Likewise, they rejected the presocratic belief that their cities had received their laws from some deity. Although the Sophists began life by teaching excellence, they soon fell into questioning the very validity of the concept. How, they asked, could excellence be measured? There was no higher authority to appeal to. They doubted everything. Which argument was correct depended on which side of the argument you stood.
For many Sophists, there was no right or wrong answer. If there were no higher authority for morality, then surely it depended on each person to decide. Protagoras, for example, taught his students to praise and blame the same thing. He boasted that he could turn any weak argument into one of strength.
The idea behind phenomenalism is that we can only know ideas present in our own minds and that we cannot make a true statement about anything outside our own minds. He taught that only those practical experiences we know through our senses by way of observation are our source of real knowledge empiricism.
Finally, regarding relativism, he held that truth had no independent existence. This, in my opinion, had the unfortunate result of creating a situation where there were no objective standards to judge by. However, he qualified this by saying that in making judgments we naturally know what is morally correct and that this should be our guide. This could, in my opinion, have left many pupils with no guideline at all except to follow their self-interest and expediency. However, it must be pointed out that most commentators admit that not all Sophists were skeptics, although apparently a good number were.
Regarding their view of society, there were many viewpoints. One group of Sophists held that man as a natural creature was subject to the laws of nature that he must obey physis. On the other hand, man was a member of the Polis and the laws under which he lived were governed by convention or custom nomos.
They were man made laws. These did not command the same degree of obedience. The example used by a number of writers is the case of traffic lights. If the government wished, it could change these to mean the opposite. The dialectical, or give and take approach, allows people to share and test ideas with one another with the goal of a more prosperous city-state.
He defined rhetoric as the ability to see, in each particular case, the available means of persuasion. He recognized the importance of audience analysis : that different things appeal to different people. To put it in contemporary terms, let us look at an example from the marketing and advertising world.
Mattel, the company who makes Barbie has long been interested in selling the doll as well as her friends and accessories worldwide.
Currently, a Barbie is sold somewhere in the world every 2 seconds! Researching the Japanese doll market, advertisers found that Japanese girls do not play with their dolls in the same way as American girls—dressing them, fixing their hair, and role-playing with them. Instead, Japanese girls might place the dolls on a shelf and admire them. As a result, their Japanese television commercials are explicit in the verbal messages as well as the images of playing with not looking at Barbie.
Mattel has taken the same message—sell Barbie—and constructed it differently depending on the context and their audience. This would be an example of creating the necessary appeals to persuade kids to buy Barbie in each particular case America versus Japan. The second part of his definition dealing with persuasion suggests that Aristotle conceptualized a very specific and limited scope for rhetoric. Rhetoric exists in contexts where a person or a group of people is engaged in the process of communicating for the purpose of changing another in some way.
Change may come in the form of trying to influence a prospective voter in an upcoming election or convincing a jury on the guilt or innocence of a defendant in a murder trial. As we will discuss later in this chapter, the sole focus on persuasion is one of the critiques that contemporary theorists have when assessing rhetorical theory. While much of the classical theorists were men and dealt with traditionally male roles, Pan Chao c.
A strong believer in the benefits of education, she was one of the first people to argue for the education of girls and women. The role of women and other nondominant groups is another concern of contemporary theorists that will be discussed later in more detail.
They deserve recognition for combining much of what was known from the Greeks and Romans into more complete theoretical systems.
Many of the concepts to emerge from this time are still relevant today, although they may have been transformed in some way to reflect a more contemporary context. You may, for example, recognize them in the setting of a public speaking course. In the classical system there were three types of public speeches—legal, political, and ceremonial.
How is it possible for the orator to bring the audience to a certain emotion? Aristotle's technique essentially rests on the knowledge of the definition of every significant emotion. According to such a definition, someone who believes that he has suffered a slight from a person who is not entitled to do so, etc.
If we take such a definition for granted, it is possible to deduce circumstances in which a person will most probably be angry; for example, we can deduce i in what state of mind people are angry and ii against whom they are angry and iii for what sorts of reason. Aristotle deduces these three factors for several emotions in the chapters II. With this equipment, the orator will be able, for example, to highlight such characteristics of a case as are likely to provoke anger in the audience.
In comparison with the tricks of former rhetoricians, this method of arousing emotions has a striking advantage: The orator who wants to arouse emotions must not even speak outside the subject; it is sufficient to detect aspects of a given subject that are causally connected with the intended emotion. For Aristotle, there are two species of arguments: inductions and deductions Posterior Analytics I.
