There is a well-known question about Aristotle\u27s view of rhetoric: on the one hand he inherited the typical Platonic disdain for rhetoric as a concealer of truth; but on the other he throws himself with verve into the elaboration of a rhetorical manual. This paper points up a little-noticed Aristotelian justification for rhetoric, one that sees rhetorical contests as means for discovering the truth; it asks how such an optimistic view might be grounded
