BOOTH

BOOTH

1. rhetoric includes both the verbal and visual garbage flooding our lives and the tools for cleaning things up. Rhetoric is the whole range of arts, not just of persuasion, but of: (removing misunderstanding and producing misunderstanding.)

2. Can't escape this ambiguity or its ethical implications

3. Three Kinds of Reality

   • 1. Permanent, unchangeable, non-contingent truth
     • Many realities are not made by rhetoric & rhetoric can even distort these realities
     • example: the earth revolves around the sun
   • 2. Realities changeable but still not created by rhetoric
     • The history of how nature moves from contingency to contingency- contingent facts change naturally all the time (example- the color of the sky, weather, seasons)
   • 3. Contingent realities about our lives
     • created realities that are then subject to further change
     • example: fall onto ice, break arm - trying to explain how it happened - clumsiness, in a rush etc. (vast majority of our social lives fall into 3rd reality
     • The only one that involves Rhetoric

4. Many realities are not made by rhetoric but reflected or distorted by rhetoric, Rhetoric us used to shift our attitudes, how we approach things (often temporary realities); creates a multiplicity of judgements about what the realities "really are.

5. Study of rhetorical issues us our best resource for distinguishing the good makings from the bad

6. There are some thing which rhetoric simply surrounds and some things which rhetoric actually creates.

7. Listening Rhetoric

   • The whole range of communicative arts for reducing misunderstanding by paying full attention to opposing views.
   • listening to the other side, opportunity to understand where the speaker is coming from.
   • not just to persuade effectively, rather, to find common ground behind a conflict.
   • Pursuit of shared assumptions that both sides depend on (beliefs, faiths, warrants, commonplaces, etc.)
   • "The whole range of communicative arts for reducing misunderstanding by paying full attention to opposing views

8. Rhetorology

   • the deepest practice of listening retoric. Not just distinguishing defensible and undefensible forms of rhetoric
   • Attempting to lead both sides in any dispute to discover shared grounds... thus reducing pointless dispute (forget what fight/ issue us about

9. Rhetrickery

   • rhetoric when used immorally
   • the whole range of shoddy, dishonest, communicative arts producing
   • misunderstanding - along with other harmful results
   • art of making the worse seem the better cause