Rhetoric

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87 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Rhetoric. They span 61 subdomains — sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Abstraction	Subdomain	Description
Accismus	—	Accismus is a recurring rhetoric, social behavior identity in which a speaker or actor feigns refusal of something genuinely desired, often to display modesty or irony.
Ad Baculum (Appeal to Force)	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	The fallacy of securing acceptance of a claim by threatening the listener rather than giving reasons bearing on its truth — a relevance error in which a payoff-altering signal is substituted for a truth-bearing one, so compliant assent and warranted belief come apart.
Ad Hominem	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	Reject or discredit a claim by substituting an attack on its source — character, motives, circumstances, inconsistency, or affiliation — for evaluation of the claim and its evidence.
Ad Misericordiam (Appeal to Pity)	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	Win acceptance of a claim by evoking sympathy or pity rather than supplying evidence, substituting an affective shift in the audience for epistemic support on a proposition that is independent of the speaker's circumstances.
Ad Nauseam (Argument from Repetition)	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	Diagnose the fallacy of treating a claim as established by bare repetition, where frequency raises felt credibility through processing fluency while adding zero new evidential warrant.
Ad Populum (Appeal to the People)	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	Name the fallacy of treating a claim as established by its popularity, and expose the defect with one test — did the believers independently weigh the same evidence, or inherit the belief through a social channel? — that separates warranted aggregation from an influence cascade wearing the same clothes.
Ad Verecundiam (Appeal to Authority)	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	The informal fallacy of treating a claim as established by an authority's credential under conditions where the citation carries no evidential weight — the credential being a signal that load-bearing conditions (domain competence, evidence access, disinterest, convergence) hold, used as though it guaranteed what it only heuristically suggests.
Antithesis	Figures of Speech	Sharpen a contrast by fusing two primitives — parallel grammatical form and opposed content — so a matched syntactic frame delivers the opposition at a controlled, audible beat.
Apologia	Defense Discourse	Analyze or build a defense of impugned conduct as a combination of four strategy primitives — denial, bolstering, differentiation, transcendence — where denial and transcendence are mutually exclusive, so mixing them produces an incoherent, self-damaging apologia.
Apostrophe (figure of speech)	—	A rhetorical turn in which a speaker breaks from the current audience to address an absent person, abstract idea or inanimate entity directly.
Appeal to consequences	Argumentation Theory	The fallacy of treating a proposition as true or false because accepting it would have desirable or undesirable consequences.
Appeal to probability	ArgumentationInformal and Probabilistic Fallacies	Diagnose an argument that promotes mere possibility or nonzero probability into probability, inevitability, or actuality without the quantitative evidence or modal premise needed for that stronger conclusion.
Asyndeton	Figures of Syntax and Coordination	A rhetorical construction that deliberately omits conjunctions between coordinated words or clauses to alter rhythm, emphasis, or memorability.
Bulverism	Motive Substitution Fallacies	Assume an opponent's conclusion is false, then explain the psychological or sociological cause of their 'error' — substituting a genetic account of the belief for the logical evaluation that was owed.
Catachresis	TropesFigures of Speech	Markedly nonconventional application of a word or phrase, whether a semantic misuse or a deliberately strained rhetorical figure.
Cherry Picking	Evidence Evaluation and Fallacies	Selectively presenting confirming evidence while suppressing disconfirming evidence from the same available population, so the offered sample gives an impression the full distribution would not support — locating the dishonesty in the selection process, not the individual data points.
Chiasmus	Figure of Speech	State two elements in one order and then restate them with their roles swapped (A-B, then B-A) across a pivot, so the crossed inversion silently asserts that the relation runs both ways.
Chronological Snobbery	Argumentation Fallacies	The fallacy of dismissing a belief solely because it is old — substituting a temporal fact for a content-specific reason — corrected by Lewis's question of whether the view was actually refuted or merely fell out of fashion, with an age-as-credit mirror in appeal to tradition.
Circular Reasoning	Informal Fallacy	Diagnose an argument whose conclusion already appears among its premises by tracing its justification graph for a cycle that never touches a node the audience grants independently.
Commonplace book	Loci CommunesRenaissance Humanist Pedagogy	A personal, retrievable collection of selected passages and notes assembled for later use rather than chronological self-narration.
Complex Question	Fallacies of Interrogation	Expose a question that smuggles a contested claim in as its presupposition, so every direct answer silently ratifies the claim and the only sound reply is to refuse the frame.
