Thanks!

Ok, I've never really studied the subject, save for a class in Environmental Sociology, where about all we did was discuss how problems were socially constructed for 16 weeks.

How else would you define it then?

So are you saying that rhetoric includes Socratic irony? If so, I'd simply say that we can safely remove Socratic irony from under the heading of rhetoric and restore it to the Logic section, so that we can find out what makes rhetoric, rhetoric.

I am not quite sure how you are delineating emotional persuasion from logic then.... I am aware of rhetorical appeals that use logic, but... if we are to understad what 'rhetoric' itself is, we must isolate what it is alone.

Well then, if you are using 'argumentation theory' and informal fallacy terminology, then you are using logic, aren't you? What exactly is the 'rhetoric' part of rhetoric, if not persuasion?

It seem to me that you are saying that rhetoric need not merely be emotional appeal, that it may be combined with logic. Fine. But logic already is a branch on it own, I want to know what exactly is the left over in 'rhetoric' that makes for a separate branch of thought.

Again, it sounds like you are explaining to me what a bowl of cheerios is by telling me that you can put milk, bananas, strawberries in the bowl with it.... I'm sure rhetoricians can use any tool they like, but what is the core of rhetoric that makes rhetoric, rhetoric? What makes a person decide to call themselves, or numbe themselves within the class of rhetoricians?

Tangent time: I'd agree that meaning is partly socially constructed. If I throw an object at you, you frown and duck and call me enemy, but if you think the object is a baseball, you smile and catch it and call me buddy. But the fact that an object is careening your way is a matter of physics and not inter-subjective.

I'd also say that the basic elements of post modernism were already known prior to the existence of post modernism. I find people like Nietzsche and  modernists like William James, Hans Vaihinger, were already saying these things... then again, post modernists can also call themselves pragmatists...

Save for those matters of unavoidable reality that do make some elements necessary. Interpret the object all you like, you must still react to it. I think you agree, but I also think that post modernists tend to underscore how much of the situation is objective.

It really seems to me that the aspect of rhetoric that cannot also be called something else (logic, Socratic irony, etc) is emotional persuasion. What I read is that you are just telling me that a person who identifies as a rhetorician need not simply rely on rhetoric...  

 

And a psychotic's worldview is socially constructed too.

One of my many problems with post modernism is that this sort of claim leads to the erroneous conclusion that they are equitable, because they are both 'socially constructed'

But such a claim is a non sequitur, because 1) certain presumptions are better than others (I don't buy that there aren't  cross paradigmatic elements) and 2) neither system is entirely socially constructed, there is more than just inter-subjectivity here, there is also objective reality. I think post modernists outside the Richard Rorty wing (RIP) accept this, do you?

It's easier to feel, than to think. I dont mean this as an attack on christians, I point it in all directions, every position has numbers of adherents driven more by passion than by reason.

Let me turn to the concepts of William James on this matter: we don't reason our ways to a position, we hold to a position and then employ reason, under the dictates of desire, to quell cognitive dissonance. (James' hard hearted and soft hearted types)

Because desire precedes reason, and because our goal is often to quell dissonance, one need not even come up with good rationales... one can simply ignore facts, remain ignorant.

Let me be an elitist here and say that the mass of people will never move beyond this stage.

You know, I just realized that I was reading Schopenhauer two weeks ago, and what I've just said is all ripped from The World as Will and Representation! No wonder it sounds so elitist! And during my reading of his work, my thoughts were: if it is true that passions employ reason, and not the other way around, then doesnt' this mar your own work, Herr Schopenhauer?

My point here is that I believe that in order to deal with this problem, one must first learn the nature of the relationship between emotions and reason, and then learn to find ways to free reason from the grasp of emotion. Which is precisely why I look down on rhetoric and precisely why I feel most people cannot be reached: coz they don't want to be reached, and yet, to change this, you must reach them.

 

The world needs more optimists.

To be honest, I don't know a large amount on rhetoric.
The only two 'rhetoricists' have read from are Textom and the guy who wrote 'The Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintainence!

I've always seen reason as a conscious linguistic activity.
That just seems to be personal difference on how we use the word though.

I guess rhetoric is persuasion in general.
So it could involve various elements in it.
The reason why I bring up intuition is because it often manifests itself through emotions, so I can sometimes see 'appealing to emotions' as appealing to the intuition.
However, I think that this is because I didn't really know what appealing to emotions is, rather I just assumed what it is by taking its name literally; as we will see:

I see. So that's what you mean by appealing to emotions!
I'm not sure where I stand on all this to be honest... it's not something I'm very clued up on. Even on this conversation I've been working purely on general experience and intuition!

J.L. Austen of speech-act theory fame would argue that the perception of the object rushing toward you is not "meaningful" because it isn't articulated in language yet.  Once the target of the flying object analyzes the rhetoric of the situation, the intention of the throw, the nature of the object and interprets it in more-or-less linguistic terms, then he has constructed a meaning for the experience.  Your own example reflects the process of articulating the language cue "baseball" and assigning the label "buddy" which reflects the social construction of the experience.

Every time I read Plato and Aristotle, I feel like they already had a handle on everything important. I think the key thing that differentiates the post-modernists from the modernists is that the posts had the work of the modernists to draw from.

Oh yah, from the very beginning Saussure included the "signified"  in even his simplest model of signs.  The key idea the semioticians added is the decoupling of the other parts of the sign from the signified.

And then the big contribution of later semioticians is the recognition that signs are fluid and interrelated.  So that a single term or text can be overdetermined with multiple simultaneous interpretations, and that's not only okay, but also sometimes inevitable. 

Probably some people do this, but it would be a misapplicaton of postmodernist ideas.  It's a similar logic pattern to the Christians who set up "moral relativism" as a strawman that means "all moralities are equal" (meaning there's no morality at all).  Everybody with some level of intellectual honesty is going to agree that lines have to be drawn somewhere, or nobody is going to be able to say anything at all.

 The advantage of looking at systems of meaning *as systems* is not that you can say that they're all equal (i.e. equally worthless). It's so that you can get a vantage point to evaluate their claims in view of the big picture of things like the stakes, the players, the history of the terminology, the intentions of the authors, the understanding of the audience, the assumptions and logic, and so on. 

 

Yeah, I read yr assumptions essay and liked it.  I'd say most postmodernists I've read agree that there's an objective reality, although more than a few would say that it's less important than the apprehension/interpretation of it.

Well, see, from my own experience as a deconverted, I think that they are reasoning rather than just thinking.  Although James mentions reasoning, he similarly characterizes the Christian's disregarding of materialism as deliberately irrational.

I don't think the Christian theist's reasoning is *good.* But I think that there is a valid ("trivially valid" in your terminology) logical construction of a rationale for the existence of God that's in play here. I think that much atheist/freethinking discourse fails to address that rationale in terms that the Christian Theist can find common ground on.  Rhetorician Richard Lanham would describe the situation as a bug in the atheist document--a spot where the desired communication does not take place.

Request: It kind of hurts my feelings when you call the appeal to emotion "rhetoric" even though I know that's not your intention. Can you please use the term "appeal to emotion," or "pathetic appeal" rather than reducing the entire discipline of rhetoric to this one tiny subject within it.  In return I agree not to refer to the entire field of psychology as "anal fixation." 

 If you're expecting the majority of people to decouple their emotions from their reason, then I can see why you wouldn't be optimistic.  Personally I question whether anybody can do it entirely 

But I am optimistic because I don't think it's necessary to override emotions.  It's possible to interact with them instead (in a non-exploitive way, naturally) as part of a dialog that takes all aspects of persuasion into account.

I won't be back until Monday.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts.