Imagine the following situation: an act of violent assault has been committed. And there are only two possible suspects, of which one is a small and weak man and the other a big and strong man. The weak man will plead that he is not strong enough and therefore not likely to have committed the crime, which seems reasonable straight away. But there will also be a loophole for the strong man, as Aristotle tells us, who reports exactly that story (...) in book 2, chapter 24, of his Rhetoric. And he also has a name to assign to the inventor of that kind of argument (1402a17–20):The Art of Corax is composed of this topic. For if a man is not likely to be guilty of what he is accused of, for instance if, being weak, he is .. (shrink)

The paper argues that the arguments from probability so popular in early Greek rhetoric and oratory essentially operate by appealing to common positions shared by both speaker and audience. Particularly in controversial debate provoked by fundamental dissensus they make their claim acceptable to the audience by pointing out a basic coherence or congruence of the speaker’s narrative with the audience’s own pre-established standards or standards of knowledge.