From the Editors 

The articles in this volume focus on 
argumentation from the standpoint of the 
discipline of rhetoric. We invited Joseph 
Wenzel to put together a special issue on 
informal logic and rhetoric because he is 
perfectly situated to do so, as a senior 
scholar in the sJ.lb-field of speech commu-
nication that deals with argumentation and 
rhetoric, and as one of the people from 
his discipline who over the years has fol-
lowed closely the developing work on 
informal logic which has been carried out 
primarily by philosophers. Wenzel has 
assembled an interesting mix of articles 
and we refer you to his Introduction (pp. 
1-4) where you will find an excellent back-
ground and overview. 

We wanted to publish an issue on 
rhetoric because in our opinion a wall of 
ignorance and misunderstanding continues 
to stand between the logicians and 
the rhetoricians. Our impression is that 
rhetoricians have been somewhat more 

inclined to scale that wall than have 
logicians. The former have tended, as a 
group-partly due to Professor Wenzel's 
influence-to keep abreast of what is 
happening in informal logic. We doubt that 
the converse can be said of informal 
logicians, whose theoretical, practical and 
pedagogical work tends to remain largely 
ignorant of the robust body of research 
on argumentation that has taken place in 
the rhetoric and speech communication 
communities. Can it be that many of us, 
too many of us, are still bewitched by 
Plato's distrust of rhetoric? Our hope is 
that these papers will pique the interest of 
logicians and will cause a few more of 
them to scale the wall. Perhaps we can 
begin to dismantle it. 

Elsewhere in this issue we have three 
book reviews selected by our book review 
editor, Jonathan Adler. We plan to keep 
publishing a steady flow of such reviews. 

INFORMAL LOGIC is published with the support and generous financial assistance of the Dean of Arts 
and the University of Windsor, Canada.