According to Aristotle, rhetoric is ‘the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion’. In today’s parlance, the term is often used pejoratively, connoting an obfuscation of truth. This would come as no surprise to Aristotle, whose treatise on the topic, Rhetorica, demonstrated an acute awareness of the dangers posed by the adroit manipulation of the means of persuasion for dubious ends.
Aristotle identified three appeals essential to effective persuasion: logos, pathos and ethos. Ethos is persuasion based on the character and credentials of the communicator; logos is the appeal to reason; and pathos appeals to emotion and passion. Lesser minds than Aristotle are alive to the power of these appeals, as much a part of the salesman’s or motivational speaker’s lexicon today as they were of the classical ‘rhetor’s’. Perhaps in no profession, however, is mastery of the means of persuasion the prerequisite for success that it is for the barrister. It is a frequent criticism of our adversarial legal system that the truth will not always emerge from a contest in which, as Robert Frost lamented, the ‘jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer’.
Secrets of the Jury Room: Inside the black box of criminal justice In Australia by Malcolm Knox
Random House, $32.95 pb, 374 pp
The Gentle Art of Persuasion: How to argue effectively by Chester Porter
Random House, $32.95 hb, 235 pp
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