Validity and the art of rhetorical criticism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical criticism from their earliest days as a scholarly endeavor in ancient Greece and the Roman Republic developed as an art. In fact, rhetoric, along with grammar and philosophy, formed the three disciplines of the trivium as compared to the scientific disciplines in the quadrivium (math, geometry, music, and astronomy). Art is fluid, dynamic, and shifting; art is always in the process of becoming.