Scott's article left me feeling like my brain is tiny, and his is big enough for me to rent a room in. I understood it better--I think--after doing a little research, but am definitely interested in being corrected by anyone who can follow his brilliant intricacies.
He starts out referring to Gorgias, the dialogue by Plato where Socrates problematizes rhetoric. In that dialogue, the most definite thing Socrates says about rhetoric, from my reading of it, is that it's a ghost of politics, and should be confined to that realm. Rhetoric can't be considered the art of persuasion, because persuasion is involved in too many other arts, like teaching, that don't employ rhetoricians. Scott also refers to Aristotle's statements about rhetoric, which assert it as the art of persuasion, and nothing but, in my (late-afternoon, caffeinated) reading of it. Looking at both of these helps me understand his brilliance a little better--he's trying to show why rhetoric has been given such a slight role since its codification by the ancient Greek philosophers.
Another area that got me googling for background material was his discussion of Toulmin's arguments. He talks about Toulmin's distinction between analytic and substantial arguments. Not knowing what those terms meant, I found that the analytic argument is thought to look for eternal principles or theories, while the substantial argument is thought to look for immediate, or practical answers. What Scott is saying, if I'm reading the brotha correctly, is that no argument can really be considered analytic, since all analytic conclusions are based on past experiences, so nothing can really be generalized into a theory that will inevitably come true. Nothing can be abstracted from time, so no analytic ideal exists. Therefore, rhetoric can't be used to make any truth just sitting out there into something that will persuade people, so we can't go by the classical views of rhetoric anymore. So this part of his article doesn't portray rhetoric as epistemic, but portrays it as unmoored from old ideas.
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I think you're right in understanding why Plato and Aristotle are so important to Scott's essay. It's been said that every piece of rhetorical theory written in the last 2500 years is just a response to one of those two fellas. I believe Scott set up Plato and Aristotle just to knock them down (completely fair when you consider the way Plato set people up in his dialogues) and erect an epistemic view of rhetoric in their place. Even more delicious is that Scott used Plato's arch rivals -the sophists- to do the dirty work.
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