Concession	Argumentation	Grant a peripheral or indefensible part of the opposing case while continuing to contest the rest, purchasing credibility through costly-looking admission and, if the granted claim was not load-bearing, harvesting narrowing, burden-shift, and board-clearing at once.
Courtier's reply	ArgumentationInformal Fallacies	The courtier's reply is a type of informal fallacy, coined by American biologist PZ Myers, in which a respondent to criticism claims that the critic lacks sufficient knowledge, credentials, or training to pose any sort of criticism whatsoever.
Digression	Discourse StructureLiterary Composition	A digression is a bounded turn from a discourse line into distinguishable material before that line recognizably resumes.
Dispositio	Classical Canons	Arrange selected rhetorical material in an order fitted to the case, audience, and persuasive work of each part.
Emotive Conjugation	Evaluative Language	Emotive conjugation grades descriptions of comparable conduct from flattering self-language to disparaging other-language across person-positioned clauses.
Epanodos	Figures of SpeechClassical Rhetoric	Epanodos is a figure of speech used when the same word or two similar words are repeated within a passage of text.
Etymological fallacy	Argumentation	Treat a word's historical origin as binding on its present meaning, mistaking a fact about language history for a fact about how today's speakers actually use the word.
Fallacy of Accident	Informal Fallacies	The inferential mistake of applying a general rule mechanically to a case that satisfies its terms but lies outside its intended scope — treating a defeasible generalisation, carrying an implicit ceteris paribus clause, as an exceptionless universal.
Fallacy of Composition	Informal Fallacies	Infer that a predicate established for one or all parts must hold of the whole they form, without a warranted preservation rule across aggregation, interaction, scale, configuration, or shared constraints.
Fallacy of Division	Informal Fallacies	Catch the inferential error of attributing a property true of a whole to each of its parts, by testing whether the predicate is one a part can hold in isolation or one that exists only in the aggregation, configuration, or interaction of parts.
False Equivalence	Informal Fallacies and Rhetoric	The fallacy of treating two things as comparably weighted on the dimension a judgment turns on, when they in fact differ by an order of magnitude or by kind — by highlighting a genuine shared feature and suppressing the difference that actually controls.
False Precision	Quantitative Argument and Measurement Communication	The measurement-communication fallacy of expressing a quantity with more significant figures or tighter bounds than the underlying evidence supports — a mismatch between the form of the claim and its warrant, read by audiences as unearned precision of knowledge.
Forensic Rhetoric	Classical Rhetoric Genres	The Aristotelian speech genre whose subject is past action under judgment — what happened, who is responsible, what remedy follows — fixed by a five-element apparatus (backward time orientation, judging audience, rules of evidence, explanation and exculpation topoi, verdict-form output) that recurs across every institutionalized judgment forum.
Genetic Fallacy	Argumentation Fallacies	Judge a claim, practice, object, or idea by source or origin information as though it settled present truth, validity, or merit, replacing the evaluation that is owed with an origin story not independently connected to the relevant criterion.
Guilt by Association	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	Discredit a claim by the disreputable company it keeps — treating shared supporters, origins, or venues as a verdict on content — a relevance failure that lets no truth-value flow along co-occurrence edges without an independent causal or evidential link.
Hendiadys	Figures of SpeechFigures of Syntax	A rhetorical construction that presents one semantically dependent idea as two expressions joined in apparent coordination.
Hypotyposis	—	A rhetorical figure that renders a scene so vivid, animated and immediate that an audience seems to witness it.
Hypozeuxis	Figures of Speech	A rhetorical sequence in which every clause carries its own explicit subject and predicate.
Invention (Rhetorical Canon)	Classical Rhetorical Canons	Systematically canvass the arguments available in a case by visiting a fixed catalogue of topoi in turn, treating coverage of that space — not the quality of any one argument — as the standard of adequacy, before any choice of what to advance begins.
Invitational rhetoric	Rhetorical Theory	A rhetorical theory seeking mutual understanding through equality, immanent value and self-determination rather than aiming primarily to change the audience.
Irrelevant conclusion	Informal Fallacies	Prove a sound argument for a proposition that is not the one at issue, then treat it as settling the contested claim — a relevance failure caught by restating the question before grading the answer.
Isocolon	Figures of SpeechVerbal Composition	A rhetorical scheme that balances the length of two or more syntactically parallel verbal members.
Kairotic Window	Classical Rhetorical Concepts	Treat effectiveness as the coincidence of a fixed message with a bounded interval of audience receptivity (kairos, not clock-time), so an act delivered outside the window is premature or stale and cannot be rescued by improving its content.
