Literally "chicanery"

There's an exploitable issue here, known to advertisers and scammers, that the knowledgeable might be harder to draw in with gut appeals, they tend to think they're too smart to fall for them. So they fall hard. So you go for their pride and their rational concerns: just as emotional, but cloaked as a rational appeal.

Interesting with the earlier note on sprezzatura. Again, there's a need to conceal the art, but not just to present it as a casual ability of speech, to present your professional obligation to your client as though you were a dispassionate observer.

Reminiscent of Aristotle's classification of constitutions by their ends. Though I note he grants Monarch's "pomp and splendor" while Aristotle gave them "self-preservation."

I'm not entirely sure why all these subdivisions are necessary? At least not two pages worth of elaboration on "importance tends to derive from personal proximity to (time/place/relationships/consequence)."

Heck and damn, there was a response I wrote about the word choice in "sentimental" and I can't find it now or who I was responding to. But this builds on its use, by making it a more robust emotional sense, rooted in more than just pathos.

Once again, there's the assumption that it's a function of the content of the crowd, rather than a function of crowds themselves, that is assumed to be at work.

I've actually been thinking of Latour a bit, and he makes a contrast in We Have Never Been Modern between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle's scientific methodologies to address this. Boyle opens his experiments up to the crowd's observation through ingenious advancements in the construction of his air pump, Hobbes closes society through unifying the Body Politic under social computation. Both are looking to stabilize these errors, but through a radically different means that sets off the Modern division between the social and scientific.

I am thinking here of Darwin's Moth, a species of moth Charles Darwin concluded must exist, from the shape of a certain orchid, 40 years before the moth itself was discovered. It is not the induction from orchid->moth, but dozens of moth-orchid interactions that lets you fill in the probable details.

e. Actually, I think this is better an example of analogy, now that I think about it.

e2. Moth-Orchid Dynamics would be a good name for a rock band

D&D has made me embarrassingly good at estimating probable outcomes of platonic die in my head.

Georges Canguilhem actually has a lot to say about how much of the history of physiology works under different mechanical analogies, thinking of the heart as a pump and the arm as a lever, but he cautions this, arguing that Science and Technique are two distinct things that borrow and influence each other, but are not extensions of one from the other. Still, the analogy logic of how we understand the long-standing human body in terms of the thing we just invented seems relevant here.

I believe Campbell addresses some of the uncertainty of Inductive Reasoning here. The phrase "insensible gradation" seems meaningful--how we go from a possibility to moral certainty is something fundamentally difficult in a manner Hume cannot accept. But Campbell explains in this section many of the difficulties of this, and how it's still useable, for moral judgment.

On the same side, I come back to Bayesian Probabilities, wondering if Campbell knew about them, and how they transfer statistical, mathematical knowledge towards determining if a hypothesis is true. Once again, I'm hesitant that I'll exceed my grasp of stats if I talk to much about it, though.

Apparently, this is a surprisingly successful rationale for meteorology. If you just assume "tomorrow's weather will resemble today's," you'll end up more right than not, and can actually beat some meteorologists. Then again, Jim Flowers and the KMTV Accu-Weather Forecast might have just been terrible.

Hmm, with Campbell's four stages of persuasion, it seems that Rhetoric moves across this division, first informing the subject, then moving them to action. It's the delivery mechanism of logic, the information superhighway, if you will.

Interesting division. You get a number of contemporary articles contrasting hope and fear in political appeals, also using a similar "elevating/lowering" rationale. But fear I see usually linked with anger, even though it's one of Campbell's "vehement" appeals.

WOO! YEAH! Anyways, I'm hype for this, because getting away from prescriptivism opens up a lot for a theory of thought. Blair looks for a stable, natural sense of eloquence, but Campbell opens the door for more socially constructed values.

To me, what's interesting with this subdivision is how it allows for incomplete rhetoric, arguments that engage or achieve less than all four ends. Campbell looks at it linearly, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. Moving someone without informing or pleasing them in particular--you get the results, but it's not in a necessarily lasting way. St. Augustine (I will never stop citing Augustine) warned against oration that gains applause, but doesn't move the listeners' hearts towards the right end.

I'm in a Digital Humanities course, but we've spent a lot of time discussing the ways DH emphasizes overlooked issues of Analog Humanities, where photo scanners let us pick up the details that publishers lose in the transcription from manuscript to print. Fervente calamo certainly comes across through vibrant rhetorical trickery and flimflam, but there's nothing like the physical marks a furious pen stamps on a document.

Interesting connection with Vico, good kairos is not just about external context, but also the speaker's ability to seize their own moment.

