Comm 395 Exam 1

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New Atheist
“Keep religion out of society”

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Hitchens

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An associate of Hitchen’s (God is Not Great)
Rushdie wrote “The Satanic Verses”
Rushdie stated that the Koran is flawed and got death threats.
Because of this Hitchen’s was threatened because he is a good friend with Rushdie.
Considered guilty by association.
“People who are religious show no tolerance”
“Religion is a powerful public force and needs to be taken out of public life.”

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Salman Rushdie

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Carter Hitchens and Garver are all interested in Ethos

Why and how to listen are not questions of law. They are not “moral” issues of rights and duties. They are, instead, ethical questions about the sort of community we want to live in. they are ethical in the sense of involving character-the character of speakers, audience, and communication.

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Ethos (garver)

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"Rhetorology" is Booth's term for the practice of "deep rhetoric" (his phrase--can't remember if it shows up in the chapter itself or in his separate book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric). But really, it's the name for the broader framework the Booth is pushing with respect to public discourse and public argument. The term also broadly fits Garver's framework as well. Remember when we were brainstorming how we might respond differently to some of the WBC folks if they came to CNU? Some of the ideas we brainstormed in class, Booth would call practicing "rhetorology."
(Amy Fallah) I am having difficulty fully fleshing out the importance of rhetorology. I understand that by rhetorology Booth is proposing a strategy to imagine a connection between science and religion, two topics that seem so deeply opposed. This is an approach that tries to uncover the deepest commitments of contrasting ways of thinking and speaking which demonstrates that true science and genuine religion share several deep and crucial understanding

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Rhetorology

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A particular branch of philosophy
What is the difference between fact and opinion?

(Steiner: the liability of enlightenment)
The fundamental problem of rhetoric in American Evangelical Christianity is modernistic epistemological assumptions in discourse.

Modernist epistemology assumes the plain and transparent natures of truth, wisdom, the workings of the universe, and the meaning of the Bible.
-it casts the authority and “truth-value” of the Bible strictly in empirical and propositional terms.

Problems with modernist epistemology:
1. Opinions and ethos of intellectual religious elites
Metaphor: “The Bible is seen in essence as a divinely inspired “third-grade answer book”
This can be problematic because people put their trust in the deciphering opinions of the Bible into intellectual and religious elites (can their opinions be trusted?) Goes into a matter of Ethos.

2. Naturalization problem
This is also problematic because America is built upon an assembly of foreign people who all carry di

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Modernistic Episitimology

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Language as an act.

This approach puts the primary stress upon such hortatory expressions as “thou shalt, or thou shalt not.”

This approach culminates in the kinds of speculation that find their handiest material in stories, plays, poems, the rhetoric or oratory and advertising, mythologies, theologies, and philosophies after the classic model.

This view of language in terms of “symbolic action”, is exercised about the necessarily suasive nature of even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures.

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Dramatastic

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(Burke- The Definition of Man)
All definitions stressing man as moral agent would tie in with this claus (quoted from a passage from “the rhetoric of religion”)
“Action involves character, which involves choice—and the form of choice attains its perfection in the distinction between Yes and No (shall and shall-not, will and will-not).

Though the concept of sheer motion is non-ethical, action implies the ethical, the human personality. Hence the obvious close connection between the ethical and negativity, as indicated in the Decalouge.”

Action=ethical (the human personality)
Sheer Motion=non-ethical (sheer secular ambitions that justify themselves)

Action=character→choice→yes or no/shall or shall-not/will or will-not
Hence the connection between ethical→negativity

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Action vs. Motion

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(Burke, The Definition of Man)
Aka “moved by a sense of order”
Incentives of organization and status
Hieratical because of the implication of “original sin”
Creates a definition of is/is not a sin and definition for what you should/should not do to sin.
Divisions of labor are created in society because of the definitions and differentiations and allocations of property protected by the negativities of the law.



Negative (creates community)- propositional [‘is/is not’] and hortatory [‘shall/should not’].

Symbol making, using, manipulating human beings. Idea of the negative- the ability to think of something by what it isn’t→ you can do this with language.

Language is Heirarchical→ Thinking hierarchical is inevitable→ having sense of good/bad= language symbol using beings.

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Goaded by the Spirit of Heirarchy

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The founder and guiding spirit of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Summer of 1964, MFDP waged a challenge to the credentials of the lily-white Mississippi slate of delegates to the Democratic national convention, a slate chosen by lily-white Mississippi democratic party. The MFDP offered an integrated slate of delegates, many of whom, like Hammer, had tried to register to vote, and been punished for it.

This scared president Johnson so he send VP Humpfrey to buy off Hammer.
Humpfrey asked Hammer what she wanted. Hammer (devout evangelical Christian) responded “the beginning of a new kingdom here on Earth”.

Humpfrey didn’t know what to do. He was in a predicament and tried to explain that if he was reelected he could work on civil rights. Hammer replied that if he did the right thing then God would take care of him.

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Fannie Lou Hamer

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(Garver- how can a liberal listen to a religious argument) Part of the difficulty of understanding alien voices—and my catholic students certaintly reguarding their bishops as an alien voice—comes from an ambiguity in the hermeneutic principle of “charity”. I have a duty to make the best I can of what you say. To understand you at all, even to disagree, even to come to the conclusion that you don’t know what you’re talking about, I have to assume that most of what you say is true and intelligible.

