Rhetoric and Epistemology Notes 1

(Originally written January 10, 2007 in Book 12)

So, I have decided that I will (for my class assignment) write on Rhetoric and epistemology. I have three articles to read before I truly narrow the scope and pinpoint my exact thesis.

Article #1

Rhetoric Denuded and Redressed
Figs & Figures

John Poulakos
Steve Whitson

Quarterly Journal of Speech, August 1995

Rumors and phobias: "Although I do not understand their arguments, I am keen on dismissing them".

Curious preferences: Why do we prefer a handful of certainty to a carful of possibilities?

Reality has real problems, humanity has artificial ones.

Truth has never been found.

Knowledge is seen as disposable.

Nietzsche's definition of truth: "Mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphizing, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adored, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions" (379).

Knowledge to the common people is something strange being reduced to something familiar. The instinct of fear demands us to know.

Epistemic potential leads to a real job and respect, which leads to the loss of evidence and humanity.

"A deficient orator is always preying on audiences" (380).

Democritus: "We know nothing authentically about anything, but each one's opines are simply what flows into him"

We shape the world (and language) in our bodily image (Somatomorphic Nominalism)

"Epistemologists will never understand that Platonism is before anything else an erotic doctrine... sensorial spiritualism at its Dionysian best" (382).

"Aesthetics is nothing else than applied physiology" (383).

Shameful poverty- Gorgias would be proud and Plato's distrust of rhetoric is vindicated by the rhetorician's abuse of language.

Another rhetoric abuse of language: "The epistemologist's point is that a definition lets one get to the heart of the matter. Let us be clear. Matter has no heart, only surfaces" (384).

The ethics of rhetoric: "Words are not one's own to do as one pleases. Respect for words and doing justice to language are two things needed for any ethics of rhetoric" (385).

Article #2
Gorgias as Philosopher of Being: Epistemic Foundationalism in Sophistic Thought
Frank D. Walters

Philosophy has long regarded rhetoric as intellectual lightweights and moral relativists.

The Sophists moved the Athenian culture from mythos to logos, from myth to logical thinking.

The sophist epistemology put speech at the center of knowing.

Sophism takes being as the province of thought and discourse.

"Sophists were more than 'mere' rhetoricians and teachers of a suspect art" (144).

Epistemic foundationalism: the unification of rhetoric and philosophy.

Being, to the Sophist, is the primary object of intellectual and moral inquiry. Being can only be known through language.

"Where there is no discourse, there is no knowledge and, correlatively, no possibility of knowing Being in any philosophically justifiable way.

Sophistic anti-logic and the problem of Being

Anti-logic: the theory of argumentation that stands in opposition to dialectics, "a community of speakers using the resources of argument to construct a commonly accepted body of truths, which can then be disseminated as knowledge" (145). Dialectics aims at one thesis being true, anti-logic posits one thesis against another in search for knowledge. Dialectics ends when knowledge is found, anti logic is a continuous and recursive process.

The price for the freedom that epistemological foundationalism is epistemological uncertainty and undecidability.

Kairos as the motive force of anti-logic.

John Poulakos' definition of sophistic rhetoric: "the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible" (146).

Gorges uses knowledge as "the experience of the irrational and the impossible" (148). "Knowledge is contradictory" (148).

Gorgias and the rhetoric of Being: The Encomium of Helen

Gorgias aims at presenting his side as the truth of the case.

Truth is shown to be language bound in Helen.

Logos and Reality: On Nature or Not-Being

Gorgias' epistemology is an irrational method of contradiction and continual self-destruction. All reality is contradictory.

"For one to know, a judgment between contradictory realities must be made, with no absolute assurance that judgment is on the side of truth" (150).

Gorgias holds that Truth is relative to the individual.

Gorgias' take on Being:
1) Being does not exist
2) If Being does exist it cannot be known
3) If Being can be known, it cannot be communicated

The logical (rather anti-logical) next step would be:
4) If Being can be communicated it cannot exist, which is absurd.

"It is possible, as Gorgias notes, to think of things which are not real, such as chariots racing on the sea. Though we think of them, they are nonetheless not real, and their non-reality is the object of our thought" (152).

But, if something is an object of our thought it exists. Existence implies reality and therefore a non-real thing derives its reality from its existence as an object of our thought.

Gorgias denies that knowledge is propositional.