H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA -- LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: SOLDATI

 G.: Let us begin with the title itself: arte rettorica or merely rettorica. Which would Soldati have preferred if nobody had required him to look useful to a seminary? S.: The title-page says L’arte rettorica, which already tells us he wants rhetoric not merely as a field but as a teachable craft. G.: Exactly. Arte promises rules, transmission, exercise, and examinability. Rettorica alone might sound too large, too Ciceronian, too unruly, almost as if one were dealing with the whole civil domain of persuasive speech. S.: While arte rettorica says: this can be taught to boys before they become dangerous. G.: Or before they become bishops, which is often the same thing under another description. S.: Then the first distinction is between rhetoric as object and rhetoric as practice. G.: More sharply: between rhetoric as theory of effective speech and the art of rhetoric as the pedagogically organised means of producing effective speakers. S.: So Soldati is already institutional. G.: Entirely. He is writing ad uso del Seminario e Collegio Vescovile di Pistoja. That phrase does half the philosophy before the first page is turned. S.: Because it means rhetoric is here under discipline, not merely admired. G.: Yes. This is not rhetoric at large in the forum, but rhetoric filtered through seminary use, approval, utility, and episcopal decorum. S.: Yet the funny thing is that rhetoric under such discipline may still become the liveliest thing in the building. G.: Always. Once one starts teaching tact, insinuation, strategic concession, litotes, meiosis, irony, one is never very far from dangerous civilisation. S.: Which is why you like him. G.: I do. Because Soldati reminds one that what I later call pragmatics had for centuries been housed under rhetoric with considerably more elegance and rather less anxiety. S.: Then the great question is whether pragmatics is merely conversational rhetoric in modern dress. G.: Leech said something very like that, and he was not wholly wrong. The problem is that “merely” does too much work. S.: Because if pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, that is not a diminution but a genealogy. G.: Precisely. The modern analyst likes to think he has discovered inferential surplus in conversation. The rhetorician had already been teaching it to adolescents with ecclesiastical ambitions. S.: Under names like litotes and meiosis rather than scalar implicature and defeasible uptake. G.: Exactly. The old labels are often better because they do not pretend the thing has just been invented. S.: Then why did rhetoric decline in philosophical prestige? G.: Because philosophers are vain and prefer categories that sound less like school exercises and more like late revelation. S.: That is severe. G.: It is fair. Also because rhetoric became associated with ornament, persuasion, and suspected manipulation, whereas logic and later philosophy wanted truth, validity, and a cleaner conscience. S.: Yet ordinary conversation never ceased to depend upon rhetorical competence. G.: Quite. One does not survive socially by syllogism alone. Even the driest Oxford don lives by concession, contrast, understatement, suggestion, strategic omission, and all the old arts the trivium once kept in circulation. S.: Which brings us to the trivium itself. Which is the most trivial of the three? G.: Ah, the dangerous question. Grammar will claim priority because without grammar no sentence stands. Logic will claim dignity because without logic no inference deserves respect. Rhetoric will be called trivial by those who do not understand that the other two are socially helpless without it. S.: So in your view the most trivial is whatever the curriculum pretends can be left till last. G.: Very nearly. In practice, rhetoric is often treated as decorative completion after grammar and logic have done the serious work. But that treatment is itself philosophically trivial. S.: Because rhetoric governs actual uptake. G.: Exactly. Grammar gives form, logic gives discipline, rhetoric gives contact with hearers. If civilisation had begun with logic and stayed there, nobody would ever have been persuaded to build Bologna. S.: Or Oxford. G.: Still less Oxford. Oxford is a rhetorical settlement pretending to be a logical one. S.: That is almost too true. G.: Most useful things are. Now, what would have happened if philosophers had started with the quadrivium rather than the trivium? S.: We should have had more astronomers with bad tempers and fewer lawyers with style. G.: A good beginning. More seriously, if arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy had formed the first habits of mind before grammar, logic, and rhetoric, civilisation would have tilted toward structure before utterance. S.: Meaning that number, proportion, and order would precede speech, argument, and persuasion. G.: Yes. The consequences would have been immense. Bologna might have become less a university of jurists and more a university of calculators. Oxford might have had fewer sermons and more instruments. S.: And fewer essays. G.: A loss to everyone except the essay-writers. More deeply, if