From Richard Tarrant’s new book Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (reviewed in BMCR here):To classify textual criticism as a form of rhetoric is a way of highlighting the fact that its arguments depend on persuasion rather than demonstration. Textual critics cannot prove that their choices are correct; the most they can hope to do is lead their readers to believe that those choices are the best available ones.
Facts do, of course, play an important part of textual criticism. But in the end the facts cannot yield a definitive answer, only a relative probability, which is where the critic needs to employ rhetorical argument.This point is not, of course, unique to textual criticism. All study of the past, certainly the ancient past, trades in probabilities and textual criticism is nothing if not a historical endeavor. So long as we are okay with probabilities, there is little here to really fuss about. Where the debate can be had is about just how probable any of our particular text critical judgments are. That, however, takes us beyond mere rhetoric since some judgments are better than others. Still, I take Tarrant’s quote as a welcome reminder that judgment is always involved.
For more along the same lines, see Gary Taylor, “The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism,” Text 4 (1988): 39–57.