter 4 ends with a brief discussion of two examples intended to illus-
trate it and to pave the way for the case studies in Chapter 5. First, Tindale 
shows how the theory works in the evaluation of arguments. He discusses 
how the false allegation that Iraqi troops tore Kuwaiti babies from their incu-
bators mistakenly played a role in influencing the U.S. Congress to support the 
Gulf War. Once the deception was revealed, the argument should no longer 
have been persuasive, because, "To endorse a position on the basis of deceit 
and falsehood is clearly in contradiction with what is reasonable here and 
cannot be universalized" (122). Taking the issue of doctor-assisted suicide, 
Tindale illustrates how a consideration of the universal audience in the particu-
lar audience he selects to address, plus the cognitive environment of that 
particular audience, help one to decide which lines of argument to use and 
which to forego. 



196 Informal Logic 

If Chapter 4 contains the theory of how the rhetorical approach to argu-
mentation illuminates the key concepts of argument relevance and acceptabil-
ity, Chapter 5 is the application of that theory, and indeed of the rhetorical 
approach developed to this point in the book, in two extended case studies. A 
case is "an entire body of discourse with a unified subject matter and purpose, 
promoting some specific overall position" (125). The first case study is a 
paragraph-by-paragraph discussion of a full-page "message" that the Shell 
International Petroleum Company printed in leading newspapers around the 
world in November 1995. Shell was defending its continued oil extraction and 
exploration in Nigeria, and its attendant cooperation with the government of 
General Sani Abacha's military junta. Shell's policies had received widespread 
criticism after the execution by the Abacha regime of writer Ken Sago-Wawa 
and eight others after a farce of a trial on trumped-up charges of treason. In 
separate sections, Tindale discusses Shell's dialectical obligations, the argu-
ment's logical structure, and the reasonableness of the argumentation. The 
second case study examines the ethotic argumentation (the use of personality, 
testimony and expertise) involved in the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel 
and his subsequent appeal of his conviction in Canada for publishing false 
news, and the use of ethotic argument in the book, Did Six Million Really 
Die?, by the pseudonymous Richard Harwood, that figured in the trial and 
appeal. 

Throughout both studies Tindale is at pains to show how the kinds of 
rhetorical consideration discussed earlier apply concretely, and with cash value, 
in an attempt to gain a deep understanding, and a nuanced evaluation, of the 
argumentation used in the two cases. In general, the parts of a case may have 
varied purposes and audiences, and in addition, the understanding ofthe whole 
affects the interpretation of its parts. Studying cases from the rhetorical per-
spective, Tindale contends, shows how the rhetorical model is "a tool for the 
analysis of argumentative discourse" (125), and how it integrates the logical 
and dialectical elements with "an underlying, context-establishing rhetorical 
base" (125). 

Tindale believes that his theory does more than serve as a tool for the full-
bodied interpretation and evaluation of particular arguments. In addition, it 
offers grounds for a revision offallacy theory (Chapter 6), and helps to distin-
guish the cogent from the illegitimate in recent critiques of reason, including 
several post-modernist and feminist-inspired criticisms (Chapter 7). 

In Chapter 6, Tindale begins by alleging four "problems with fallacies" 
which, he claims, bear on the disagreements in the literature over the nature of 
fallacy, the proffered lists of fallacies, and the elaboration and analyses of 
individual fallacies. (1) The "problem of theory" is Hamblin's and Massey's 
contentions that we have no theory of fallacy in the sense that we have a 
theory of correct reasoning. (2) The "standard treatment problem" consists 
of all the worries about the Aristotelian definition of a fallacious argument as 



Book Reviews I Com pes rendus 197 

one that seems valid but is not so. (3) The "problem of relativity" is the prob-
lem of accounting for the fact that an argument that's fallacious in one context 
can be solid in another, which seems to imply that it can be legitimate to 
commit fallacies. (4) The "counters ide problem," which Tindale says (with-
out argument) is different from the relativity problem, is the problem noted by 
Walton among others that a type of argument can be fallacious in some in-
stances and correct in others. 