Kettle logic	Defensive Argumentation	A defensive pattern in which an arguer offers several mutually contradictory defenses at once — each sufficient alone but jointly self-undermining — so the scatter is itself evidence that none is relied upon and the aim is deflection by volume, not vindication.
Lapalissade	HumorFigures of Speech	A lapalissade is an obvious truth—i.e. a truism or tautology—which produces a comical effect.
Litotes	Figures of Speech	Assert something by negating its contrary — 'not bad' for good, 'no small feat' for a substantial achievement — so the gap between the stated-weak negation and the conveyed-strong meaning does the work, typically intensifying under a culturally trained convention the audience must share.
Logos	Aristotelian Proofs	Persuade through the apparent rational structure of an argument — premises, evidence, and inferential steps — so an audience reads the force as grounded in reasoning rather than in the speaker's character or its own emotion.
Memory (Rhetorical Canon)	Classical Canons	The fourth classical rhetorical canon: the orator's living, indexed archive of arguments, examples, and passages — acquired before performance, organized for retrieval, and reachable under the pressure of a live occasion, not rote recall of a fixed script.
Metanoia (rhetoric)	—	A rhetorical self-correction that retracts or qualifies a just-made expression and replaces it with a stronger, weaker or more precise one.
Middle Ground Fallacy	Informal Logic and Fallacy Taxonomy	Detect the error of concluding the truth must lie between two opposed positions merely because they are opposed — substituting a positional operation for an evidential one — by asking whether the midpoint keeps its credibility once one position is shown unsupported.
Mistakes were made	Political RhetoricEvasive Language	"Mistakes were made" is an expression that is commonly used as a rhetorical device, whereby a speaker acknowledges that a situation was handled poorly or inappropriately but seeks to evade any direct admission or accusation of responsibility.
Moralistic fallacy	Normative Inference Errors	Detect the inference that runs from normative undesirability straight to empirical falsity — 'this would be bad if true, therefore it is not so' — foreclosing a factual question on a moral ground without any evidence being weighed, the mirror of the naturalistic fallacy.
Motte-and-bailey fallacy	Argumentative Equivocation	Maintain a strong controversial claim and a weak defensible one under the same label, advancing the strong claim when unchallenged but retreating to the weak one under fire and resuming the strong claim once the challenge passes — so the motte's successful defence is misread as vindicating the bailey.
Moving the goalposts	Standard Revision Under Evidence	An argumentative pattern in which, on being shown evidence that meets a previously stipulated standard, one party revises the standard upward to block the conclusion rather than accept it — repeated so that no finite evidence can settle the question.
Narrative Paradigm	Argumentation Theory	Walter Fisher's theory that humans judge value-laden arguments by narrative rationality — narrative coherence (does the story hang together?) and fidelity (does it ring true against experience?) — rather than by formal-logical soundness.
Naturalistic Fallacy	Metaethical Fallacies	The metaethical error of identifying goodness with a natural property, exposed by the open-question argument — for any proposed good = N, 'but is N good?' stays a meaningful question, so goodness cannot be identical with any natural property it merely co-occurs with.
Obfuscation	—	Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language.
Package-Deal Fallacy	Informal Fallacies	Treat a set of positions bundled together only by coalition, tradition, or product line as if they were logically inseparable, so that endorsing one forces endorsing all and rejecting one requires rejecting the whole.
Pathos	Classical RhetoricRhetorical Appeals	Pathos is a Greek term referring to appeal to the emotions and ideals of the audience, eliciting feelings that already reside in them.
Persuasive definition	Argumentation Theory	A stipulative redefinition presented as ordinary or true usage that embeds an evaluative stance and shifts the audience’s attitudes or argumentative commitments.
Poisoning the Well	Ad Hominem Family	Pre-emptively discrediting the source of a forthcoming argument, so an anchoring frame of suspicion is installed first and every later thing the source says is received through it — including any rebuttal, read as defensiveness.
Politician's Syllogism	Political RhetoricInformal Fallacies	The fallacious move from 'action is needed' and 'this is an action' to 'therefore do this.'
Polyptoton	Verbal Figures	A rhetorical figure that repeats one lexical root in nearby words with different grammatical forms.
Racial rhetorical criticism	Rhetorical Studies	A rhetorical-critical approach that analyzes how racial histories, oppression, and logics shape discourse while treating race itself as rhetorically constructed.
Red Herring	Relevance Fallacies	Deflect a discussion by introducing material irrelevant to the open question, so attention and the conversational floor shift to the new topic and the original question is left feeling-addressed-but-unanswered — the test being whether the new material does any work on the claim that was open.
