Chapter 1 Review Flashcards
Rhetoric
The use of language and other symbolic systems to make sense of our experiences, construct our personal and collective identities, produce meaning, and prompt action in the world.
Symbols
A letter, image, or gesture that represents something else.
Rosteck’s Definition of Rhetoric
The use of language and other symbolic systems to make sense of our experiences, construct our personal and collective identities, produce meaning, and prompt action in the world.
Rosteck’s TWO simultaneous understandings of influence
STRATEGIC—in that it can accomplish some kind of action and CONSTITUTIVE of our experiences, culture, and identities
Rhetorical theories have emphasized….
both guidelines (strategies) for effective communication (i.e., persuasion) and ways of understanding how communication constructs meaning and ways of being in the world (e.g., as a socializing process)
Common Characteristics: 4 Features: FEATURE 1
in terms of Strategic and Constitutive influence (Each is influenced by culture and technology)
Symbols
A) Means to persuade: Letters, words, pictures, font, music, architecture, nonverbal gestures, etc.
B) Indirect means for expressing (and learning) values/experience/etc.
Feature 2
Audiences
A) Efforts to persuade people, via practical, communal decision-making
B) Broader influence: how people “form…collective identities”
Feature 3
Contingency
A) Decision-making is sought on issues of probability: what’s to be done?
B) These rhetorical processes helps create our (evolving) senses of truth, right and wrong, etc.
Feature 4
Inventive and analytic theories
A) Inventive: Theories used to help create effective forms of communication
B) Analytic: Theories used to examine implications of rhetoric’s use
Rhetorical Theory
Guides that help explain instances/patterns of public symbol use. How rhetoric works and what it does.
*primarily inductive, prediction is not a primary focus
Rhetorical Criticism
the process of using rhetorical theory to understand and evaluate rhetorical practice and generate future rhetorical theory
Pragmatic-dominant (200 B.C.E.-5 C.E.)
Ancient theorists from Greece and Rome who asked and answered very pragmatic questions about rhetoric and who saw the speaker as influencing the events of the world through rhetoric.
Pragmatic-subordinate
The world, as discovered through science, would be the dominant element and the speaker would receive secondary emphasis during this time.
Rhetoric would be used to communicate what scientists found
Aesthetic/stylistic (Middles ages and Renaissance)
Rhetoric was used during this period to embellish the truth or ingratiate the rhetor to a very small audience. (1400-1700s)
Attention was paid to the aesthetic qualities of rhetoric, which is a way of referring to rhetoric’s style. Rhetoric during this period consisted of sermon-making and the art of letter writing
Social Focus
Impact (on audiences) > Intent (of speakers)
(1900s-present)
Epistemology
The study of knowledge and what is considered to be true or false
What’s the role of public symbol use in knowledge/understandings of truth?
Ontology
The study of the nature of human existence and how humans perceive themselves to be.
How does public symbol use influence ways of being (i.e., individual and collective identity and experience)?
Ethics
The study of how people make and justify decisions about what is right and wrong.
How do we make judgments, construct moral action, and/or define community and values through public symbol use?
Name two functions of rhetoric
Persuasion and influence
