COMS240 Riccardo Cardilli Constance Lafontaine · Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Student of Socrates and mentor of Aristotle Plato’s writings dealt with many objects, including

Rhetorical Theory

COMS240

Riccardo CardilliConstance Lafontaine

Overview of Presentation

What is rhetoric?

The rhetorical utterance

Rhetorical Theory

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”

Lakoff & Johnson’s “Metaphors we live by”

What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric as a mode of inquiry in the field of communication.

Sees all communication as symbols that can potentially induce social action.

Study of strategy and best-practices of the influence of communication

So, what is rhetoric? Why do we study it?

There’s more to rhetoric than the popular and pejorative and commonplace

meaning associated to it.

What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric is split between practice and study

Practice:Practitioners are rhetors or rhetoricians

Study:The theoretical study of rhetoric is carried out by rhetorical critics. Criticism is a

politically neutral, intellectual commentary on a text.

Explains the linguistic and tropological mechanics. How does this text operate

persuasively? What are the strategies and tactics employed by this rhetor? How

are the arguments structured into a convincing case? Could the speaker do a

better job and how?

The rhetorical utterance

• Initial association of rhetoric to

orality, the spoken word.

• As society becomes increasingly

literate, rhetoric is embodied more

generally through language.

Rhetoric and language

• Rhetorical studies adapt to society’s

predilection for visuality

• Images, visual renderings,

photography, video, become

rhetorical embodiments.

Rhetoric and the image

• Architecture, public spaces, actions,

etc. Artefacts as rhetorical.

• Hegemonic vs. Emancipatory

Rhetoric and… everything?

Rhetorical Theory

Plato: “the art of winning the soul by discourse”

Aristotle: “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available

means of persuasion.”

Burke: “The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in

other human agents”

Elements of rhetorical exchange: Speaker, Audience, Occasion, Subject, Situation, Speech or Text, Discourse.

Rhetorical Theory (classical tradition)

Audience

MessageSpeaker


Aristotle’s three branches of rhetoric.

Though not exhaustive of all types of rhetorical possibilities, they remain important

to rhetorical analysis, still today.

Each branch is associated with a setting, a time and a purpose.

DeliberativePolitical/

legislativeTo exhort or dissuadeFuture

Judicial Forensic To accuse or defendPast

Epideictic Ceremonial To praise or blamePresent

Aristotle’s three types of rhetorical appeals:

Pathos: Appeals to emotions, evoking pity, fear, and desires

from the audience.

Logos: Appeals to logic and reason through induction and

deduction. Logos does not need to be factual, but needs to

be persuasive.

Ethos: Appeals to the credibility and authority of the rhetor.


Audience/Pathos

Message/LogosSpeaker/Ethos


Audience/Pathos

Message/LogosSpeaker/Ethos

Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)

Rhetorical discourse occurs in a specific time and place: in a context or a

rhetorical situation

Rhetorical discourse arises as a response to a situation, just as an

answer arises in response to a question.

It arises from an exigence or an imperfection, catalyst, and problem

that can be "corrected" with rhetorical discourse.

It is the rhetorical situation, not the rhetor, that is the ground of the

rhetorical discourse.


Bitzer

VatzRefers to the “Myth of the Rhetorical Situation”

Argues that discourse is logically and temporally prior to the emergence

of the situation’s impact.

Therefore, rhetoric is a cause, not an effect, of meaning.

The Rhetorical Situation

For a long time rhetoric was believed to be a uniquely epistemic practice.


Epistemology vs. Ontology

The fact that rhetoric exists as a practice is evidence that truth, outside

what is knowable scientifically, cannot be ordinarily possessed by humans.

If truth were fixed, then rhetoric would have little value.

Truth is never given, but contingent, and subject to deliberation.

What kind of knowledge, then, can be used as the content

of our arguments? In other words, what can make rhetoric function?


Epistemology vs. Ontology

Social Knowledge

“…conceptions of symbolic relations among

problems, persons, interests, and actions, which

imply (when accepted) certain notions of

preferable public behaviour.”

Thomas J. Farrell

-Product of public consensus

-Dependent on audience

-Generative

-Normative

Originated with Kenneth Burke

He introduced identification as a category of persuasion.


The Aesthetic Turn

If the orator would like to change the opinion of the

audience, he/she must openly identify with its other

existing and commonly held opinions so as to gain its

trust.

Form is of central importance.

The way in which an idea is proposed, its structure,

trends, figures, development all invite the audience to

participate regardless what the content may signify.

This theory is a stepping stone to see rhetorical

effectivity as an aesthetic endeavour.

What is the aesthetic quality of rhetoric?

a) appeals to the audience’s emotional sensibilities.

b) identifies the audience – calls individuals to participate

ontologically in collective categories constructed by speech.


Other Elements of the Aesthetic Turn

Edwin Black, 1970: Every discourse implies an audience (a second persona) that

critics should consider when judging texts. The stylistic tokens of a speech:

- call forth a particular audience

- create a world occupied by it.

