He explains each by looking at what he calls the different elements of the composing process: audience, writer, language and reality.
- Truth: “Classical Rhetoric considers truth to be located in the rational operation of the mind, Positivist Rhetoric in the correct perception of sense impressions, and Neo-Platonic Rhetoric within the individual, attainable only through an internal apprehension. In each case Knowledge is a commodity situated in a permanent location, a repository to which the individual goes to be enlightened. For the New Rhetoric, knowledge is not simply a static entity available for retrieval. Truth is dynamic and dialectical, the result of a process involving the interaction of opposing elements” (773-4).
- Language: “For Neo-Aristotelians, Positivist, and Neo-Platonists, truth exists prior to language so that the difficulty of the writer or speaker is to find the appropriate words to communicate knowledge. For the New Rhetoric truth is impossible without language since it is language that embodies and generates truth” (774).
- Audience: Current-Traditional Rhetoric demands that the audience be as ‘objective’ as the writer…For Neo-Platonic Rhetoric the audience is a check to the false note of the inauthentic and helps to detect error, but it is not involved in the actual discovery of truth…Neo-Aristotelians take the audience serious as a force to be considered…[but] Classical Rhetoric embodies rational structures, and the concern for audience is only a concession to the imperfections of human nature. In the New Rhetoric the message arises out of the interaction of the writer, language, reality, and the audience” (775).
- Writer: “In Current-Traditional Rhetoric the writer must efface himself; stated differently, the writer must focus on experience in a way that makes possible the discovery of certain kinds of information…In Neo-Platonic Rhetoric the writer is at the center of the rhetorical act, but is finally isolated, cut off from community…Neo-Aristotelian Rhetoric exalts the writer, but circumscribes her effort by its emphasis on the rational – the enthymeme and example. The New rhetoric sees the writer as creator of meaning, a shaper of reality, rather than a passive receptor of the immutably given” (775-6).
*Helpful summaries of Platonic sensory-experienced truth and Aristotelian logic
*Explains common sense realism