Nice ¢25 word, here. Means "raised," as in embossed letters or bas relief. Pronounce "reh-LEE-vo," in case you, like me, need to pepper your conversation with unnecessary ornateness because you, like an Athenian, like to dazzle through "showy but false eloquence."

"Good Sense" being defined as "the sense not to be Inappropriate." "Inappropriate" being defined as "working within the boundaries established by Good Sense."

It's politeness all the way down!

This is kind of a wander, but I wonder if you can run this backwards? Like, if you're looking for genius, don't look at the masterful orator, look for the girl who has lacking mechanical skill but still pulls it off. It won't be top-tier work, but she's able to demonstrate a natural attention to the universe's current of Eloquence.

I'd like to connect this with my earlier comment on movies whose enthusiasm outstrips their ability. The quality of passion is a hard thing to pin down--St. Augustine argues that a preacher driven by true faith will outstrip the best educated orator, but at the same time, makes allowances that you can't expect that of everyone, even people who do have true faith. This arrangement also means this section is in immediate parallel with Blair's notion that oratorical skill is inherent and natural, and the real rhetoric was in our hearts all along. I'm pretty suspicious of this as a method of teaching rhetoric, but, at the same time, I can't deny that sometime someone actually does pull off "true of heart" oratorical skill. Nothing technically amazing, but delivered like a champ because they believed in their cause.

Dead opposite of Rickert, here, and stemming from Blair's need to establish a linear development and hierarchy of language.

I was going to make a joke earlier that the Protestant approach would be to declare all taste equally bad in the eyes of God, but he's actually kind of doing that here. "Why are there differences in taste?" "Because we live in a sin-cursed world."

That puts an interesting wrench into Blair's approach. He has a restriction in his writing, because he has an answer he has to build to. No matter what, Blair's goal is to uphold and confirm the polite taste, and as a second to that, try to identify how taste works. Hume, I think, comes off stronger because he doesn't have this restriction.

Might be a practical inquiry to look at how technological developments, like telescopes and microscopes, historically impacted this discussion on taste. When technological mediation means that someone with normative eye functionality can beat the best in terms of distance or detail, it has to shift the perception somewhat.

Polite Literature is all about following the crowd and inclining towards the comfort of the majority, so there's a bit of a question loaded in this.

It goes to the heart of the question of taste: surely we've all had foods we don't love, but still eat because the weird culture of St. Louis demands we, politely, eat it.

As true today as it was then.

Seems Hugh is taking something of a step back to the weak defense here, seeing Rhetoric as a means of "polishing" the already developed knowledge of another field. Which is odd, because he comes out fiercely for Rhetoric being a key step within the process of other fields on the very next page?

I found a blog post here from a British library that elaborates on "polite literature," and emphasizes it as a matter of a particular middle-to-upper class culture, that needed to be qualified due to increasing economic demand for more books.

This sentence might be a good phrase to fit into a "What is Rhetoric" question. The rest of the paragraph also goes on to exhort the collective and collaborative nature of knowledge, which is a perspective that favors the value of Rhetoric.

Look at him! I'm pretty sure this guy was a villain in a Star Wars novel

Connect with Vico and Verisimilitude. These notions of compatibility and construction again must incline to the generalized audience's expectations.

I've never read Orlando Furioso, so I can't really comment on it's offbeat character, but I do see a connection here with the so-bad-it's-good style of filming, particularly the movies that win you over as actually good. Like House (surrealist Japanese film with a remarkable poster) or Miami Connection (...just click). If they're found to please...

Some things will never change...

Thinking of this scene from Men In Black, where J explains to K that "a person is smart, people are dumb, panicky animals." J's more egalitarian, it's something about crowd size rather than an inherent problem in the body of the common multitude, but it's built on the same observation that you can't speak to the masses the same way you might talk to a peer. J endorses secrecy for their own good, Vico endorses explaining it in a simplified way, then raising the discourse over time.

I am curious in this translation to "common sense." The phrase is often used today as the homespun opposite of book learning, either practical experience, finding the simplest solution, or just a willingness to cut through PC regulations to say what we're (nominally) really thinking. Vico's use doesn't seem to square with these, it's about likelihoods and probabilities. I wonder if there might be a better term for this? Or does that contrast work for Vico's meaning?

A femina bona, I suppose. But as opposed to Quintillian who's talking about the big E Ethics and capital T Truth, Astell is addressing a very immediate and straightforward set of prescriptions for a particular social role in the family.

