Vernacular dialogue and the rhetoricality of public opinion

Abstract

Discussions of public opinion are dominated by visions that regard it as a rational ideal or as an objective datum. The evident differences between these interpretations reflect distinct ideologies and disparate scholarly and research interests. Without gainsaying their consequences, attention to these differences has muffled their shared illumination of public opinion as a product of discourse. Even when they give discourse thematic priority, rhetorical norms become buried amidst the rationalism of ideal communication or the instrumentalism of degenerate manipulation. Neither characterization shows satisfactory empirical fidelity to the complex process whereby public opinion is formed and communicated because neither accounts for the dialogical engagements by which an active populace participates in an issue's development; the contours of the public sphere that color their levels of awareness, perception, and participation; the influence on opinion formation of sharing views with one another; and the terms of expression warranting the inference that a public has formed and has a dominant opinion. This essay develops a rhetorical model that emphasizes the discursive endeavors of those whose symbolic formations in everyday “talk,” or vernacular rhetoric, authorize public acts and conduct taken in their name.

Key words:

• Public opinion
• Vernacular Rhetoric
• Rhetorical Dialogue