Relative Privation	Relevance Fallacies	The informal fallacy of dismissing a concern by pointing to a worse problem elsewhere, conflating severity-ranking with action-licensing — since ranking governs how much total attention a problem warrants, not whether it is eligible for any, unless the worse problem's resources are genuinely exclusive.
Rhetorical Listening	Ethics of Discourse	Suspend rebuttal and parse another's discourse through three moves — what they claim as their stakes, what genuinely remains contested, and what your own position lets you hear — so an accurate hearing and a firm 'no' become compatible.
Rhetorical Question	Pragmatic Devices	Use interrogative form to perform an assertion rather than seek information, leaving the answer for the audience to supply internally so their self-generated agreement does the persuading — a move whose success rides entirely on an accurate audience model.
Rhetorical Situation	Rhetorical Theory	Read any occasion that calls a discourse forth through three slots — exigence, audience, and constraints — treating communication as a fit problem so that a misfit traces to a specific misread element rather than to a defect of craft.
Rhetorical stance	Rhetoric and CompositionCommunicator Audience Subject Alignment	Coordinate a communicator's projected persona, treatment of a subject, relation to an audience, purpose, tone, and available appeals so a message adopts a deliberate position fitted to its rhetorical situation.
Simile	—	A marked explicit comparison that transfers a single salient attribute from a familiar vehicle to an unfamiliar topic while keeping the two distinct, enabling fast perceptual or affective uptake.
Slippery Slope	Informal Fallacies	Flag a consequence-chain argument as fallacious when its inter-step links are held together only by conceivability rather than a demonstrated mechanism, so it blocks a proposal by gesturing at a speculative terminus.
Special Pleading	Informal Fallacies of Consistency	The fallacy of exempting a favored case from a general standard the arguer just invoked, without a principled basis — a consistency violation under self-serving direction, exposed by asking whether the arguer would grant the same exception to an opponent.
Spotlight Fallacy	Informal Fallacies of Evidence Weighting	Infer that a property is common in a population because it is prominent in coverage of it — mistaking a selection bias for a base rate, since an attention-allocating channel surfaces cases by newsworthiness rather than by frequency.
Straw Man	Informal Fallacies of Relevance	Refute a weakened proxy of an opponent's view instead of the view they actually hold, so an apparent victory leaves the real position untouched.
Symploce	Figures of Repetition	Symploce repeats one expression at the start and another at the end of successive clauses or lines.
Terministic Screen	Rhetorical TheoryBurkean Dramatism	A Burkean vocabulary-centered frame in which terms simultaneously reflect, select, and deflect reality, organizing attention, attitude, motive, and symbolic action.
Topoi	Rhetorical Invention	The pre-formed argument templates of rhetorical invention — a finite catalogue of move-forms (definition, a fortiori, cause-and-effect, sign, precedent) whose form is fixed and content variable — so finding arguments becomes an auditable search through a known library rather than creation ex nihilo.
Toulmin Model	Argumentation Analysis	Decompose an informal argument into six named slots — claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal — so evaluation becomes a completeness check that isolates the usually-implicit warrant, where almost every contested dispute actually lives.
Transpositional pun	Rhetoric and Wordplay	A wordplay form that swaps elements of a familiar phrase so the altered expression becomes a comic redefinition of an otherwise unrelated word.
Tu Quoque	Informal Fallacies	Catch the fallacy of rebutting a charge by alleging the accuser commits the same offence — substituting a verdict on the speaker's standing for a verdict on the speaker's claim — by asking whether the dispute was about a proposition's truth or the speaker's standing.
Visual Rhetoric	Visual Rhetoric	The practice and analysis of how images, typography, composition, color, and multimodal arrangement shape meaning and persuasion for situated audiences.
Writer's block	Writing Studies	A nonmedical state of sustained difficulty initiating or continuing writing despite an intention and opportunity to write.
Writing process	Composition Studies	The recursive set of cognitive, social and material activities through which a writer develops, composes, revises and delivers a text.
Wrong Direction (Reverse Causation Fallacy)	Causal Fallacies	Catch the error of assigning a causal arrow A→B when it actually runs B→A on the strength of a symmetric association alone, by refusing any oriented claim until temporal precedence or interventional response fixes the direction.
Zeugma and Syllepsis	Figures of SpeechSyntax	One expressed word governs multiple parts of an utterance, with their grammatical or semantic fit held together or deliberately shifted.