Abstract

The issue I address in this paper is the age-old problem of the relationship between logic and rhetoric. More specifically, I ask the question, how do logic and rhetoric differ in their approaches to the study of argumentation? What makes this question timely are the changes that logic has undergone in the last 25 years. In this paper, I develop the idea that an argument is the central event in what I call argumentative space. I present a conception of argumentative space as a subspace within rational space and seek to provide a rough characterization of the main features of argumentative space as understood, on the one hand, by informal logic and, on the other hand, by rhetoric.