Harmony and the composite audience

Pluralism and the audience is at the heart of Perelman’s theory of argumentation. In this presentation, I will discuss my current work on address of composite audiences as pluralistic rhetoric: speech that account for diverging interests, attitudes and beliefs among hearers. I follow some of the implications of combining arguments, ideas and reasons addressing several different people within a composition. Speakers doing so are advertent to diversity among their hearers, a theoretically important attitude as it implies interdependence between people and a mutuality of issues. The way the difference of arguments interact in argumentation gives address of composite audiences a certain harmonic content, and it may rely on implicit compromises or incompatible reasons for success. This has implications for argument evaluation, as the efficacy-validity pair of Perelman’s theory may need to be supplemented with considerations of how address implicitly negotiates the differences within a composite audience.

About Tommy Bruhn

Tommy Bruhn is a postdoctoral research fellow in rhetoric at the department of Communication and Media, Lund University. His research interests concern pluralism, dialogue and negotiation, and political popular culture.