Ethos, the speaker’s image in speech is one of three means persuasion e stablished by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and often studied a loose way. Many scholars develop lists self-images (ethos leader, modesty ethos, etc.), but few explain how arrives at these types ethos. This precisely what inferential approach described here intends to do. Considering, like many discourse analysts, that ethos consubs...

The modern critical tradition’s strategy for defeating the demon of self doubt and securing certainty, as Hannah Arendt has written, restricts serious candidates for belief to those whose conditions of truth can be rendered wholly immanent to focal consciousness within a point of view that is simply taken for granted. Thereby it forecloses the possibility of recognizing the partiality of its ow...

To take some obvious examples, modern industrial technology derives from physical science, from techniques of mass production, from certain forms of social organization (e.g., capitalist or socialist), and from an ethos which declares that affluence is preferable to poverty and that man is privileged to modify nature to suit himself. Modern medical technology derives from physical and biologica...