the quadrivial disciplines came first, one might learn harmony before disagreement, proportion before disputation, celestial order before civic speech. S.: Which sounds attractive until one remembers that civilisation is mostly disagreement about proportion expressed in bad prose. G.: Excellent. That is why the trivium came first. Humans need words before they need stars, or at least they need words to argue about the stars. S.: So the educational order is not arbitrary. Speech precedes number in social necessity. G.: Precisely. The quadrivium may promise a higher serenity, but the trivium deals with immediate human conditions: how to speak, how to argue, how to persuade, how not to be laughed out of court. S.: Soldati would approve. G.: Entirely. Arte rettorica is for boys who must soon speak to persons, not merely to ratios. S.: Yet some scholastics would say the quadrivium disciplines the mind more rigorously. G.: Perhaps. But rigor without address is poor civilisation. One may have perfect geometry and still fail to tell one’s hearer what one means, or worse, succeed only accidentally. S.: So rhetoric remains the least trivial of the trivium in practical life. G.: I should say so. Grammar is indispensable, logic is honourable, but rhetoric is where social intelligence enters as method rather than as accident. S.: That is very close to saying pragmatics is rhetoric cleaned up for modern analysis. G.: Cleaned up, reduced, re-labelled, and made slightly ashamed of its own ancestry. S.: Why ashamed? G.: Because modern philosophers fear persuasion. They would rather speak of inference, uptake, recognition of intention, maxims, calculability. All of which is fine, but much of it is simply rhetoric under anaesthesia. S.: Soldati, by contrast, has no shame about tact, insinuation, strategic concession. G.: None at all. He teaches them as the substance of effective discourse. And that is one reason he matters. He reminds us that the between-the-lines life of utterance is not a late discovery but a long pedagogical practice. S.: Then arte rettorica is perhaps the more honest title. G.: Yes. It admits that meaning between the lines must be made, not merely noticed. There is craft in it. S.: Whereas rhetoric as pure noun might sound too much like a theoretical container. G.: Or too much like a vice. “Rhetoric” in modern English often means empty public style, inflation, insincerity. “The art of rhetoric” sounds older, narrower, and more teachable. S.: So Soldati’s title already protects him against modern contempt. G.: In part, yes. Though not against all of it. There are still those who hear rhetoric and think only of flourish. S.: Which is exactly what your own examples of “He is a fine fellow” are meant to resist. The sentence does not merely decorate criticism; it performs it through irony. G.: Exactly. It is not ornament on top of content. The content itself is inseparable from the rhetorical manner in which it is conveyed. S.: That sounds like Soldati’s whole point. G.: Very much so. And if one wanted to scandalise the cleaner analysts, one might say that conversational implicature is often just rhetoric happening under ordinary cooperative conditions. S.: The phrase “ordinary cooperative conditions” does a lot of salvage work there. G.: It does. It saves rhetoric from the accusation of being necessarily manipulative. In ordinary conversation, rhetorical devices work not merely because one wants to win, but because shared expectations allow meaning to be shaped delicately rather than bluntly. S.: So litotes, meiosis, strategic concession, “but,” irony, understatement, all rely on reason-governed expectations. G.: Precisely. Which is why they are philosophically tractable. If rhetoric were mere decoration, there would be less to say. But because it works through shared norms of relevance, sufficiency, contrast, and recognisability, it belongs directly to the philosophy of language. S.: Then perhaps the old quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy was always misplaced. G.: Often. The real quarrel should have been between good rhetoric and bad metaphysics, or between honest rhetoric and manipulative power. Philosophy itself cannot escape rhetoric without becoming unintelligible. S.: Yet it has often tried. G.: And usually by becoming unreadable, which is a form of revenge upon the public. S.: Bologna, then. If the quadrivium had come first there, would law have developed differently? G.: Undoubtedly. Roman law lives by distinctions carried in language. Its subtleties require grammar and rhetoric as much as logic. A quadrivially trained first formation might have made Bologna less verbal, less juridical, more formal in the wrong sense. S.: So no glossators, or at least worse ones. G.: Worse ones, certainly. A jurist without rhetoric is a filing cabinet with Latin endings. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford would have become still more abstractly mathematical before learning how to sermonise. One shudders to imagine an Oxford where ratio precedes disputatio absolutely. S.: There would still have been sermons, but perhaps less style in them. G.: Much less. Anglican civilisation depends upon delayed argument ornamented by remembered rhetoric. Take away the trivium and you damage the whole ecclesiastical prose tradition. S.: So civilisation survives because boys learn to decline nouns and detect irony before they learn harmonics. G.: In broad outline, yes. One must know how to say before one can know how to count elegantly. S.: Yet some Greeks might object. G.: Greeks object to everything in educational order, which is why they remain useful. S.: Then what is the most trivial discipline of the trivium in your actual ranking? G.: If forced, I should say grammar is treated as the most trivial only because it is taken for granted once one has it. In reality, rhetoric is often falsely judged trivial because it is associated with social polish. Logic preserves its prestige because moderns are frightened of appearing loose. S.: So the answer depends on whether one asks what is most despised or what is least necessary. G.: Exactly. Most despised, rhetoric. Least dispensable in actual human affairs, also rhetoric. Most easily forgotten because absorbed into habit, grammar. Most capable of self-advertised dignity, logic. S.: A very unfair ranking. G.: Which is why it is accurate. Now, Soldati in a Pistoiese seminary. What is he really teaching? S.: Not merely Ciceronian categories, but the disciplined production of clerical intelligibility: how to move a hearer, how to concede without collapsing, how to suggest without vulgarity, how to use form to manage souls. G.: Very good. Rhetoric there is practical theology by linguistic means. S.: Which is another reason pragmatics inherits more from rhetoric than from pure logic. G.: Yes. Everyday talk is not a formal proof environment. It is a field of managed emphasis, selection, veiling, stressing, and arranging. S.: Which again sounds like Soldati. G.: Entirely. He knows that a phrase like “He is a fine fellow” may praise, damn, ironise, excuse, defer, or wound depending on context and shared expectations. S.: So the old rhetorical pedagogy had examples for what you later formalise with implicature. G.: Exactly. It did not formalise in my way, but it understood in practice that saying one thing can, under shared conditions, make another thing reasonably gatherable. S.: Then perhaps the question “arte rettorica or rettorica?” can now be answered. G.: Let us try. S.: Rettorica names the field in its civic and historical breadth. Arte rettorica names the teachable, disciplined, seminario-sized extraction of that field for practical formation. G.: Excellent. And Soldati chooses the latter because he is not writing a history of eloquence but training speakers. S.: Or future priests. G.: Which in Italy often means future speakers first, priests second. S.: A dangerous observation in Pistoia. G.: All the better. Now, if pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, what does modern philosophy add? S.: A thinner but sharper account of why the old devices work: shared rational expectations, inferential routes, recognised intentions, cooperative norms. G.: Exactly. We do not replace rhetoric; we explain some of its ordinary mechanisms under a less ornamental vocabulary. S.: And what does Soldati add back? G.: Memory. He reminds us that practical intelligence in speech was cultivated long before analysts arrived with examples and distinctions. He also reminds us that tact, insinuation, irony, and strategic reduction are arts, not accidents. S.: So perhaps civilisation without the trivium would have had order but no style, proportion but little address, astronomy but bad sermons. G.: And civilisation without rhetoric would have had grammar enough to decline and logic enough to infer, but very little capacity to survive dinner. S.: Which is surely the more serious disaster. G.: By far. Philosophy that cannot survive dinner eventually writes only for itself. S.: Oxford occasionally approached that condition. G.: More than occasionally. Bologna, too, when it forgot that law must persuade as well as classify. S.: Then Soldati is useful not because he is modern, but because he keeps alive the old truth that meaning among persons is an art before it is a theorem. G.: Beautifully put. And that is the nearest thing to a conclusion we shall get before tea. S.: One final question. If the quadrivium had come first, would pragmatics have been delayed? G.: Almost certainly. A civilisation trained first in number and proportion would likely have treated speech as secondary form rather than primary practice. The subtle arts of ordinary implication might have survived socially, but not pedagogically. One would have more geometry and less conversation. S.: Which is another way of saying fewer essays and worse marriages. G.: Precisely. The history of philosophy is often hidden in curriculum design. S.: And the history of civilisation in whether one teaches boys irony before astronomy. G.: That is too good not to be true. S.: Then Soldati, finally? G.: A seminary rhetor who knew that between the lines lies most of what moves human beings, and who would not have been surprised to hear that pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, provided one did not say it as if the discovery were yesterday’s. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Pistoiese, with one Oxford sneer held in reserve.