Edward Schiappa and Stephen Toulmin

Edward Schiappa points out that there are a growing number of theorists interested in the sophistic turn. The sophistic turn is the belief that the Sophists had important things to say that should be revived and understood in current rhetorical theory. For him, this turn is a viable alternative to Plato and Aristotle in that it provides a different voice to Ancient Greece. However, he does not think that the sophistic turn is rooted in valid historical facts and argues that relying on the sophistic turn to make judgments about current rhetorical theory amounts to what he believes is a mirage. He says this is because there is a problem in identifying who the sophists are and what they actually believed-for the very reason that their writing didn't survive except in terms of what later philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato wrote. In fact, now we only have the reactions to their existence in latter writings rather than a true historical view of the Sophist perspective. Further, he distinguishes between a neo-sophist perspective and a real reconstruction of their views. We see in the sophists what we want to see rather than what really occurred. He argues that sophistic rhetoric is a misnomer because rhetoric is a construction of Plato. The sophists never spoke of rhetoric and we can't use their theories as support for rhetorical theory. He also argues that it is impossible to generalize about the sophists and their views because of their varied nature. There is not a coherent agreement about what the sophists believed that could be generalized from.

Stephen Toulmin's most important contribution to rhetoric is how he identified elements of a persuasive argument and showed how these elements could be a tool for both evaluating and making arguments. He breaks down argument into six parts. His model allows rhetors to examine unstated assumptions that are part of all arguments and often not addressed by formal logic. His main concern was that probability of an argument was more important than definitive truth, and that the foundation for understanding and believing an argument was much less than established by formal logic. For him, he saw Aristotelian logic as not applicable to the real world and that there are plausible ways of arguing and justifying arguments without resorting to certainty. Toulmin's theory was first used to show practical argument foundation for courtroom arguments and later used in composition classrooms.