Tindale's next move is a useful if brief compilation of senses of 'fallacy,' 
which leads him to concluded that there are in play three distinct models of 
fallacy, which he dubs, "bad product," "bad procedure" and "bad process." 
He then proceeds to devote a separate section of the chapter to an examination 
of exemplary treatments in the literature of each of these: Johnson's, as repre-
sentative of a "bad product" theory, Walton's, as a representative of a "bad 
procedure" theory, and Willard's, Brinton's and Aristotle's, as representatives 
of "bad process" theories. The last is the occasion for an extended analysis of 
the nine types of spurious enthymeme that Aristotle lists in Sophistical Refuta-
tions. What Tindale teases out of Aristotle's treatments there and in the Rheto-
ric is the notion that what make arguments fallacious are features that impede 
the "process of legitimate communication between arguer and audience" (173). 
This notion reminds us of the pragma-dialectical idea that a fallacy is a viola-
tion of the rules of rational disagreement-resolution, and of Walton's idea that 
a fallacy hinders argumentation or prevents its development. It is also what 
the "semblance of validity" and the "appearance of refutation" of the standard 
treatment can be seen to refer to. There is a necessary reference here to the 
audience, but to avoid making fallacies totally relative to the audience, Tindale 
rem inds us of the other part of the standard treatment account: the argument 
seems valid, but is not, appears to refute, but does not. Who decides? Tindale's 
answer, not surprisingly, is that "for an argument to be fallacious, it mustseem 
not to be so to the particular audience, but be found to be so by the universal 
audience for that argument" (174). It is, from this perspective, reasonable to 
identify argument forms that have the potential to be deceptive, and in some 
contexts become actually deceptive to particular audiences. This account pro-
vides a solution to each of the four "problems" with which the chapter began, 
and has a place for the essentials of the "product" and "procedure" models 
within its essentially "process" model. The chapter ends with a discussion of 
Crosswhite's treatment offallacies, which Tindale finds similar to his own but 
troublesomely vague at key points, and with a section that repeats the general 
features of Tindale's account. 

Chapter 7 is an essay on post-modern and feminist critiques of reason, 
argument and logic. It is not possible to do justice to its subtleties and com-
plexities in a paragraph or two. In a tour de force that flows smoothly from 
one to the next through more than a score of points, Tindale discusses, men-
tions or cites the views of (in alphabetical order) Alcoff and Potter, Anthony 



198 Informal Logic 

and Witt, Appignanesi, Atherton, Ayim, Berrill, Billig, Cherwitch and Darwin, 
Cohen, Hikins, Homiak, Lloyd, Menssen, Meyerson, Nye, Orr, Perelman, 
Potter, Putnam, Roberts and Good, Rose, Rowland, Russman, Toulmin, 
Verbiest, Warren, and Willard. As I understand it, the gist of this chapter is that 
much, though not all, of the feminist and post-modernist critique of the domi-
nant traditions of reason and argument is well-founded, but that a rhetorical 
(particularized, contextual, embodied) approach to argument of the sort de~ 
vel oped in Tindale's book avoids the problems legitimately identified, incorpo-
rates the values and attitudes that animate those legitimate criticisms, and 
recaptures what is worthwhile and true in the tradition. 

The book ends with a five-page conclusion, a "Summation and Prolepsis" 
that begins with a re- invocation of Perelman. Tindale anticipates two objec-
tions to an insistence on the centrality of the rhetorical dimensions of argu-
mentation. The first is that the pluralistic conception of argument inherent in 
rhetorical argumentation is too broad and undefined. His reply is twofold. On 
the one hand, he insists, it is not true that "anything goes." "Rhetorical argu-
mentation requires the attempt to address an audience with a view to adher-
ence to some claim on the basis of understanding, and it requires a ... 'text' 
(broadly conceived) which can be identified as the product of an arguer or 
arguers ... " (204). On the other hand, the vagueness can't be helped. It 
cannot be decided in advance what will count as argument, and an insistence 
on translating images, gestures or figures into propositions in all cases is un-
duly restrictive. The second objection is that the ambiguity essential to rhetori-
cal argumentation is objectionable. There seem to be three threads to Tindale's 
response. First, the ambiguity of natural language and other properties of 
argumentation is a fact that any theory must accommodate. Second, the rhe-
torical perspective does not countenance reliance on the ambiguity of lan-
guage and context to manipulate audiences, but insists on invoking the audi-
ence's reasonableness. Third, the ambiguity that is employed in equivocation 
of the sort identified as the fallacy of equivocation is unreasonable and so 
unacceptable. Tindale concludes by insisting that his emphasis on the rhetori-
cal model is not meant to imply that the logical and dialectical perspectives 
should be abandoned, but rather to highlight a neglected perspective that is 
importantly illuminating, has significant implications for the practice of argu-
mentation, and is fundamental to the interpretation and assessment of argu-
ment as product or as procedure. Thus, in the appropriate synthesis of the 
three perspectives, the rhetorical is not an add-on, but the basic framework 
for the other two. 

