Wayne C. Booth Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Buffington

Critical Essay by Robert Buffington

In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent Booth engages the modern mind and its dualisms. It is an exciting book, not in the way that it proceeds—though much expanded, it suffers in several ways from its original lecture format—but in its good news. (p. xxxiv)

Booth does not attempt to establish an epistemology or even, despite the systematic appearance of the book, a systematic rhetoric…. What he attempts is to reestablish as intellectually respectable, roughly under the classical rhetorical heads of ethical proof and emotional proof, some of the other good reasons there are to assent to an argument besides empirical and logical proof: for example, the reason of expert testimony. It has always been a good reason in law, although the meaning of expert has come to be more and more narrowly defined…. (pp. xxxvi-xxxvii)

One of Booth's basic appeals is to our common sense—to what we sense...
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