Rhetorica:
Of the Same Clay
By Gabriel Blanchard
Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honor and dishonor made
Two sister vessels. Here is one.
It makes a goblin of the sun.
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Jenny"
The Twy-formed Ambiguity
The upshot of all this nonsense about “argument isn’t about winning, it’s about uncovering truth” and “it is our duty to practice magnanimity” and “no really, it is our duty to practice magnanimity” is a point about how to argue. Specifically, it has to do with how we lay the foundation of argument.
In a post from our 2024 series Sorting Through Sophistries, we discussed the fallacy known as the “bald assertion.” This denotes those baseless claims for which the asserter offers (and frequently possesses) no actual evidence or reasoning, which he seems to wish to get accepted by sheer loudness or repetition. Obviously anybody would object to that; or would they?
Consider our old friends, Miss B and Mr. A. Miss B is a convinced Catholic, while Mr. A is a devout Presbyterian, and the two decide to hold a debate on the question of whether ordination to ministry, which both their churches practice, is properly a sacrament or not. Will either of them begin by attempting to prove the existence of God? Presumably not. The deity of Christ? Equally unlikely. The inspiration of Scripture? Again, no. Miss B might begin by attempting to prove a Catholic view of the authority of the Church, something that she believes (a) inheres in a different ecclesiastical body than Mr. A accepts, and (b) is much further-reaching than Mr. A’s doctrine states; but neither of the two are likely to try and prove something to the other which they both already accept—not even if they differ in the reasons for accepting it. Why bother?
This is, so to speak, the obverse of which bald assertion is the reverse. What is essential to argument is not that both sides prove everything they say, but only that they begin from premises both parties accept.
Ex Concessu1
Some readers may feel that that was a statement on a level with Warning: Road May Be Wet During Rain. But if social media is anything to go by,2 plenty of people think the first step in a solid argument is shouting “you have to accept X” until the other person either acquiesces or logs off—and this is without even touching on the vast multitude of people who will not only readily tell strangers “your views are Y”, but (more bafflingly still) will become angry at said strangers if they attempt to explain that they don’t believe Y, but R. So it seems the point needs to be made in so many words!
There is, in fact, a form of argument (a fairly potent one, too) that relies entirely on hypothetically accepting an opponent’s views, and then extending them to further logical conclusions. It is called the argument ex concessu, Latin for “from what has been granted.” Its essential structure is something like this:
Alright, let’s suppose that R is true. If R is true, then S logically follows; but S contradicts Q, which is one of the other elements of your view—so you can’t have both R and Q. Which is it?
Provided all the inferences are correct (i.e., S really does both follow from R and contradict Q), this is an extremely compelling form of reasoning, because it appeals only to things the other person already accepts.3 Which is the only way you can convince anybody of anything, really. After all, when was the last time you were persuaded of something based on premises you didn’t accept?
Imagine: A Checklist
As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, imaginative sympathy is required to make our rhetoric effective (whether we mean the rhetoric of conveying ideas to others, or the rhetoric of receiving them from others). This is doubly and trebly true in the use of ex concessu; if you are going to construct a syllogism on your opponent’s ground, so to speak, you need to know the land pretty well in order to avoid sinkholes, R.O.U.S.es, and so forth.
The Church is Catholike, universall, so are all her Actions; All that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concernes mee; for that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too, and engraffed into that body, whereof I am a member.4 ... No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde ...
There is also the question of language. Are you both working with the same definitions of terms? The same connotations? This is trickier than it may seem at first, because while most (if not all) words have a dictionary definition, many have more than one, and the distinctions can be both logically crucial and linguistically subtle. The word superior is a useful example: to call one person “the superior of” another could mean the former is better than the latter somehow, or might mean only that the former is more highly ranked in an organization. And, of course, we all think we know the meanings of words we think we know. Especially when it comes to technical terminology, the uneducated often get things wrong, and most of us are uneducated about a lot of things. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis remarks, “How many scholars know (what I discovered by accident) that when uneducated people say impersonal they sometimes mean incorporeal?”
We would suggest the following list of questions as a good starting point for understanding an opponent’s outlook well enough to find areas of common ground and begin to build ex concessu arguments. Given their view on whatever we’re disputing:
- What kinds of evidence would a view like this need for me to find it reasonable? Does this person believe they have that kind of evidence? If they do think so, why specifically do I not agree? If they don’t, why do they rank evidence differently than I do?
- What good things does that view treat as of paramount importance? What does it treat as comparatively trivial? Why might a person find this hierarchy of duties plausible?
