P155 Speech
"God is omniscient because he knows all things" demonstrates the fallacy of the non sequitur.
Answer Key: False
A condensation symbol is a symbol that has one specific meaning, which is why it unites people.
Answer Key: False
A syllogism is a relativist form of logic that factors in a certain degree of uncertainty in its conclusions.
Answer Key: False
According to the textbook, dissensus prevents a society from developing habits of settling disputes, coordinating actions, and addressing shared concerns.
Answer Key: False
According to the theory of the rhetorical situation, the purpose of the rhetorical act originates with the speaker.
Answer Key: False
An exigence is an enduring quality in a community's system of values or beliefs.
Answer Key: False
Eye-witness testimony is the most powerful and reliable form of trial evidence.
Answer Key: False
In a rhetorical situation, the speaker's main persuasive technique is always logical analysis.
Answer Key: False
It is sufficient to test an analogy by asking what are its relevant similarities.
Answer Key: False
The theory of the rhetorical situation is most concerned with the face-to-face audience assembled before the speaker.
Answer Key: False
When Aristotle said that "The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without techniques or systems to guide us," he was attributing to art of rhetoric the ability to predict results with precision.
Answer Key: False
The "public sphere" assumes a community of common interests and values.
Answer Key: False Feedback: That would be nice, but deliberation and decision in a democratic public sphere does not depend on consensus. In fact, it's designed to withstand dissensus and even benefit by conflict.
The penalty for plagiarizing a speech in our course (not attributing sources, not revealing quotations, memorizing someone else's work and presenting it as your own, etc.) is always going to be a "0" on the assignment.
Answer Key: False Feedback: A "0" on the assignment is the probably least severe penalty for plagiarism, and we take plagiarism very seriously in this course. Penalties can be as serious as an F in the course and a notation on your permanent record, so stay a mile away from copying someone else's work, or not attributing what you use.
Rhetorical judgment is the subsumption of particular events under fixed categories.
Answer Key: False Feedback: If you marked True, you've missed one of the essential things we're learning: The event of speaking modifies categories as we go. Our categories are historical, perpetually shaped by our interactions with each other. (Slide 19)
Today's "civil society" model of public communication relies on friendship and common values to achieve consensus.
Answer Key: False Feedback: The civic virtue model is based on friendship and common values. The civil society model assumes dissensus in many areas of public communication.
In our approach to public rhetoric, since all perspectives are equally valid, standards and norms are illegitimate.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Vicious relativism is a challenge to rhetorical approaches that value different perspectives, but it has a limit in the pragmatic need to get along on a finite planet.
The penalty for plagiarizing a speech in our course (not attributing sources, not revealing quotations, memorizing someone else's work and presenting it as your own, etc.) is always going to be a "0" on the assignment.
Answer Key: False Feedback: A "0" on the assignment is the probably least severe penalty for plagiarism, and we take plagiarism very seriously in this course. Penalties can be as serious as an F in the course and a notation on your permanent record, so stay a mile away from copying someone else's work, or not attributing what you use.
An exigence is an enduring quality in a community's system of values or beliefs.
Answer Key: False Feedback: An exigence is an interruption of the norm, some imperfection that mars the calm front of the status quo.
It's wrong to condition audiences with emotional appeals, because this inevitably has the effect of distorting people's judgment.
Answer Key: False Feedback: It can sometimes distort. Often it does the opposite: It illuminates things in a way that mere facts cannot. Emotion is its own kind of truth.
In this theory the rhetorical background is what is salient in the rhetorical situation.
Answer Key: False Feedback: What stands out or rises to the surface in a rhetorical situation is the rhetorical foreground. The background is the relatively stable (and invisible) set of values, beliefs, and habits of a community or society.
In today's society, in practice, there is a clear dividing line between public and private.
Answer Key: False Feedback: With the skill of businesses to mine and share information about your most intimate life details, the ready availability of communication media to publish information about your lives, and the aggressive push of government to gather all kinds of private and public information, the boundaries between public and private are become more and more obscured.
"Practical judgment" requires that we say what an exigency is before we determine what to do about it.
Answer Key: True
A circular argument is when a claim restates the supporting material.
Answer Key: True
A post hoc fallacy is an error of reasoning based on a temporal relationship.
Answer Key: True
A statistical index is a form of reasoning from sign
Answer Key: True
According to Professor Arthos, the strength of example as support for an argument is its vividness, and its weakness is that it is such a limited sample.
Answer Key: True
According to the textbook, the mainstream of society does not regard "counterpublic" arguments as legitimate.
