This term, "attractor," comes up quite a bit in this reading, and I'm not entirely clear on what it means. I can deduce that an "attractor" might be a focus point to which a group is drawn (for example, Rickert later writes, "In the case of the sophists and glib talkers, that would mean that increased discursive sophistication was an attractor for their situations" (358)). But, because it comes up quite a few times in different contexts (especially in crucial moments such as "But if rhetoric is not the achievement of an idea of how to persuade, but rather the growing recognition and discourse about what is an attractor given certain social complexities..." (367)), should this be a term I have a more comprehensive understanding of?

God, the Great Strange Attractor

In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of numerical values toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system. System values that get close enough to the attractor values remain close even if slightly disturbed... An attractor is called strange if it has a fractal structure. This is often the case when the dynamics on it are chaotic, but strange nonchaotic attractors also exist. If a strange attractor is chaotic, exhibiting sensitive dependence on initial conditions, then any two arbitrarily close alternative initial points on the attractor, after any of various numbers of iterations, will lead to points that are arbitrarily far apart (subject to the confines of the attractor), and after any of various other numbers of iterations will lead to points that are arbitrarily close together. Thus a dynamic system with a chaotic attractor is locally unstable yet globally stable: once some sequences have entered the attractor, nearby points diverge from one another but never depart from the attractor.