Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism

Rhetoric and Employment Relations

“…It therefore stands opposed to the essentialism of Platonism, contending that its constituency, the world of human affairs, is not capable of yielding absolute truth. This can be seen in the Sophist Protagoras' view of not assuming only one side to an issue (Mailloux 1995), through Toulmin's (1958) concern with modality in argument, Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's (1969) notion of the universal audience and Billig's (1996) restatement of Protagoras in the form of the logoi and antilogoi.…”

Pragmatism and International Relations

“…This epistemological theme reappears in the works of Schiller (1929) and Fish (1989). Mailloux (1995:21) has recently baptized scholars converging on this theme as rhetorical pragmatists. Does this rhetorical pragmatism have any relevance for us doing IR today?…”

F.C.S. Schiller’s Pragmatist Philosophy of History

“…Referencing Mailloux here again, perhaps it begins at least sometimes, in part, in individual perspective and is then subsequently corroborated in social perspectives because "Truth-claims are relative to persons, and different persons might thus understandably make different arguments about the same topic." 54 Schiller argued, "The results of our past thought enter into and transform our immediate perceptions and render them more adequate as guides to action. "55 Again, history is always in a state of evolution along a continuum in which it itself sometimes changes during this process, and this again also means that history can neither be captured nor recorded completely; in its entirety, or wholly accurately.…”