ABSTRACT
Wallace conceives of the rhetorical situation as occurring in the area of the contingent, where choice-making is possible, bringing "practical reason into play" and actively exhibiting three modes: deliberation, justification, and explanation. Since the "stuff" of rhetorical discourse springs from the essential character of the speaking/ writing act, it is ethically grounded. His focus on the primacy of substance and ideas and on rhetoric as advisory leads him to center on the substance of rhetoric as "good reasons." A good reason "is a statement offered in support of an ought proposition or of a valuejudgment." The rhetor, then, should focus on one or more of three essential value categories: the desirable, the obligatory, and the praiseworthy. Both rhetor and listeners/readers are necessarily concerned with choices, ought-
statements and their justifications as they are "indicated or implied in statement form as reasons, warrants, premises, laws, principles and beliefs."