Seems relevant today. I've seen a lot of arguments about the proper tone and etiquette of online conversations about political issues, particularly shunning anything that pushes the opposition too hard. But as for Astell, I connect this with my earlier note on the fine line of early women's rhetoric. Look at early anti-suffrage propaganda, any suggestion of change can only result in terrible social destruction.

Vico would say it's better to have both. But for Astell, who's writing for social conversation, the impact of rumors and seeming are arguably even more important than for affairs of state.

Might be the only time in history a feminist movement was deemed "too catholic"

It's an interesting switch on the Rhetoric-as-clothes argument when your presumed audience cares about fashion.

That's Scudery's influence, I'll bet. Salon rhetoric really discouraged showing off, and preferred a social contract of inclining to the majority's ability when it came to stylistic elements. I believe there's an interesting feminist reading of this--female rhetoric has to walk a finer line for fear of threatening social norms of power.

Again, with Sheridan and Austin, education that builds up the disadvantaged, as opposed to Vico, a rhetoric that reaches down to the masses.

Would "Zizekian Flailing" fall here or under X?

yyyyyyyyep

I get the concept: Austin's goal is to formally record the non-language parts of elocution in a standardized written form. Chirography for motions instead of sounds. But I can't see a way to match up the poem, the chart, and the pages of illustrations in a way that makes sense.

John Gay's the guy who wrote The Beggar's Opera, which was later turned into a musical Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, which is mostly famous for the song, "Mack the Knife." You get the same politics, issues of greed and a general disgust towards society. Though I don't really see Sinatra singing what's on the next page.

I remember David Crystal having quite a bit to say about 18th-19th Century standardization of pronunciation, particularly Sheridan (he does not like him). He emphasizes how big a deal Sheridan's lectures were (estimates he brought in £150k in 2004 dollars [Stories of English 406]), and how he influenced John Walker, the guy who codified Received Pronunciation. Pretty much the father of prescriptivism for elocution, which means you definitely already have opinions on him.

This line of thinking seems like it'd have a lot of resonance with things like Chomsky's notion of Universal Grammar, but Sheridan's argument that this language needs to be refined through educating the nobler faculties would also have some interesting historical opposition. This is contemporary with Rousseau's Emile, which is basically the opposite of this.

Building on my note with Vico, who emphasized Rhetoric as the tool that enables reaching the bodily-minded vulgus, Sheridan thinks the issue is that we need to elevate the generally-prevailing taste. The dynamic here is simple: how much can you expect to be able to shape your audience?

I... am not sure what that sounds like. This?

Canguilhem also, in Knowledge of Life, notes that humans are unique in their ability to shelter and compensate for the anormal in their society. This further lessens the impact of natural selection in determining the normal and emphasizes how normativity is constructed by the norm.

Canguilhem's basis for this is also pretty interesting. Medicine is the one science that has "good" and "bad" as measurements. He defines health as "a capacity to tolerate variations in norms...The measure of health is a certain capacity to overcome organic crises and to establish a new physiological order, different from the old" ("The Normal and the Pathological" loc 2627)

A surviving fragment of Protagoras, specifically.

Ah, so quizzes are fair for Rhetoric, I see.

:(

Answer to my earlier question, and I like this with his later point that he believes each court should have a rhetorician on hand like a philosopher: not only to ensure that the ruler is acting in accordance with the (t)ruth, but that it also seems that way to the general public. Good PR in governance affects the execution of the government's interests

Interesting, this seems like a cura personalis-ish approach that sees the value of literature and the liberal arts for scientists alongside the advancement of communications technology (printing press) and intellectual organization (the university).

Gonna put a shoutout to Lolo if she remembers Schiappa and Poulaksos coming to blows on defining Sophism by present standards and if it's possible to get beyond that.

This is something that interested me in Kennedy's history of Renaissance rhetoric--with rare exception, it's practiced under autocratic princes. Vico's later in history, but Italy hasn't been unified yet, and Vico served the King of Naples. The paragraph goes on to explain how legal rhetoric helped turn a system to enforce aristocratic privilege into something more equitable, so there's the obvious question: why would the rich and unquestionably powerful allow this?

So this is basically Sapir-Whorf, right? Didn't know the argument was that old.

Good note for the "what is Rhetoric?" discussion. The "common opinion" attitude is important in the context of Vico's earlier point on the court rhetorician. Ornateness and common sense don't seem like words that normally fit together, but the key word is "appropriate." There's no iron rule for appropriateness that can be discerned philosophically, you have to engage your audience on their understanding.

