ABSTRACT
James and Tita French Baumlin (1994) claimed “mythos” as the fourth rhetorical proof, rounding out the Aristotelian trio of logos (logic, rationality), pathos (emotion and feeling), and ethos (the view of others toward the speaker; the speaker’s credibility). Mythos is using language not to argue rationally, develop a persona, or express emotion, but rather to engage in imaginative or creative discourse that seeks and expresses a “truth” indirectly, but powerfully. One might call this Truth with a capital “T.” Baumlin and Baumlin argued that “The mythic seeks … to unite, to synthesize, to assert wholeness in multiple or contrasting choices and interpretations. Mythos thus offers a synthetic and analogical, as opposed to analytic, mode of proof, one that discovers-indeed celebrates-the diversity of truth” (p. 106).