I said at the outset that I would mention some critical questions I have for 
Tindale's theory. My first point is a minor one. There are two theses running 
through the book. On the one hand, Tindale is at pains not to reject tbe logical 
and dialectical "approaches" or "models," but to argue for a synthesis of them 
with the rhetorical approach or model. On the other band, he argues that the 



Book Reviews / Compes rendus 199 

logical account of relevance and dialectical conceptions of fallacy are inad-
equate, and he proposes rhetoric-based accounts of both as superior. These 
twin proposals sit uneasily together. In the end, he argues for the addition of 
audience relevance to premise and topical relevance, but that is not a replace-
ment for the allegedly inadequate theories of premise relevance. And he argues 
for a fallacy theory that allows for process fallacies as well as product and 
procedure fallacies, but that is not a replacement for the allegedly inadequate 
product and procedure accounts of fallacies. In both instances, the rhetorical 
perspective adds a further dimension, but it doesn't supplant the other theo-
ries. This is not to say that Tindale's initial criticisms were mistaken. In fact 
they seem to me plausible quite independently of his later discussions of a 
rhetorical perspective on these issues. But there is a difference between say-
ing that a theory is wrong and that it is incomplete. Which is it? 

My second point may be related to the first one. Nowhere does Tindale 
discuss what he means by a "model" of argument (or argumentation). He 
seems to consider the concept unproblematic. Yet in the book he uses inter-
changeably with 'model' other terms that on the face of it are not on a par 
with it. He speaks of logical, dialectical and rhetorical "perspectives" on, and 
"approaches" to argumentation, and sometimes he speaks of "rhetorical argu-
mentation," of the logical "structure" of argumentation, and of "dialectical 
argumentation." Maybe these are just different ways of saying the same thing, 
but the eclecticism marks the absence of an attempt to specify carefully the 
nature of the three things being contrasted, and "synthesized," which to my 
mind is a significant omission. For instance, in Chapter 3 Tindale starts talk-
ing about rhetorical argumentation as if it were a type of argumentation in-
stead of an aspect of or a perspective on argumentation. He may get this way 
of talking from Perelman, who makes a distinction between demonstration 
and argumentation. The latter is "rhetorical." But Perelman's "demonstration 
vs. rhetoric!argumentation"classification does not map neatly onto Tindale's 
"logical perspective vs. dialectical perspective vs. rhetorical perspective." (It 
won't do to reply that the theory itself calls for an accommodation with vague-
ness. Certainly vagueness is to be accommodated where it is appropriate or 
unavoidable. The formulation of theory, however, requires precision.) So what, 
precisely, are these three things? 

Third and fourth, I think that Tindale's rhetorically-based concepts of rel-
evance and acceptability need work. Consider relevance first. Imagine the 
following exchange taking place, in which Ann and Bill are discussing a lake 
they lease for their private enjoyment and fishing: 

Ann: I think we should stock more trout in our lake than we do now. 

Bill: Really? 
Ann: Yes. You know, that old truck of yours isn't going to last much 

longer if you keep driving it on the bad roads around our lake. 
Bill: I suppose you're right. ... Does that have anything to do with 

stocking more trout? 