A deduction sullogismos is an argument in which, certain things having been supposed, something different from the suppositions results of necessity through them Topics I. The inductive argument in rhetoric is the example paradeigma ; unlike other inductive arguments, it does not proceed from many particular cases to one universal case, but from one particular to a similar particular if both particulars fall under the same genus Rhet. At first glance, this seems to be inconsistent, since a non-necessary inference is no longer a deduction.
If the former interpretation is true, then Aristotle concedes in the very definition of the enthymeme that some enthymemes are not deductive. But if the latter interpretation which has a parallel in An.
For Aristotle, an enthymeme is what has the function of a proof or demonstration in the domain of public speech, since a demonstration is a kind of sullogismos and the enthymeme is said to be a sullogismos too.
In general, Aristotle regards deductive arguments as a set of sentences in which some sentences are premises and one is the conclusion, and the inference from the premises to the conclusion is guaranteed by the premises alone.
Since enthymemes in the proper sense are expected to be deductive arguments, the minimal requirement for the formulation of enthymemes is that they have to display the premise-conclusion structure of deductive arguments.
This is why enthymemes have to include a statement as well as a kind of reason for the given statement. The reason why the enthymeme, as the rhetorical kind of proof or demonstration, should be regarded as central to the rhetorical process of persuasion is that we are most easily persuaded when we think that something has been demonstrated.
Hence, the basic idea of a rhetorical demonstration seems to be this: In order to make a target group believe that q , the orator must first select a sentence p or some sentences p 1 … p n that are already accepted by the target group; secondly he has to show that q can be derived from p or p 1 … p n , using p or p 1 … p n as premises.
Given that the target persons form their beliefs in accordance with rational standards, they will accept q as soon as they understand that q can be demonstrated on the basis of their own opinions.
Consequently, the construction of enthymemes is primarily a matter of deducing from accepted opinions endoxa. That a deduction is made from accepted opinions—as opposed to deductions from first and true sentences or principles—is the defining feature of dialectical argumentation in the Aristotelian sense. Thus, the formulation of enthymemes is a matter of dialectic, and the dialectician has the competence that is needed for the construction of enthymemes.
However, in the rhetorical context there are two factors that the dialectician has to keep in mind if she wants to become a rhetorician too, and if the dialectical argument is to become a successful enthymeme.
First, the typical subjects of public speech do not—as the subject of dialectic and theoretical philosophy—belong to the things that are necessarily the case, but are among those things that are the goal of practical deliberation and can also be otherwise. Second, as opposed to well-trained dialecticians the audience of public speech is characterized by an intellectual insufficiency; above all, the members of a jury or assembly are not accustomed to following a longer chain of inferences.
Therefore enthymemes must not be as precise as a scientific demonstration and should be shorter than ordinary dialectical arguments. This, however, is not to say that the enthymeme is defined by incompleteness and brevity. Rather, it is a sign of a well-executed enthymeme that the content and the number of its premises are adjusted to the intellectual capacities of the public audience; but even an enthymeme that failed to incorporate these qualities would still be enthymeme.
In a well known passage Rhet. Properly understood, both passages are about the selection of appropriate premises, not about logical incompleteness. The remark that enthymemes often have few or less premises concludes the discussion of two possible mistakes the orator could make Rhet. The latter method is unpersuasive, for the premises are not accepted, nor have they been introduced.
The former method is problematic, too: if the orator has to introduce the needed premises by another deduction, and the premises of this pre-deduction too, etc. Arguments with several deductive steps are common in dialectical practice, but one cannot expect the audience of a public speech to follow such long arguments. This is why Aristotle says that the enthymeme is and should be from fewer premises.
Just as there is a difference between real and apparent or fallacious deductions in dialectic, we have to distinguish between real and apparent or fallacious enthymemes in rhetoric. The topoi for real enthymemes are given in chapter II. The fallacious enthymeme pretends to include a valid deduction, while it actually rests on a fallacious inference.
Note that neither classification interferes with the idea that premises have to be accepted opinions: with respect to the signs, the audience must believe that they exist and accept that they indicate the existence of something else, and with respect to the probabilities, people must accept that something is likely to happen.
However, it is not clear whether this is meant to be an exhaustive typology. But there are several types of sign-arguments too; Aristotle offers the following examples:. Sign-arguments of type i and iii can always be refuted, even if the premises are true; that is to say that they do not include a valid deduction sullogismos ; Aristotle calls them asullogistos non-deductive.
Sign-arguments of type ii can never be refuted if the premise is true, since, for example, it is not possible that someone has fever without being ill, or that someone has milk without having given birth, etc.
