Post on 13-Oct-2020
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
Rhetorical Theory (classical tradition)
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.
Rhetorical Theory (classical tradition)
Audience/Pathos
Message/LogosSpeaker/Ethos
Rhetorical Theory (classical tradition)
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.
Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)
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.
Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)
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?
Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)
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.
Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)
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.
Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)
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.
Rhetorical Theory (contemporary tradition)
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)
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
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.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
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.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
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
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
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.
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
3. The systematicity of metaphorical concepts
•hiding and highlighting
•Metaphorical concepts not only reveal, but they “hide”or mask other ways of conceptualizing.
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
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.
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
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.”
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
•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.
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
•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.”
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
•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.”
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by
•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…
Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by