Answer Key: True
The emotional response to a situation has an orientation (the positive, negative or neutral response to a situation) the salience of which influences the speaker's choice of strategies.
Answer Key: True
The loci communes are the starting points of an argument grounded in an audience's common values or beliefs.
Answer Key: True
When the textbook says that "Rhetoric is the creature of shared contingency," it is connecting the uncertainty of the future with deliberation.
Answer Key: True
To say that our identities are discursive means that our identities are being formed by the discourses that circulates around us.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Much of the time we are not even aware of this shaping effect of discourse.
The discourse of a counterpublic is normally regarded by the mainstream of society as inappropriate.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Counterpublics are usually inconvenient to the mainstream public discourse, because their voices interrupt the smooth working of the status quo. Think of Code Pink in congressional hearings on U.S. military intervention. Textbook p. 121
According to the textbook, publics are created by rhetorical appeals.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Yes, we are creating the reality we collectively live in all the time by the way we speak to each other, the language we use, and the rhetoric we practice.
In rhetoric, constraints are not bad; they are the resources of rhetorical invention.
Answer Key: True Feedback: We probably normally think of constraints as a bad thing, as a limitation rather than an opportunity. In rhetoric, constraints provide the boundaries for you to work within (just as artists sometimes do the best work and will often become highly creative when they have limited materials to work with.) So you know you have only five minutes to present a complex argument; that gives you a good gauge of what kind of efficiency you'll have to employ in boiling down your source materials.
Assignment of responsibility" is a type of inference from cause that answers a "Why?" question.
Answer Key: True Feedback: With this inference you tell why something happens or is done. Why is someone running for office who is obviously going to lose? Well, a politician might run because they can give greater prominence to a cause, or force their party to address an issue. (TB 272)
The expression of speech's main ideas have the following feature(s) (Check the most appropriate answer): A. Simplicity, so that the separate ideas hang together in a meaningful way B. Balance, because main ideas serve as memory aids to speaker & audience. C. Coherence, because overlapping ideas make speech confusing. D. All of the above
Answer Key: D Feedback: The textbook develops these qualities and their relationships in depth. The challenge for you in a speech is to achieve all of them.
In this course rhetorical adaptation is regarded as an illustration of vicious relativism.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Rhetorical adaptation is premised on the potential for people with different views and values to find degrees of agreement.
An audience-centered approach to public speaking means that you will pander to your audience and tell them exactly what they want to hear.
Answer Key: False Feedback: An audience-centered approach thinks from the position of the audience in order to figure out how to construct an argument that will resonate with them. This is very different from pandering.
Conditioning is a manipulative rhetorical strategy that creates the grounds for audiences to be deceived.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Conditioning can do this, but because audiences are complex, it can also make them receptive to different aspects of their own perspectives.
Eloquence and sophistry mean more or less the same thing.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Eloquence is truth embodied in speech, and sophistry is seductive speech that deceives.
In this course, "rhetoric" means political spin or empty words.
Answer Key: False Feedback: In common parlance "rhetoric" often means spin or empty words, but in this course we are practicing rhetoric as the eloquent use of speech to illuminate and move people to action.
In rhetoric a "claim" has a universal and timelessly valid meaning.
Answer Key: False Feedback: In rhetoric, claims are embedded in the audience and the occasion. Refer back to the public sphere diagram of circulating relationships in lecture #1.
Our formal speeches in class will focus on scripted and impromptu speech techniques.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Our primary performance focus in the course will be on extemporaneous speaking (extemp).
The study of rhetoric is the science of the uniform meaning of communication.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Rhetoric is an art not a science, and it is useful precisely in those situations where the meaning of communication is ambiguous or plurivocal.
The inherent issues of a claim are going to be the same for every audience.
Answer Key: False Feedback: The inherence of issues will vary depending on the audience you're speaking to, their values and interests, and the history of the issue. The inherency lies in the needs of your audience at that time and place.
The way to address a composite audience is to remove all ambiguity from an argument.
Answer Key: False Feedback: The lecture mentioned several strategies for speaking to a composite audiences, at least one of which exploits ambiguity.
In this course "topic" and "claim" are roughly equivalent terms.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Topic is only a general subject of discussion (e.g., climate change). A claim is an expression of a particular view about a topic. ("I make the following claim about this topic.")
The "transmission theory" of communication is a circular model of communication.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Transmission is a uni-directional linear model of communication.
In rhetorical situation theory a practical judgment responds to the single criterion of saying what we should do about a practical matter.
