INVENTION – COMMON PLACE
The term commonplace corresponds to the Latin locus communis, which translates the Greek topos.
— Often reduced to a place (locus, pl. loci), an inferential common place is an inferential topic, or argumentation scheme.
— A substantive commonplace is an endoxon, a formulaic expression of a common idea. Traditional rhetorical invention specialised in the argumentative use of substantive common places.
1. Chapter heads of reality
According to Aristotle’s Categories (1b 25 sq.; Tricot, p. 5), events and reality are organised according to a basic ontology, whose ultimate components (categories) are:
Person, Action, Time, Place, Manner, Cause or Reason …
This is a Western ontology. Its parameters can vary from author to author.
According to Benveniste (1966, ch. VI), these parameters, which are supposed to reflect reality, are also closely related to language, especially to the system of sentence complementation and to interrogative words:
Category Question
Person focus Who? Peter
Kind of action What? met Paul
Quantity How many times? twice
Place Where? in Washington
Manner How. reluctantly
Medium How? on Paul’s instigation
Purpose, reason Why? to discuss their business
The systematic use of this interrogative grid is a survey method for gathering and organising information about any event.
[Interrogatives] have already been recognised in different languages for different purposes: for speculative purposes, in the Latin of the scholastics: cur?, quomodo?, quando? [why? how? when?]; or for military purposes in German, where the tetralogy Wer? Wo? Wann? Wie? is taught to all military recruits as the framework of information that every scout on a reconnaissance mission must be able to provide and report to his superiors. (Tesnière 1959, p. 194)
It is known as the method: Who? Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? How many? (”Five Ws”)
When applied to a particular field, these parameters correspond to words that have a full lexical meaning. For example, a classic guide to political decision-making includes questions such as:
“Honorable? Will the proposed measure be honorable or embarrassing to us?
See Political Arguments: Two collections and infra, the parameters for humans portraying human beings.
In the Middle Ages, it guided the practice of confessors looking for sin and anxious not to forget any (Robertson & Olson, 2017). We can speak of “inquisitorial” questions [1] , in the sense that an inquisition is defined as an “investigation, methodical, rigorous research” (TLFi, Inquisitoire) . It is a cornerstone of ordinary Western thought.
The same kind of questions also guide moral evaluation, for example an act such as “having carnal intercourse” is evaluated as shameful if it was done “with forbidden persons” (With whom?), or “at the wrong time” (When?) or “in the wrong place” (Where?) (Aristotle, 1383b 15-20; RR p. 279).
2. The rhetorical “technical” method
The distinction between the rhetorical vs the non-rhetorical, i.e. between what is said to belong to “rhetorical technique” and the rest, i.e., all the material elements that are considered “nontechnical”. This distinction is non-intuitive, and a priori, shocking.. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the very beginning of the rhetorical work, the inventio, that is, the research of arguments. The grid of questions is always operative, the radical change is in the way the answers are constructed.
These questions can be answered a posteriori, that is after a full documented investigation into the specifics of the case, the kind of work a police investigator is supposed to do. The inspector does fieldwork, the rhetor does not necessarily. He can answer a priori, on the basis of endoxa, i.e. pre-judged common ideas, “ruling ideas ».
In both cases, the material collected must be presented in a convincing discourse before the court and the public. This is all a matter of language, and the material data must also be convincing. In any case, rhetorical discourse is particularly powerful in creating doubt doubt and shifting the burden of proof.
When the material data are scarce – no witness, no contract, not even a corpse, the case still has to be discussed and this is where rhetoric comes in, in full force, not necessarily to manipulate people, but to clarify the situation, to circumscribe the zones of doubt and avoid, for example, the condemnation of an innocent person.
The undue prominence given to stereotyped ideas in the construction of arguments, leads to the strong and indignant criticism of rhetoric as a fallac ious verbiage, see Ornamental fallacy and infra §5.
Consider the argumentative question “Did Mr. So-and-So commit this horrible murder?”
— The question Who? “Who is the defendant, Mr. So-and-So?”. The subtopos Which country? provides the categorizing information: “Mr. So-and-so is Syldavian”, and likewise for all questions parameterizing the person.
— Endoxon about the Syldavians: The category Syldavian is associated with a set of defining endoxic predicates (“the Syldavians are like this”), each of which has a specific argumentative orientation:
the Syldavians are peaceful / bloodthirsty people.
These predicates provide an endoxic encyclopedic-semantic definition of the Syldavian.
— The instantiation of the endoxic definition supports the conclusion:
the guilt of Mr. So-and-So is probable / improbable.
Other topical questions about the same Mr. So-and-So will provide other, possibly contradictory, orientations that can be used by the opponent.
Such answers can help to organize a previous serious documentation, as well as a bunch of pre-established judgments regardless of the outcome of any detailed investigation of the matter.
3. Portrait based on common places
Each and every one of these questions can itself become the source of sub-questions, and these can be developed considerably, to produce a detailed grid of investigation. The results produced by this technique depend entirely on the method of inquiry used to answer the question; an armchair argument where the ‘research’ is based on common sense and common places will produce commonplace conclusions.
A rich set of detailed questions concerns the key element of rhetorical scenarios, the person (Who?). Quintilian distinguishes the following facets identifying a person in order to compose the a priori rhetorical representation of a person, independent of any concrete information about the situation under discussion.
— “Birth, for people are mostly thought similar in character to their fathers and forefathers, and sometimes derive from their origins motives for living an honorable or dishonorable life” (IO, V, 10, 24 ).