Maurice Charland, 1987: Alternative to the logic of influence is a constitutive model

of rhetorical effectivity.

Identification is the primary function of rhetoric.

The subject exists as a rhetorical effect (it becomes what it is because the text named

it as such).

Some things logically do not apply to the epistemic model because good reasons

have little reign over decisions far too self-conscious to allow for such grand

categories to be effectively negotiated.


Other Elements of the Aesthetic Turn

Barbara Biesecker, 1989: Rhetoric is an intervention that deconstructs/destabilizes

the subject (audience) in order to re-articulate its identity and social relations.

Rhetoric produces audiences discursively.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Student of Socrates and mentor of Aristotle

Plato’s writings dealt with many objects, including

logic, philosophy, politics, mathematic and

rhetoric.

The Allegory of the Cave is one of Plato’s most

well-known texts and is one of Socrates’ most

famous dialogues. Plato relays an exchange that

occurred between Socrates and Glaucon

Plato (428/427 BC– 348/347 BC)


Socrates never wrote himself, or at least none of

his writings have been identified. His dialogues

are relayed by his students.

Referred to himself as the “Gadfly of Athens”

Tried and executed for corrupting the youth and

questioning the existence of the gods

Socrates (469/470 BC–399 BC)

Allegories are a form of extended metaphor that figuratively represent

abstract concepts. The elements in the narrative stand for a meaning that

surpasses their literal signification.



The echoes and the shadows are understood as an unquestioned reality by the

prisoners.

Once a prisoner is freed, the journey from the world of ignorance and appearances

(shadows) to the world of ideals and truth (light) is a difficult one. The road is steep, the

light is bright and there is a comfort in living among the shadows and the illusions.

Once the prisoner has become accustomed to his new life, and lives in the world of

authentic truth and reason, he may want to return to the cave and free other prisoners

who will be unwilling to leave the cave.

Allegory as Rhetorical

Focuses on an the dialectic relationship between Truth and Appearances, Light and

Shadows.

Follows the notion of rhetoric as epistemic in that through communication and education,

the Truth is knowable

A rhetorical structure: It is a metaphor, the structure follows a Socratic method.


The Socratic Method

While its name is derived from Socrates, it is a method articulated from the

observation of his dialogues, and was not formulated by Socrates.

Dialectic method of inquiry

A form of debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints

It is based on a simple question/answer or asking/answering format

The method often leads to one individual, usually the one questioned, to

contradict himself or herself, thereby emboldening the argument of the other


The Socratic Method in Contemporary Terms

The interviewer begins by giving the Congressman the freedom to explain

his point.

The interviewer encourages the responses, even agreeing with some of his

statements, and prompting the Congressman for more information.

Finally, by modestly asking a simple question, he allows the Congressman

to contradict himself and to portray his own ignorance.

http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/best-of/better-know-a-

district/#clip90793

1. Concepts we Live by

“We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” (192).

Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by

2 and 3. The systematicity of metaphorical concepts

“arguments follow patterns” ( 194)

–Argumentation as war; time as money.

When we accuse someone of mixing metaphors we are pointing to the lack of systematicity in their speech or their analysis.


3. The systematicity of metaphorical concepts

•hiding and highlighting

•Metaphorical concepts not only reveal, but they “hide”or mask other ways of conceptualizing.


4. Orientational metaphors:

•“organize a whole system of concepts with respect to one another.”

•Orientational metaphors have to do with our physical orientation towards things: how we imagine our bodies with respect to each other and how this is expressed.


5. Metaphors and Cultural Coherence.

•They assert that “the most fundamental values in a

culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in a culture.”


•Ontological metaphors.

•The final chapter on types of metaphors or way to think about metaphor.

•This is also I think the most difficult one: ontological metaphors are ones that are about how we think of things as things (as discrete entities or substances)

•“Human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete just as we are: entities bounded by a surface.” (203).

•Our experience with physical objects “ give rise to an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors for viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas as entities and substances.


•THESE METAPHORS ALLOW US TO TRANSFORM ‘INVISIBLE” or ABSTRACT ENTITIES INTO THINGS

– “Theory drives me crazy.”

•They allow us to quantify or qualify these things.

- “It takes a lot of stamina to read these articles.”

•They allow us to identify aspects of something.

- “Some of the readings today were impenetrable.”


•They allow us to identify causes:

- “I had a headache from reading these readings.”

•They allow us to set goals or actions

- “If I finish these readings I will be prepared for my exam.”

- “She plowed through the readings to prove to herself that

she could do it.”


•Container metaphors; who is in and who is out..

•“We are physical beings bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside of us. Each of us is a container with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation.” We project these orientations constantly…


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COMS240 Riccardo Cardilli Constance Lafontaine · Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Student of Socrates and mentor of Aristotle Plato’s writings dealt with many objects, including