(Steiner Discussion board) "Hermeneutic principle of charity," from Garver, refers to the ethical obligation of listeners to make the best sense they can of public messages and arguments. This is important because it reminds us that the obligation to "rationally increase trust" does not just rest on speakers, but on listeners as well. In class we emphasized the obligations that speakers have--to earn the right to be heard, to build credibility, to create space upon which common ground can be forged. A

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Hermeneutic Principle of 'Charity'

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Language as definition
An approach towards language.
Begins with the questions of naming, or definition. Or the power of language to define and descrive may be viewed as derivate; and its essential function may be treated as attitudinal or hortatory: attitudinal as with expressions of complaint, fear, gratitude, and such; hortatory as with commands or requests, or, in general, an instrument developed through its use in the social processes of cooperation and competition. I say “developed”; I do not say “originating.” The ultimate origins of language seem to me as mysterious as the origins of the univers itself. One must view it, I feel, simply as the “given.” But once an animal comes into being that does happen to have this particular aptitude, the various tribal idioms are unquestionable developed by their use as instruments in the tribe’s way of iving (the practical role of symbolism in what the anthropologist, Malinowski, has called “context Situation”). Such consideration are involved i

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Scientismist

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(Steiner discussion) In persuasion, Kuhn was brought up in class to reinforce a fundamental approach to understanding persuasion that's reflected in how the course is structured. In comm and religion, Kuhn comes up very specifically in one of the readings, so in explaining the meaning and significance of Kuhn for comm and religion, you need to talk about Kuhn in terms of what that author is trying to argue and how that argument fits into the course more generally. Let me know if you have further questions.

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Thomas S. Kuhn

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Particular way of committing symbolic violence
Taking ideas from one context & putting them in a new context= creates shock and awe

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Power By Incongruity

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Definition itself is a symbolic act (burke, terministic screens)

If we defined man first of all as the tool-using animal

Our definition (man is the tool using animal) would not be taking into account the “priority” of its very own nature as a definition (man is a symbol using creature).

Inasmuch a definition is a symbolic act; it must begin by explicitly recognizing its formal grounding (man is a symbol using creature) in the principle of definition as an act. In choosing any definition at all, one implicitly represents man as the kind of animal that is capable of definition (that is to say, capable of symbolic action).

Thus even if one views the powers of speech and mechanical invention (tools) as mutually involving each other, in a technical or formal sense one should make the implications explicit by treating the gifts of symbolicity as the “prior” member of the pair. Tools are not a species.

Language is a species of action, symbolic action—and its nature is such that it can be used as a

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Symbolic Action

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Human beings are symbol making, symbol using beings.
“Language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is necessarily talk about thing in terms of what they are not- and in this sense we start out beset by a paradox. Such language is but a set of labels, signs for helping us find our way about. Indeed, they can even be so useful that they help us to invent way of threatening to destroy ourselves. But even accuracy of this powerful sort does not get around the fact that such terms are sheer emptiness, as compared with the substance of the things they name. Nor is such abstractness confined to the language of scientific prose.

“Human beings are the inventors of the NEGATIVE.”
There are no negatives in nature and this ingenious addition to the world is because of the human symbol systems.
There are no negatives in nature, where everything simply is what it is and as it is. To look for negatives in nature would be as absurd as though you were to go out hunting for the square root of minus-one. The negati

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The Negative (burke)

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The principle of perfection is central to the nature of language as motive. The mere desire to name something by its “proper” name, or to speak a language in its distinctive ways is intrinsically “perfectionist.”

What is more “perfectionist” in essence than the impulse, when one is in dire need of something, to so state this need that one in effect “defines” the situation? And even a poet who works out cunning ways of distorting language does so with perfectionist principles in mind, though his ideas of improvement involve recondite stylistic twists that may not disclose their true nature as judged by less perverse tests.


Occupational psychosis- work language→ Patch Adams→ terministic screens→ evolving language→ new reality.

“Symbolic Ruts”→ what’s their language?
We don’t try and fix our symbol system.

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Rotten With Perfection

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Rhetoric is a technique used to persuade. Uses the Socratic view of persuasion. There is an argument and rationality. Human person is thought to be a rationally thinking being. Using language effectively to please or persuade. It falls into the three art forms of persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. It also uses the five canons of rhetoric: memory, invention, delivery, style, and arrangement. Falls into the sociopsychological perspective (people are unknowingly being persuaded).

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Rhetoric as Technique

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(Lauren Cherry) I am still slightly confused on the concept of diakonia. It seems to focus on the conversion of people to Christianity and it does not entail changes in behavior, but involves addressing a different case to a different audience. I know it is the "sacred service" and that it relates to rhetoric as comprehensive because you cannot conform people or persuade them to change their ideas by persuading them with religious or political point of views, and that people will not change their identities for something that is the speaker's belief only. How else is this term significant or related to other concepts?

(Steiner discussion) Hi, Lauren. Your definition of it as "sacred service" is correct, but it comes from Compier, and he uses it as part of his understanding of what theology is for. This is important to Compier not only in that it is a part of his fleshing out (as he critiques Cunningham) what his understanding of "rhetorical theology" is, but also why his critique of traditional theology

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Diakonia

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Man is
The symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal
Inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)
Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making
Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)
And rotten with perfection

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Burke's Definition of Man