Knowledge and the Straw Man

In reading and creating the schema for The New Rhetoric, I thought about knowledge in two different ways.

1. While reading, I kept going back to one of Jenn’s questions from last week.  In reference to Aristotle, she asks, “Is there a separation between persuasion and creating knowledge?”  I asked the same question of Perelman because his argumentation style - while seemingly allowing the audience more agency and control over the orator’s rhetoric – ultimately mimics Aristotle’s style.  The orator considers the audience’s objects of agreement and uses those to encourage the audience to adhere to the orator’s thesis (1393).  Unlike with Bitzer, the rhetorical act for Perelman (and Aristotle, I would argue) is not solely for encouraging action.  “The new rhetoric, like the old, seeks to persuade or convince, to obtain an adherence which may be theoretical to start with, although it may eventually be manifested through a disposition to act” (1391).  The beginning point of persuasion, Perelman implies, is affecting the audience on a “theoretical” level.  In The New Rhetoric, P and OT use the phrase “theoretical knowledge” (1377).  Carrying this over, then, one’s understanding of the theoretical can equate to one’s knowledge (though one could argue that the theoretical may only be one type of knowledge). If this is true, the orator is affecting (creating, changing, deleting?) the audience’s knowledge through persuasive means.  This implies that, for Perelman, persuasion and affecting theoretical (at least) knowledge are synonymous.

2. Jenn and I, while designing our schema, discussed Perelman’s conception of the universal audience.  We debated whether Perelman believes the universal audience actually exists.  According to the introduction to The New Rhetoric, P and OT “emphasize that there is no actual universal audience, not any unimpeachable facts or truths that could be presented to it, but rather, only an idea in the speaker’s mind about what such an audience would be were it to exist.  An argument may gain persuasive power by appearing to appeal to this universal audience” (1373).  This suggests that the construct of the universal audience in the rhetor’s mind can help him persuade his audience.  However, the meat of Perleman’s argument states that the rhetor needs to appeal to his specific audience in order to be persuasive.  Thereby, the rhetor would need to appeal to the audience’s image of the “universal audience.”  The audience’s understanding of the “universal audience’s” ideals, most likely, would be the ideals of the specific audience currently listening to the rhetor’s speech.  So, the rhetor isn’t appealing to the universal audience at all.  He is appealing to the specific audience.  This means that, for persuasive purposes, the universal audience doesn’t exist at all.  Furthermore, because there is no universal audience, there is no universal knowledge. P and OT assert that knowledge is relative in stating that they “will stay clear of that exorbitant pretension which would enthrone certain elements of knowledge as definitely clear and solid data, and would hold these elements to be identical in all normally constituted minds, independently of social and historical contingencies, the foundation of necessary and eternal truths” (1376).  The anonymous author of Dissoi Logoi echoes the lack of universal knowledge as he/she plays with and complicates terms (like just and unjust) that one may consider objective and completely knowable.  As he/she emphasizes, knowledge of a subject, term, etc. is relative to the position of the knower. 

Applying the reading’s arguments, this begs the question: How does one know what one knows?  (This question may be entirely too existential, but it also might be worth exploring.)  If knowledge is always contextual – dependent on a person’s social, cultural and historical situation as well as one’s individual experiences – how can one point to something and label it “knowledge”?  This question ties into Sarah, Jason and Kyle’s discussions of emotion and of moral relativism.  One can defend one’s knowledge based on logical facts (for example, “I know it’s raining because I can see the rain drops”).  Beyond the physical, though, one needs to make a series of justifications of what one “knows;” these justifications are often (maybe always?) based on what one senses/feels (intuition/emotion) to be true or what one believes is morally true. When thinking about the justification with emotions, we can apply Condit’s understanding of the relationship between reason and emotion. “Reason is merely a set of tools for allowing us to compare ‘our’ feelings across many contexts.  Reason cannot constrain or judge passion; it can only assist us in the broader process of seek to feel which passions might be better across more times, spaces, and entities” (103).  In other words, Condit uses reflection on past actions (which are driven by emotions) to justify particular actions emotions.  Likewise, reflection could be used to justify knowledge.  (“I know (feel) this is true because it is support by past feelings and their consequences.”)  This becomes a straw man, however, as one is only able to justify something as “knowledge” by pointing to other justifications, which are also based on what the person “knows.”

This brings me to a video a found about moral relativity, which points to interesting problems that occur when we claim there is no objective morality and then claim that some action or belief is “wrong.”

With that, another question comes to mind: how do we decide on communal knowledge and morality?  Generally, in the U.S., it is wrong to kill a person.  But, many states have laws that allow one can kill another person if one feels the person is threating one’s life (self defense laws).  This suggests that even generally agreed knowledge or morality is open to exceptions (which draws us back to the idea that there is no big M morality or big K knowledge).  So, to get back to the sentence that started this paragraph, how do we come to decide which laws of morality or “common knowledge” we will operate under?  What does this process actually look like?  Is it the rhetor’s job, ultimately, to help us come to this common knowledge and laws of morality?