Mentioned here about embracing the rhetoric of half-truths and propaganda, interesting to think about the rhetoric of bullshiting--psyching yourself up is a form of self-construction, and I do think that there's a productive use of bullshitting around an issue to open up new avenues of approach. I also think of how Ralph Cintron in Angelstown talks about albures, a kind of bilingual pun-game that turns ordinary phrases dirty, as a form of honing and demonstrating intellectual skill and shrewdness in casual, workday chat.

Who annotates the annotaters?

What's interesting with the Rickert is the history of early shamans trying to get away from "things as they really were" and the world only measured in animal, sensory data. Then, with the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment, there's a pressure to re-emphasize that empirical.

Unsurprising from a guy who discovered calculus: it presumes symbols can be derived to their preceding ideas.

Through a one-way mirror, though. But to connect to my last point, when we compose a letter (or an annotation), we try to anticipate our audience in our mind. So there's an entanglement of events of writing and thinking, even if it is a linear one (per the earlier comment).

Interesting for a "when is rhetoric?" question--you can't make an appeal without using it on yourself as well.

Athanasius' qualifier here makes me think he's seeing the journal being itself a stand in monk to keep you honest. Perhaps a connection to Latour, where the process of making a record is more important than the record itself. I also think this has an interesting connection with the shaman walls in Rickert, and the sense of rhetoric as ritual, and where the author is the sole audience.

Man, how many times have I had to explain my field to my dad?

What's interesting here, though, is the locations that Mucklebauer approaches this question in: job interviews and bars. I have friends in medical science, and it's interesting to talk about the difference in perspectives on our fields. My brother's an entomologist--no one at the bar knows what that is, but "insect science" is a legitimate thing to look into, and it's something you can be an expert in. Studying Rhetoric is like we're pulling the wool over their eyes, making up a field as some kind of absurd scam.

Important connection for teaching 1900 and teaching Logos to students. It's not just facts and data, it's an appeal to probable truths. I noted a similar thing later in this article with Vigo, Bacon, and treating logos as an appeal, rather than a ruling.

I wonder if there's anyone really embracing Rhetoric as half-truths and propaganda. Feels like a bad time to champion it, now, but George Kennedy points out it was still a major, even celebrated, factor in ancient Greek Rhetoric.

Interesting with Vigo's earlier point that Rhetoric, unlike Cartesianism, actually trains responsibility for civic action. I see a lot of connections being made by people that sees scientific truths as the precursor of political action (Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson's twitter in particular), rather than one means of communication.

You know, I've never read much of Ong's writings on Ramus, and don't know much of the context this had on his later works, but Ong's orality/literacy divide struck me as a binary that strongly denies one is superior to the other.

:(

Context of Rickert, the magic seemed to be very alive in drawings. Writing's absolutely a flatter medium, but it'd be interesting to note the media differences between orality and drawing.

Connection to our earlier discussion on the strong defense--as Rhetoric discerns and develops the Truth, likewise it can constitute things like hands an animals?

I am curious about the anthropology of the soul, and how the idea's believed to be developed (I suppose I would say "discovered") over time. The notion of transcendence of the physical world developing after discovering symbols seems pretty relevant to prehistoric Rhetoric.

OK, so this class is concerned with Pre-Toga and Post-Toga Rhetoric, but absolutely not the Toga Era. Got it.

Huh, kind of interesting to think about no-go cultural developments that had to be redeveloped later. You get a lot of it in the Renaissance, but those at least rediscovered lost copies of Cicero or a copy of Averroes made it North. Here, there's no record and everyone died, so it's remade from scratch.

The diversity of Rhetoric reminds me of a point in Michael Gagarin's "Did The Sophists Aim to Persuade?" which looks at these elements, but also sophism as performative. He points to Gorgias' defense of Helen being a bit of a "with one hand tied behind my back" boast, taking on handicaps to show off his language skills. From my perspective, the Encomium on Helen makes a lot more sense that way, and I'm interested in how a spiritual aim alters other texts.

e. and, of course, obviously, the performative has a connection with Orpheus and music.

I'm interested in the Benefits of Tedium Latour alludes to here. He comes back to his tech choice at the end, defending the legitimacy of his, I guess, "science aesthetics," but this is about how the inherent inconvenience of the medium is valuable. It reminds me of a friend who was recently lecturing me about how automated workout logging apps aren't worthwhile because it's the process of logging that's more important than the data.

For Latour, who's all about the process and the "show your work," changes that make our lives easier never just make our lives easier. For Quintillian's detailed outline of the education of the rhetor, the long impact of these changes can have a major role in how you create a "vir bonus."