Comm 2020 Chapter 1

Cicero

- 106-43BC - One of the most influential figures in the history of rhetoric - position of Consul in ((roman republic)) - "well spoken champion of the people" - wrote De re publico and De oratore

Aristotle's Lyceum

- Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great - opened his own school: the lyceum - Saw teachings of Isocrates and Sophists as inadequate - Believed rhetoric was beneficial to society as a means rather than an end - a pragmatist - Understood the role of style in the success or failure of persuasive appeals

Aristotle's 3 virtues of style

- Clarity: ability to clearly articulate what you want to say - Correctness: accuracy of info presented - Propriety: faithfulness to what one considers to be moral and just (you should be both ethical and clear in your content and delivery)

Plato's Beliefs

- Did not approve of sophists because he believed they trained people to achieve personal goals through persuasion rather than philosophy or the truth - Philosophy was inquiry, rhetoric was flattery - Not everyone was capable to seeking and knowing the truth "The only people who could seek and know the truth and tell the difference between good and bad were philosophers"

School of Isocrates (438-335BC)

- Isocrates was an Athenian citizen who taught his student's that a persons capacity to know things was limited and they could not expect to know the right course of action in every situation

2 significant differences between educational experience today and in ancient Greece

- Nature of education: today there is government control, while in Greece the state had very little control and not many children were educated - Different curriculum: ancient Greece focused on rhetoric, today many students don't have formal speech training until college

What did Isocrates believe?

- Only a well-educatied man could determine the best course of action through well informed yet incomplete opinions - Good speakers were well learned on many subjects and morally sound enough to discern right wrong wrong - Lofty sentence subject on a worthy cause could show an ethical speaker - His emphasis on style and content was a fusion of Gorgias and Protagoras - No set of rules or characteristics of a good speech like many of his competitors - kairos

Plato's Academy

- Plato was Socrates' student - Thought rhetoric was a "knack" because he felt that living a "good life" where understanding justice and living a good life were the ultimate goal

Sophists

- Teachers who traveled Classical Greece training people in public speaking - Entrepreneurs - Unethical: didn't care about the truth - There weren't any lawyers at the time, so citizens accused of crimes had to represent themselves and usually won or lost based on their speaking skills

Aristotle outlined 3 ways in which someone could know something

- Techne: experimental knowledge - Episteme: universal knowledge - Intermediate knowledge: what is intuitively correct to the person

Aristotle believed rhetoric fulfilled 4 functions in an open society

- Uphold truth and justice - Teaching to an audience - Analyze both sides of an argument - Defend oneself

Protagoras

- believed anything and everything could be argued - taught his students to know both sides of the argument so they would know the truth - his critics argued that this only helped people to make the worse case look better to win the debate

5 principle duties for any speaker

- defend truth - protect the innocent - prevent criminal behavior - inspire the military - inspire the public

Linear Model

- designed by research mathematician Claude E Shannon who was training people to communicate via telephone - concentrated on ((one way)) or ((linear)) communication - Warren Weaver helped so it became known as the Shannon-Weaver model of communication - very speaker-centered, receiver is at the end of the process

3 component parts of persuasion

- ethos - logos - pathos - these 3 are artistic proofs

Techne

- experimental knowledge - comes from a person's own encounters - LEAST reliable way of knowing - we can see the same thing but know it differently (the two faces/the vase)

Aristotle

- father of modern rhetoric - tutored alexander the great - books he wrote are still considered foundational texts for public speaking

Cicero broke down speech into 5 canons of rhetoric

- invention - arrangement - style - delivery - memory

Civic engagement

- knowing that one has responsibility to the community - speech is central

Gorgias

- notable sophist (480-376BC) - "relationship between speaker and audience is linear" - a speaker fills the audience with knowledge and moves them into action - the audience is passive and can be moved with "magical" enough speech - creative persuasion - his view of rhetoric differed from other sophists

Transactional Model

- recognizes that we simultaneously send and receive messages - adds an 8th component to the linear model: feedback - feedback: responses and reactions to the messages, a new message sent back to the original sender, both parties serve as the sender and receiver

Shannon-Weaver model of communication 7 components

- sender: person who wants to deliver the message to a person or group who will use a symbol system (language) to encode the message - encoding: process of attaching symbols to ideas and feelings in order to understand them - message: actual content which can be intentional or not - channel: mode through which the message is conveyed - noise: anything that interferes with the transmission of the message - receiver: the person or people who receive the message, not always intended target - decoding: taking a message and using it toward your own experiences and knowledge to give it meaning

Episteme

- universal knowledge - understanding about the common characteristics of like materials - public speaking allowed people to learn and search for universal characteristics by sharing knowledge of particulars with each other

Intermediate knowledge

- what is intuitively correct to the person - concerned with ethics - This separated Aristotle from Plato since Plato believed only philosophers could know the truth

Public speaking can be traced back to _____

Classical Greece (490-322BC)

Kairos

Greek term meaning timing, and recognition of the needs of the occasion

Media Today

always trying to persuade us which makes training in speech and rhetoric so important

Ethos

character/credibility of speaker

Pathos

emotional dimension of appeal

Inartistic proofs

evidence, data, and documents that exist outside of the speaker and the audience but aid in persuasion

Logos

logical dimension of appeal

Artistic proofs

something created by the speaker for the presentation

The ability to use _________ to communicate with each other is what makes us human

symbols

Rhetoric

the ability to speak well and to persuade audiences

Public speaking is the way we negotiate and construct society's ______, ________, and _________.

values, rules, and beliefs