Week 2 Notes PDF

Week 2 Notes Social media as a form of rhetoric ○ Ads on social media throughout feed ○ Presentation of a certain lifestyle ○ Platform to express our interests and to persuade other people to try them ○ Election material ○ Fear mongering ○ Rhetoric...

Week 2 Notes Social media as a form of rhetoric ○ Ads on social media throughout feed ○ Presentation of a certain lifestyle ○ Platform to express our interests and to persuade other people to try them ○ Election material ○ Fear mongering ○ Rhetorical construction of your identity*: you curate how you present yourself to the world Show people the life we want them to see How tools in social media can be used rhetorically (who is the audience and what use we can put these tools to) ○ Filters + edit tools to present how you are seen ○ Images, videos, sound bites, trends ○ Length of videos, using pathos for more impactful short videos ○ Putting fake degrees /qualifications in your biography Show how you fit within a group of people ○ Digitial delivery (rhetorical velocity, in which way does it move and how can you influence how it moves through the space): Writing in a way where you know it will be remixed ○ Brands will sponsor certain influencers Drawing on the ethos ○ Filtering comments/ censorship, taking out non similar opinions ○ Selfies are rhetorical, rhetorical presentation of self ○ Captions and hashtags unrelated to the video to get more engagement ○ The way we use language on social media is different Ex: censorship of certain words Ancient Rhetoric Introduction Relativistic epistemology Relationship between rhetoric and knowledge Gorgias says rhetoric can be used for both bad and good purposes (like drugs) Isocrates blame the orator (person using rhetoric) 5th century BCE: perilean Athens (athens under pericles) Made peace with the persians, then penopolisian war for many years Athens was a city state, governed themselves ○ Limited who is able to participate in this democracy (no metic/foreigner, no women) ○ Space for deliberative rhetoric, make decisions for war  People Athenian court system are expected to defend themselves ○ Call for forensic rhetoric Ability to speak in public becomes a mark of importance/distinction ○ Display rhetoric, epideictic ○ Epideictic rhetoric is the rhetoric of praise and blame, occasional Aristotle doesn’t invent those 3 types they already existed he just brought them together This is the context for the sophists ○ Sophist meaning= wise person ○ A group of teachers of rhetoric who were traveling rhetoricians usually ○ They're paid Plato, Aristotle have their own schools We group certain rhetoricians under the label of sophists, sophistic rhetoric ○ They didn’t call it rhetoric at this point, used logos (the art of discourse) In our context its not logical persuasion Orators and teachers linked together as sophists were diverse and had diverse interests and different opinions ○ Often disagreed about things like democracy ○ Gorgias, Potagoros… One of the problems with the sophists is so little of it is made available/was preserved ○ Hard to get a full understanding of what they thought but we can get an idea of common ideas of sophistic rhetoric Sophistic rhetoric Sophistic rhetoric (idea of Sophists): the idea that rhetoric is epistemic (center to the creation of knowledge) ○ No Truth of any kind Doxa: belief ○ Talking through these beliefs and finding the most common ones need to Nomos phenomenal world is their starting point, the only thing we can have is contingent or probable knowledge we can’t know for certainty ○ That contingent or probable knowledge is constructed through language Nomos: norms, constructs, what is expected and desired in a certain society ○ World view Opposite of nomos = physis: all people of the world are alike and unchanging Kairos: right timing the elements, its situation, cultural and political context is what's important rather than laws  ○ The knowledge of the world is decided together in community according to Sophists Knowledge is made through language, rhetoric… Language Language is never objective ○ Goes against the container model of language Language isn’t neutral ○ Everyone has a different set of available resources, everyone understands different things, we all get different things out of readings ○ Bias slips in ○ Words have connotative and denotative meanings Knowledge is made through language, talking to each other… So Sophists had Anti Foundational view of the world, there is no foundation upon which knowledge is based ○ We can’t be certain about any conclusions we draw from the world, and knowledge is based on our interactions so therefore there’s no absolute real knowledge ○ Foundation view = opposite, knowledge is based on principles (God, world of forms, the objective reality of science…) Protagoras Major doctrine is the basis for the way we think of sophistic rhetoric 490-420 BCE Traveling teacher who visits athens several times Proponent of democracy The Man-Measure doctrine ○ Man is the measure of all things which are that they are and of things which are not