In order to answer the sub-question “Birth?”, the inquiry about the family gathers information such as “he comes from a well-known honorable family”, or “his father was condemned”. The first information provides arguments that allow, for example the application of the rule “like father, like son”, “he is a chip of the old block”, which serves conclusions such as:
He made a mistake, but his family provides all the necessary guarantees; good blood cannot lie, he deserves a second chance.
The second piece of information leads to different conclusions:
The father was convicted, so the son has a heavy inheritance. Bring me more information about him!
The commonplace “the son of the miser is a spendthrift” contradicts the previous one. If the father has a vice, the doxa does not attribute the corresponding virtue to the son, but either the same vice or an opposite vice.
— “Nation?” (ibid.) and “Country?” (id., 25). The answers will introduce national stereotypes: “if he is a Spanish, he is proud, if he is British, he is phlegmatic”. These conclusions, “he is proud, he is phlegmatic”, can be useful for the ensuing discussion, “he is Spanish, so he is proud, so he certainly strongly reacted to this personal attack”.
— “Sex? – for you would more readily believe a charge of robbery with regard to a man, and poisoning with regard to a woman” (ibid.) The prejudiced investigator will follow the commonplace suggestion: in case of poisoning, he will tend to look for a woman. A French book, “The Famous Poisoners” [Les Empoisonneuses Célèbres] is devoted exclusively to famous female poisoners.
— “Age?”, “Education?”, “Bodily constitution? – for beauty is often drawn into an argument for libertinism, and strength for insolence, and the contrary qualities for contrary conduct” (id., 25-26). In other words, “he is handsome, he must be a debauchee” is more probable than “he is handsome, therefore he must live an austere life”. If A is stronger than B, then “A is more aggressive than B” is likely, and therefore, if A and B had a fight, “surely, A attacked B”, in other words, A bears the burden of proof. These conclusions can be reversed by applyingof the paradox of plausibility: “Actually, B must have attacked A, because he knew that the evidence was against A”.
— “Wealth? – for the same charge is not equally credible in reference to a rich and a poor man, in reference to one who is surrounded with relations, friends and clients, and one who is destitute of all such support” (id., 26). The commonplaces associated with social roles and positions come under this heading. An elderly man from the country, sitting on a bench in the setting sun, will certainly give some deep and true thoughts on the present state of affairs, S. Rich and Poor.
— “Natural disposition – for avarice, passionateness, sensibility, cruelty, austerity, and other similar affections of the mind, frequently either cause credit to be given to an accusation or to be withheld from it” (id., 27): “the murder was committed in a peculiarly cruel manner, Peter is cruel, therefore he is the murderer’, S. Circumstances.
— “Manner of living, for it is often a matter of inquiry whether a person is luxurious, or parsimonious, or mean” (ibid.).
The following questions refer to arguments based on desires and motives_ (ibid.):
— “What a person affects, whether he wishes to appear rich or eloquent, just or powerful” (id., 28).
— “Previous doings and sayings” (ibid.), used to find motives and precedents.
— “Commotion of the mind, […] a temporary excitement of the feelings, as anger, or fear” (ibid.), S. Emotions.
— “Designs” (id., 29)
This set of commonplaces underlies portraits such as:
A man in his thirties, Canadian, West Coast, athletic, from a well-known and respected family, has never finished law school, very friendly with his neighbors, lives a conventional life, works in a pharmacy, with limited prospects for the future…
This portrait can be read as an (unsuccessful) literary attempt, as a police form, etc. In any cases, it is a set of premises. Doxa-based argumentation uses pieces of information like “the man is X”, relies on the stereotyped categories attached to X’s, “the X are like this”, and concludes that “the man is like this”, S. Categorization; Definition.
4. The literature of characters
This topology has a derived argumentative function and a direct aesthetic-cognitive function. By providing a technique for the construction of the portrait, it builds a bridge between argumentation and literature through the genre of “characters”, such as those of the Greek Theophrastus. We are no longer in the realm of ethos as autofiction, but in the pure world of the ethopoeia, that is, the fictional representation of a “character”, such as « the Miser” or “the Garrulous person” through his or her conventional-typical manners, discourse and actions. Such decontextualized portraits can be used as authorized and respectable sources about the character they represent and as preparatory exercises for real-life argumentation.
This combination constitutes a coherent educational, aesthetic and cognitive process of controlled writing and thinking, the very antithesis of any automatic writing.
5. “This noxious fertility of common thoughts” (Port-Royal)
When this technique is based solely on linguistic associations and doxa-based knowledge, it makes it possible to quickly compose fairly convincing, true-to-life images of things and events. Critically, these images are justifiably very difficult to refute, as they are the mere expression of shared preconstructed knowledge. The vicious circle between persuader and persuadee is an example of such a situation, S. Persuasion. Such compositions are the antipodes of elaborated characterizations of the individual, as can be developed in psychology or philosophy; they are the perfect stronghold for all positive or negative social prejudices.
Port-Royal has condemned in the strongest terms this « noxious fertility of the common thoughts »:
Now, so far is it from being useful to obtain this sort of abundance, that there is nothing which more corrupting to the judgment, nothing more choking up good seed, than a crowd of noxious weeds; nothing makes a mind more barren of just and weighty thoughts than this noxious fertility of common thoughts. The mind is accustomed to this facility, and no longer makes any effort to find proper, special and natural reasons, which can only be discovered by an attentive consideration of the subject. (Arnauld, Nicole, [1662], III, XVII; p. 235)