https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillary_sphere

At the beginning of this episode, Sandy Hudson tells Nora Loreto about a podcast on NPR, Invisibilia.

The episodes that I listened to were about an anti-news news website in Stockton, California. How news has shifted and changed.

The Invisibilia episode is entitled, The Chaos Machine: An Endless Hole.

I ended up following this rabbit hole all the way to The View from Somewhere podcast episode featuring a discussion of Hallin’s spheres. Truly fascinating!

The View from Somewhere

Hallin’s spheres

At 11 minutes into this podcast episode, David Mindich provides an overview of Hallin’s spheres.

Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

Wikipedia: Hallin's spheres

I learned about this podcast from Sandy and Nora in their episode, Canada’s democratic deficit.

Hallin’s spheres

Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

In "The Letter Killeth" Frances Willard admonishes the acceptance of "truth" without acknowledging the social fictions at work in male-dominated exegesis:

We need women commentators to bring out the women's side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when woman's eye and man's together shall discern the perspective of the Bible's full-orbed revelation.

I do not at all impugn the good intention of the good men who have been our exegetes, and I bow humbly in the presence of their scholarship; but while they turn their linguistic telescopes on truth, I may be allowed to make a correction for the "personal equation" in the results which they espy.

As we move into the 19th century, some women speakers challenge the notions mentioned in a previous annotation about Mary Astell, particularly Sarah Grimké. In one of her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, Grimké touches upon a more oppressive tradition of making women feel powerful in the private, domestic sphere in order to keep them from reaching beyond their "natural" boundaries. She attempts to break down the historical boundaries of the public and private, the domestic and the political, the masculine and the feminine that someone like Astell still seems to uphold.

Mary Astell, another Enlightenment thinker, is really interesting to link up here. From the intro to her section in The Rhetorical Tradition,:

For Astell, women's rhetoric should focus on the art of conversation... This is women's proper rhetorical sphere, different from but in no way inferior to the public sphere in which men use oratory. (845)

Astell makes some interesting moves around the concept of "natural" throughout A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II. She claims that women's "natural sphere" is the private and domestic, which aligns with the social distinctions between public and private as masculine and feminine spheres. But she rejects the "natural" characteristic of the private as powerless.