- What problems might a view like that be interested in solving, or what evils or dangers in the world does it identify as especially urgent? Why might someone find this a reasonable way to prioritize problems?
All of these questions, you may notice, bring us back to an assumption we had to go out of our way to make a few weeks back: Most people are normal.
The Wrong Fork
This, incidentally, is where plain old-fashioned good manners come into rhetoric too—if you will, it is the place where we put down Morton’s fork in order to pick up the right dinner fork.5 Unluckily, while there are some fairly broad rules that everybody in our society at least accepts in theory (like not talking with one’s mouth full), a lot of the relevant principles of courtesy vary from region to region and from family to family—even from person to person.
For instance, a lot of Americans dislike formality, often because they associate it with snobbery, discomfort, repression of individual spirit, and confusion about the rules. Those are all pretty rational reasons to dislike formality! But it doesn’t follow that people who do like formality must be snobs who enjoy finding fault with others. Those who enjoy formality often like it because, by establishing publicly-known conventions of how to dress, speak, and behave, it takes the pressure off from deciding all those things down to the tiny details; a “social mask” may silence us sometimes, but it also affords us a kind of social cushion in many inherently uncomfortable circumstances that at least secures us some privacy. And here we see exactly the kind of disagreement where both sides are being equally reasonable, and each one is almost completely unpredictable to the other! The first set of concerns (leading to a dislike of formality) probably spring from a personality that’s bubbling over with creativity and confidence and wants to give those things vent; the second set likely betoken a personality that’s more methodical, not necessarily lacking energy but inclined to spend itself on precision rather than in more obvious ways.
This is only one example of how etiquette—both in the subtler sense of human decency and courtesy, and in the more “external” sense of which fork to use—can impinge on rhetoric. But it is high time we turned to the sub-genres of rhetoric, and bade farewell to these meditations on the rhetorical mindset. We do so with one final explicit rule of good manners, one of the most important ones: It is crucial to remember that sometimes, people simply don’t want to debate.
1This phrase may be pronounced according to English rules (ĕks køn-sĕs-û) or those of Ecclesiastical Latin (ĕks køn-chĕs-û); the pronunciation of Classical Latin (āks køn-kĕs-sû) would feel out of place to the present writer, but is not in any meaningful sense wrong.
2To be fair to the human race, perhaps social media isn’t anything to go by regarding this issue. To be even fairer to the human race, we are the ones who created social media and its contents.
3A rather mean-spirited meme has made the rounds over the last few years, depicting a haughty-looking young man saying something in the form: “You should [behave a certain way] because [reason]. No, I don’t accept [reason] and have nothing but contempt for it—so yeah, this argument wouldn’t work on me but maybe if I use it on you, you’ll do what I want.” Cynicism of that kind does of course exist, and obviously cynicism as such does not really merit our respect. The snag is, the most important question about the claim “You should [behave a certain way] because [reason]” is simply, Is that true? The objection If I accept this, that annoying guy will get his way about something may feel urgent, but it really isn’t relevant to that chief question, is it now? If he is wrong about matter of fact, then his error must be dismissed even if he is the humblest, most pleasant person we’ve ever met; if he is correct, then no amount of ego can undo that, any more than the ego of a meteorologist could turn a blizzard into sunshine.
4Today, member normally means “individual belonging to some group or institution,” often with a suggestion of equal rights with other members. This was neither the meaning nor the connotation of the term when Donne was writing; originally, member meant “body-part, limb, organ”—hence the meaning of dismemberment—and thus, while it certainly had the same sense of belonging, had a different and much more vivid background, with a tendency to accent uniqueness and variety rather than equality.
5Those who are interested in formal etiquette as a subject (and it can be quite an interesting one) are encouraged to consult the works of Judith Martin, particularly Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior and Miss Manners’ Guide to the Turn of the Millennium. Those who wish very literally to know which fork to use are advised to eye their hostess surreptitiously, or—if this is not possible, perhaps due to her being cunningly hidden behind a potted begonia or something of that sort—that utensils for all courses are generally laid on the table outside-to-in (the fork furthest from the plate is used first, then the next one in, etc.)
Gabriel Blanchard admits nothing.
If you’ve just come upon our series on Rhetoric, and would like to start from the beginning, you can read the series’ “preface” here and its “table of contents” here, followed by a treatment of the three base virtues it requires, and the virtue of magnanimity that then follows. Next week, we shall be discussing the three temporal divisions of rhetoric (and why it is time that determines the divisions)—so stay tuned!
Published on 20th March, 2025. Page image of the Californian coastline at Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco; photo by Frank Schulenberg, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (source).
