Argumentation in Pedagogy

In Chaim Perelman's "Social Contexts of Argumentation", he discusses how society paves the avenues of discourse. He states, "...the development of all argumentation is a function of the audience to which it is addressed." (252). We want to shake the foundations of our audience by awakening them to the concepts we present but somewhere we want to meet what they already know--to be able to plug into their belief system (enough to change it). We try to assume what their critiques would be, how they could counterargue and we want to address these before they do. We want to use their language if they are not from the same social background as us. We want to research them because they are not us. Perelman points out that language is a 'product of social tradition' and while that is true it is filtered through the individual perspectives of the persons inside that social tradition. One could even argue that one social tradition is splintered into sub-traditions. While it is obvious that certain patterns of thought arise where an ideaology is manifested in society, for instance democracy and its implications of rhetoric, each person that lives in a democracy may have a different belief that shades their rhetoric. The question for the speaker is what do the majority of the audience believe and how can you teach a speaker to find that general belief? Do you research their social background and grab out the general beliefs produced by it and address them? To a certain extent this is possible but one must keep in mind that while social context is a good common ground, the individual has already assessed their belief system and altered what they have learned by experience.