Dialectic

Abstract

Dialectic is the use of the question and answer method in the pursuit of truth, or logical argumentation aiming at victory in pursuit of truth rather than at testing of validity of inferences, which is the province of logic. Nor is dialectic rhetoric aimed at persuasion, without the give and take of intellectual combat of opponents. To be sure, Plato’s dialectic is sometimes argument with minimal use of an opponent; however, the dialectic of the schools up to the time of Swift and beyond was not modelled on Plato’s dialectic but on Aristotle’s, which is nothing if not combative. Dialectic is neither logic nor rhetoric, although it uses the one and is used by the other, and its function and theirs are sometimes identical. This blurring of the distinctions of the three is only apparent; their differences are real and undeniable in spite of a tendency in literary criticism to overlook the differences. The widespread rhetorical analysis of literary works in the last three decades, for example, has often appropriated dialectic to serve its ends. Dryden’s poems have been described in the name of classical rhetoric as verbal battles against opponents in which he ‘answers objections, offers evidence, and appeals to the “old rule of logic” ‘ and in which he offers ‘a formal and logical argument, more like a public debate than a conversation’.¹ This concern with public argumentation is the province of dialectic far more than of rhetoric. Of late, rhetorical analyses of literature have rather unhistorically enlisted dialectic under the banner of rhetoric, although dialectic traditionally had a larger banner of its own.