![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
The turn toward dialogue during the past 40 years by communication scholars, particularly, interpersonal and organizational communication scholars, has been well documented. More recently, a number of these communication scholars have highlighted the importance of dialogue to public/rhetorical communication. However, to date, dialogue research has not taken hold in a substantial way in rhetoric and argumentation studies. A thesis of this review is that there is a substantial stream of dialogue research within 20th and 21st century rhetorical and argumentation studies that might provide grounds and direction for contemporary dialogue research by rhetoric and argumentation scholars. The goal of the review is to identify key essays in this stream of research as well as to highlight some of the fundamental themes running through these essays.
Notes
1. See, especially, Bakhtin (1981), Buber (1965a, 1970), Gadamer (1982), Habermas (1984), and Levinas (1969, 1998).
2. See also, Anderson et al. (2003), Arnett (2001), Czubaroff (2000), and Hyde and Bineham (2000).
3. See McOmber (1990), Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey (1987), and Simons (1989).
4. See also on this theme the afterward to Anderson, Cissna, and Clune (2003, p. 34).
5. Unlike Arnett et al. (2008), who did a systematic search of all major communication journals, I have less systematically examined essays in rhetoric and argumentation journals and so do not claim that this review covers all relevant essays.
6. The judgment that argument is rhetorical activity goes back to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1964) New Rhetoric, which pointed out that arguments are centrally concerned to gain the adherence of audiences.
7. See on dialogue the following classical essays: Arnett (1981), Johannesen (1971), Poulakos (1974), Stewart (1978), and Tomlinson (1975).
8. See Galati (1969), “A Rhetoric for the Subjectivist in a World of Untruth: The Tasks and Strategy of Sören Kierkegaard,” for an early study of Kierkegaard's rhetorical approach. Galati does not note or discuss dialogic elements in Kierkegaard's work. For current scholarship, see Herrmann (2008).
9. See Natanson (1965b), for reflections on rhetoric and dialectic.
10. See Gilbert(2003), for an excellent overview of scholarship in communication studies on Plato's Phaedrus
11. Barnlund (1962) already hinted at some of these attitudinal distinctions in his classic article, “Toward a meaning-centered philosophy of communication” in which he argues, “any exchange of words is an invasion of the privacy of the listener” and reflects on three orientations. First, in messages that intend to coerce, “meaning is controlled by choosing symbols that so threaten the interpreter that he becomes incapable of, and blind to, alternative meanings.” Second, in messages taking an exploitative approach to the audience, “words are arranged to filter the information, narrow the choices, obscure the consequences, so that only one meaning becomes attractive or appropriate.” Finally, in messages which are “facilitative” “words are used to inform, to enlarge perspective, to deepen sensitivity, to remove external threat, to encourage independence of meaning. The values of the listener are, in the first case, ignored, in the second, subverted, in the third respected.” Barnlund concludes “that only facilitative communication is entirely consistent with the protection and improvement of man's symbolic experience” (p. 204).
12. While rhetoricians seemingly ignored dialogue in the 1980s and 1990s, they were prolific in their work in the area of rhetoric of inquiry. For seminal volumes and essays published, see Cherwitz (1999) and McOmber (1990).
13. On dialogue in the public sphere, see also Arnett (1986, 2001), Hammond, Anderson, and Cissna (2003), and Kim (2008).
14. The entire committee included: D. Ehninger, T.W. Benson, E.E. Ettlich, W.R. Fisher, H.P. Kerr, R.L. Larson, R.E. Nadeau, and L.A. Niles. The other two committees were: the Committee on the Advancement and Refinement of Rhetorical Criticism, and the Committee on the Nature of Rhetorical Invention. For a recent re-engagement by rhetoricians with the proceedings of these conferences, see Porrovecchio (2010).
15. For other essays addressing the topic of rhetorical ontology, see, Campbell (1970) and Wieman (1961).
16. Brown and Keller's (1979) proposal of a Monologue-Dialogue continuum is one way to conceptualize the relation between monological and dialogical rhetorics in a unified rhetorical theory.