Rhetoric of Argumentation as a Science of the Approximate

Rhetoric of Argumentation as a Science of the Approximate Rhetoric is a science of the approximate. Its most basic normative paradigm, /fallacies vs sound arguments/, appears to be founded on a blurred and controversial set of inconsistent criteria. Treatises of rhetoric usually focus almost exclusively on deductive (enthymematic) and inductive mechanisms and tend to disregard a number of quite frequent (and socio-historically significant) ways of argumenting which resist any kind of formalisation: the apagogical reasoning, abduction (or inference to the best explanation), certain types of provisional and conjectural reasonings, counterfactuals, analogical reasoning.