200 Informal Logic 

It seems that on Tindale's account of audience relevance, Ann's comment 
about the truck is relevant to her claim about the need to stock more trout, for 
it takes into consideration the environment of the audience (Bill) and is con-
structed so that it relates to its features, it is not inconsistent with any of the 
facts made manifest there, and it can generally be understood in terms of what 
is already available to the audience all specified relevance conditions. Tindale 
may say that to be relevant as support for a claim, information also has to have 
"contextual effect." That is (as noted above), it must allow a conclusion to be 
derived, provide evidence to strengthen an assumption, or contradict an exist-
ing assumption. That seems right, and those conditions would rule Ann's 
truck comment irrelevant to her trout-stocking plea, but here we have moved 
away from features of the cognitive environment and on to questions about 
what, consistent with that environment, is probative. How does the rhetorical 
model help to solve the latter problem? 

Here is another question about Tindale's account of relevance. He says 
that if a premise or argument has contextual effect, then it is relevant to the 
audience (109). That seems to be a descriptive (causa!), not a normative, 
account of relevance. If relevance is a causal concept, then it would make 
sense to consider it to have degrees, as Tindale does. An argumentative inter-
vention can have more or less contextual effect. However, Tindale also wants 
to be able to say that people can be mistaken in their judgements of what is 
relevant not because they miscalculate the effects of offered premises on the 
audiences of their arguments, but because the premises are beside the point. 
Otherwise he could not insist, as he does, that a straw man rejoinder can be 
logically relevant, but is rhetorically irrelevant. One might expect Tindale to 
appeal here to the standards of the universal audience as grounds for norma-
tive relevance judgements, but he doesn't. So how is this tension between the 
normative and descriptive accounts of relevance to be resolved? 

Mention of the universal audience brings me to a question about Tindale's 
rhetorical account of acceptability.l find the idea of the cognitive environment 
of the particular audience an extremely useful way to identify what can be 
expected to be acceptable to the audience a significant and valuable innova-
tion. But I have trouble understanding how the universal audience constructed 
out of the particular audience adds anything beyond the arguer's own sense of 
what it would be reasonable for that audience to accept in that cognitive envi-
romnent. Tindale appeals to the notion of universalizability (Kant's? R.M. Hare's? 
he doesn 't say). For example, he suggests that the deployment of fallacies is 
unacceptable because we could not universalize prescribing their use. He also 
suggests we should not use claims we believe to be false because we could 
not universalize the recommendation to do so. Presumably we cannot 
universalize commending an improper appeal to authority, or the use ofmisin-
formation. But why not? If the answer is that we would not want someone 
else to appeal improperly to authorities, or to offer us misinformation, when 



Book Reviews / Compes rendus 201 

they are offering arguments to us, the question still comes back why not? 
What's wrong with doing so? Why ought we to object to it? This is Hegel's 
old objection to Kant, but it remains pertinent. We seem to have to have made 
a prior moral/logical/rhetorical judgement that the behaviour is objectionable in 
order to rule that it cannot be universalized. So, what is the authority for a 
judgement that a particular property of the actual audience is "reasonable" 
(and so will characterize the universal audience constructed from it) and that 
another of its properties is objectionable (and so is to be excluded from the 
characterization of that universal audience)? 

If these critical questions give the impression that there are insuperable 
problems in this book, or that this reviewer is fundamentally unhappy with it, 
let me end by correcting that impression, for nothing could be further from 
the truth. I believe that Tindale succeeds in making his case that a rhetorical 
perspective on argument is both necessary and valuable. He shows, I think, 
that the analysis of the "logic" of particular arguments and of the dialectical 
rules, roles and relations appropriate to them must be embedded in a rhetorical 
reading, and that in the construction of arguments a sensitivity to the particu-
lar audience is essential. Even for those who might dissent from particulars of 
his case, Tindale has, I believe, more than shifted the burden of proof in 
favour of making the rhetorical dimension a central one in argumentation studies 
by philosophers as it long has been for scholars in speech communication. In 
my opinion this is a major book, a must- read for any serious scholar in the 
informal logic community. 

1. Anthony Blair 
Department of History, Philosophy & Political Science 

University of Windsor 
Windsor, Ontario 

Canada N9B 3P4 
tblair@uwindsor.ca