that they are not ○ We can only judge things in the world through the lens of human perception, man is the measure of all things in the world that are or that are not For Protagora nomos is the necessary condition for the maintenance of human society, it’s established communally though language ○ If man is the measure of all things we need to come together to think about our society ○ Thought that we make a society together through language For the Sophists the practical application of language to civic life = important (living together) ○ Talk to each other to solve problems Gorgias 480-380 BC we don’t exactly when he died Aletheia which means truth, relative truth which comes through provisional knowledge, he says that’s the only knowledge we have ○ The only knowledge we have = contingent truth ○ Plato dislikes them cuz he finds the idea of contingent truth problematic, wants to see truth as having a foundation “Determination of truth happens through the consensus of the many” “when the language has no basis in the Truth it will be devoid of ethics” Gorgias is also interested in communicative uncertainty, the unstable communication of language ○ Paradox, we come to knowledge through communication with each other but communication is uncertain, unstable, we can’t depend on it ○ We always have to monitor how we speak with each other, how it’s being said, by whom… “Testing and implementing the linguistic rhetorical choices that are in that time and place most effective” ○ Think about what is most effective in that particular situation ○ Rhetorical situation changes constantly, audience changes, purpose changes, who you are as a speaker and your knowledge changes Gorgias’ text on non-existence 3 points: 1. Nothing exists Nothing exists in a totalizing or foundational sense No world of the forms, no foundation 2. Even if existence exists it is unknowable and inconceivable to humans All we have is doxa (beliefs and opinions) If a true nature of the world exists, we don’t know what it is for certain ○ He thinks only philosophers can get close 3. Even if existence should be perceived, nevertheless it could not be communicated to another person What we communicate is not reality but a representation of those realities ○ Representation of what we experience, comes through language All we communicate is logos or rhetoric When we come together and create Nomos, this happens through exchange of beliefs If our ties to the world beyond our world is severed all we have is rhetoric and language Separation of logos (discourse) from foundation of existent things, he means existence in a particular way here  Logos has a communal basis which generates communal discourse ○ Anti-foundational again ○ More concerned with how we live in the world, they say all we have is the world around us Gorgias: Encomium of Helen Display rhetoric, epideictic Stated purpose is to praise helen, get rid of the blame attached to her Really a piece about the negative or unethical uses of rhetoric ○ Uses epideictic rhetoric to make an argument about rhetoric Section 1 “What is becoming to a city is manpower, to a body beauty, to a soul wisdom, to an action virtue, to a speech truth, and the opposites of these are unbecoming. Man and woman and speech and deed and city and object should be honored with praise if praiseworthy and incur blame if unworthy, for it is an equal error and mistake to blame the praisable and to praise the blamable.” ○ This is the genre of speech that is about praise and blame, announcing it Section 6 “For either by will of Fate and decision of the gods and vote of Necessity did she do what she did, or by force reduced or by words seduced or by love possessed.” ○ If its force, she’s not to blame but it’s not rhetoric ○ He’s most concerned about her not being to blame because of speech Section 7 “But if she was raped by violence and illegally assaulted and unjustly insulted, it is clear that the raper, as the insulter, did the wronging, and the raped, as the insulted, did the suffering.” ○ If violence has been done to her she is the victim, should not be blamed Section 8 “But if it was speech which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: It can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.” ○ Claiming a lot for speech, rhetoric “All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had both memory of things past and awareness of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future. So that on most subjects most men take opinion as counselor to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes.” ○ All we have is opinion but it’s slippery  Section 14 “The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.” ○ Explaining things through metaphor ○ You can have speech that does good or bad It's the problem of the person using rhetoric in the wrong way Acknowledges that speech can be used for both good and bad, up to the person using ir ○ If she is seduced by speech she is not to blame Last section: purpose of the speech, getting rid of blame of Helen, uses his own work to bolster the claims of his argument