And from our view these distinctions look like major disagreements and give the impression that all answers to questions are only opinion. That is where the problem between philosophy and rhetoric still resides. Should we view our common questions like the budget process from the logically scientific perspective and attempt to account for all cases, or should we use rhetoric and literary analysis to isolate meaningful units and search for broad, probable themes. It is not as flippant a question as it may, at first, seem. And this is the basic issue in modern rhetoric, how can it become, once again, an integral part of common knowledge, sort of an everywoman's toolkit for making decisions and influencing people.
Rhetoric needs to be more concerned with ethics than it currently is.
Medicine, psychology, and even the hard sciences make some attempt to deal with ethical issues. But rhetoric has for the most part disregarded the problem of ethics in its contemporary incarnation. Yes ethics was important to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but there were many rhetoricians who did not consider it an important issue. However, today's rhetoricians, at least those of the current generation are not concerned with ethics in the way that I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke were even though they follow from these earlier schools. Burke and Richards cried out for a more ethical rhetoric and pluralism, but contemporary rhetoricians have a major problem because they are concerned about ethics and yet they cannot propose an ethical system for what they consider to be a pluralistic society.