Now, if some sign-enthymemes are valid deductions and some are not, it is tempting to ask whether Aristotle regarded the non-necessary sign-enthymemes as apparent or fallacious arguments. However, there seems to be a more attractive reading: We accept a fallacious argument only if we are deceived about its logical form. So it seems as if Aristotle didn't regard all non-necessary sign-arguments as fallacious or deceptive; but even if this is true, it is difficult for Aristotle to determine the sense in which non-necessary sign-enthymemes are valid arguments, since he is bound to the alternative of deduction and induction, and neither class seems appropriate for non-necessary sign-arguments.
Cicero, Brutus , 46—48 and Isocrates. Aristotle's book Topics lists some hundred topoi for the construction of dialectical arguments. These lists of topoi form the core of the method by which the dialectician should be able to formulate deductions on any problem that could be proposed.
Most of the instructions that the Rhetoric gives for the composition of enthymemes are also organized as lists of topoi ; especially the first book of the Rhetoric essentially consists of topoi concerning the subjects of the three species of public speech.
It is striking that the work that is almost exclusively dedicated to the collection of topoi , the book Topics , does not even make an attempt to define the concept of topos. According to this definition, the topos is a general argumentative form or pattern, and the concrete arguments are instantiations of the general topos. That the topos is a general instruction from which several arguments can be derived, is crucial for Aristotle's understanding of an artful method of argumentation; for a teacher of rhetoric who makes his pupils learn ready samples of arguments would not impart the art itself to them, but only the products of this art, just as if someone pretending to teach the art of shoe-making only gave samples of already made shoes to his pupils see Sophistical Refutations b36ff.
By recalling the houses along the street we can also remember the associated items. At least within the system of the book Topics , every given problem must be analyzed in terms of some formal criteria: Does the predicate of the sentence in question ascribe a genus or a definition or peculiar or accidental properties to the subject?
Does the sentence express a sort of opposition, either contradiction or contrariety, etc.? Does the sentence express that something is more or less the case? Does it maintain identity or diversity?
Are the words used linguistically derived from words that are part of an accepted premise? Depending on such formal criteria of the analyzed sentence one has to refer to a fitting topos. For this reason, the succession of topoi in the book Topics is organized in accordance with their salient formal criteria; and this, again, makes a further mnemotechnique superfluous.
More or less the same is true of the Rhetoric —except that most of its topoi are structured by material and not by formal criteria, as we shall see in section 7. Other topoi often include the discussion of iv examples; still other topoi suggest v how to apply the given schemes.
Often Aristotle is very brief and leaves it to the reader to add the missing elements. In a nutshell, the function of a topos can be explained as follows. First of all, one has to select an apt topos for a given conclusion. The conclusion is either a thesis of our opponent that we want to refute, or our own assertion we want to establish or defend.
Accordingly, there are two uses of topoi : they can either prove or disprove a given sentence; some can be used for both purposes, others for only one of them. Most topoi are selected by certain formal features of the given conclusion; if, for example, the conclusion maintains a definition, we have to select our topos from a list of topoi pertaining to definitions, etc.
Once we have selected a topos that is appropriate for a given conclusion, the topos can be used to construe a premise from which the given conclusion can be derived. If the construed premise is accepted, either by the opponent in a dialectical debate or by the audience in public speech, we can draw the intended conclusion.
It could be either, as some say, the premise of a propositional scheme such as the modus ponens, or, as others assume, as the conditional premise of a hypothetical syllogism. Aristotle himself does not favor one of these interpretations explicitly. But even if he regarded the topoi as additional premises in a dialectical or rhetorical argument, it is beyond any doubt that he did not use them as premises that must be explicitly mentioned or even approved by the opponent or audience.
This topic was not announced until the final passage of Rhet. II, so that most scholars have come to think of this section as a more or less self-contained treatise. The insertion of this treatise into the Rhetoric is motivated by the claim that, while Rhet. In the course of Rhet. After an initial exploration of the field of delivery and style III.
The following chapters III. Chapters III. Again metaphors are shown to play a crucial role for that purpose, so that the topic of metaphor is taken up again and deepened by extended lists of examples. Chapter III. The philosophical core of Aristotle's treatise on style in Rhet.
A great Roman rhetorician, Quintilian's reputation rests on Institutio Oratoria Institutes of Oratory , a compendium of the best of ancient rhetorical theory. The definition which best suits its real character is that which makes rhetoric the science of speaking well. For this definition includes all the virtues of oratory and the character of the orator as well, since no man can speak well who is not good himself. As described in his autobiography The Confessions , Augustine was a student of law and for ten years a teacher of rhetoric in North Africa before taking up study with Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and an eloquent orator.
The aim, what you intend, is to persuade by speaking. Almost anything related to the act of saying something to someone--in speech or in writing--can conceivably fall within the domain of rhetoric as a field of study.
Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change , Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.
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