Week 1: Persuasion and the Creation of Knowledge

For the trace assignment, my group – myself, Ashley, and Megan R. – focused on the audience and the rhetor.  Before beginning my actual argument, I would like to echo Ashley’s comment that the table format was simultaneously helpful and problematic. While it did help me put Aristotle and Quintilian in conversation with each other, the table also made distinctions between categories and texts where there may not have needed to be any.  In foregrounding the relationship between Rhetoric and Institutes of Oratory, the table obscured slightly the relationships between the books and chapters within each text.  For our next trace, I may rethink slightly the format of the table in relationship to the questions being asked.

Part of my task in working on the trace was to discuss the rhetor as a cultural lens.  In doing so, I examined the following quote: “A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or appears to be proved from other statements that are so” (Aristotle 183).  In the quote’s explanation, I wrote that, in addition to being evidence that the rhetor is grounded in a cultural context, the quote might also be evidence of knowledge making.  When the topic came up in class, I had meant to bring up this point, but realized that I, although the idea made sense to me, I was not yet sure how to articulate it.  As such, I would like to use this additional reflection opportunity to expand and slightly complicate my claim.

According to Aristotle, an argument begins with “notions possessed by everybody” (180).  In other words, an argument begins with knowledge that everyone holds and believes in. The rhetor then reasons forward to his argument by creating a relationship between what is already known and what is new.  Aristotle himself does this in Rhetoric.  He begins a section on enthymeme by stating that “with regard to the persuasion achieved by proof or apparent proof; just as in dialectic there is induction on the one hand and syllogism or apparent syllogism on the other, so it is in rhetoric” (182).  Here he begins with a notion – or knowledge – that his audience presumably already believes: that dialectic uses both induction and syllogism.  Considering this audience is probably his students, it is not unreasonable to think that they would be familiar with dialectic.  Once he has established a familiar notion, Aristotle provides the relationship of similarity between dialectic and rhetoric or between old and new information: both use syllogism and induction.  Finally, Aristotle provides new information: “I call the enthymeme a rhetorical syllogism and the example a rhetorical induction” (182).  

Aristotle is able to create knowledge not just by providing new information, but by persuading his audience of its probability or its truth.  Once the audience is convinced, this new information becomes part of the “notions that everybody possesses,” allowing it to become the basis for additional knowledge.  The argument I make here equates knowledge and notions, an aspect of my argument on which I am still working.   Aristotle writes that “argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and here are people who one cannot instruct.  Here, then, we must use, as our modes of argument and persuasion, notions possessed by everybody” (180).  Does he mean here that these people – these popular audiences - cannot have knowledge?  Or simply that their knowledge must come from these propositions?   The question really asks about the intellectual separation between audience and rhetor, a question that Quintilian might have enjoyed and one that is important to me, but one that I will not address in this already lengthy blog post, lest a critical blog post become a critical essay.

The argument that I have presented here leaves me with two questions.  First, in terms of Aristotle, what is the relationship – in terms of knowledge – between the rhetor and the audience?  Second, is there a separation between persuasion and creating knowledge?  This more universal question is one that I hope to answer throughout the course, as it carries implications for my wider research interests and really for all of the texts we read.  It can be argued that all of our texts are persuasive, even though we as students use then as tools to learn.