Answer Key: False Feedback: "Practical judgment tells us both what things are and what we should do about them. . . A practical judgment demands action but only after an act of cognition that explains to our minds the relationship among a thing, and idea, and an action" (TB 135).
According to the theory of the rhetorical situation outlined in this chapter, the purpose of rhetoric originates with the speaker and is primarily the speaker's purpose.
Answer Key: False Feedback: "To be clear, the purpose is not the purpose of the speaker; it is the purpose for the event. Purpose establishes common expectations among members of a diverse public that help direct their attention and focus...The occasion came first, and the speaker was selected based on his or her ability to fill its purpose." (TB 138). The speaker is merely a vessel; a midwife, if you will.
Contemporary rhetoric thinks of identification exclusively as the ways in which speakers consciously deploy symbols to make meaning.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Although symbols can be consciously deployed by rhetors for strategic purposes, contemporary rhetoric has had to uncover the agency that resides with language itself outside of our knowing and willing, and that is perhaps its major contribution to the venerable art of rhetoric. (TB 7)
Arthos's formulation is that "The world is half created, half perceived." In this frame of reference, connotative meaning is the perceived part, and denotative meaning is the created part.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Connotation invests a symbol with personal associations and emotions, so it is the 'created' part, the stuff we add to the things in the world we perceive. Denotation is the standard dictionary definition, so it is the 'perceived' part.
To say that rhetoric is constitutive means that symbols embellish or ornament our speech or writing with rhetorical figures.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Constitutive rhetoric means that symbols help constitute the actual reality of our lives. They do not just prettify our speeches.
Rhetorical eloquence is primarily a stylistic ornament of language that dresses up your message. The real meaning of your speech is separate from the style you use.
Answer Key: False Feedback: If you said true, you haven't been paying attention. True eloquence means that your rhetoric embodies your meaning, makes it come to life. It doesn't just prettify a meaning that's already there.
Good rhetoric should appeal to people's rational faculties and stay away from appeals to the passions.
Answer Key: False Feedback: If you've been listening, you know that rhetorical understanding is emotional as well as rational, and comes from a person's own life experience and character. Purely rational argument does not speak to all the dimensions of human experience.
In this course, "rhetoric" means political spin or empty words
Answer Key: False Feedback: In common parlance "rhetoric" often means spin or empty words, but in this course we are practicing rhetoric as the eloquent use of speech to illuminate and move people to action.
In rhetoric a "claim" is a stand-along proposition that has a universal and timelessly valid meaning.
Answer Key: False Feedback: In rhetoric, claims are embedded in the audience and the occasion. Refer back to the public sphere diagram of circulating relationships in lecture #1. Claims develop more general force the more audiences adhere to them over time as presumptions.
In this course public address will be a speaker-centered activity.
Answer Key: False Feedback: In this course we will approach rhetoric and public address as an audience-centered activity, and you as a public speaker will learn to think habitually from the position of the other.
Our formal speeches in class will focus on scripted and impromptu speech techniques.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Our primary performance focus in the course will be on extemporaneous speaking (extemp).
The study of rhetoric is the science of the uniform meaning of communication.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Rhetoric is an art not a science, and it is useful precisely in those situations where the meaning of communication is ambiguous or plurivocal.
In this course rhetorical adaptation is regarded as an illustration of vicious relativism.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Rhetorical adaptation is premised on the potential for people with different views and values to find degrees of agreement.
It is sufficient to test an analogy by asking what are its relevant similarities.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Testing an analogy requires asking what are its relevant similarities, relevant dissimilarities, and then weighing these similarities and dissimilarities together.
The "public sphere" assumes a community of common interests and values.
Answer Key: False Feedback: That would be nice, but deliberation and decision in a democratic public sphere does not depend on consensus. In fact, it's designed to withstand dissensus and even benefit by conflict.
The inherent issues of a claim are going to be the same for every audience.
Answer Key: False Feedback: The inherence of issues will vary depending on the audience you're speaking to, their values and interests, and the history of the issue. The inherency lies in the needs of your audience at that time and place.
The theory of the rhetorical situation in chapter 5 is most concerned with the face-to-face audience assembled before the speaker.
Answer Key: False Feedback: The most important audience in a rhetorical situation are those people capable of acting to resolve the exigency, wherever they may be. There may be many people present at a speech who have no power to remedy the deficiency of the situation. The is the distinction between the primary audience and the target audience in the chapter.
In rhetoric a "claim" is a stand-alone proposition that has a universal and timelessly valid meaning.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Topic is only a general subject of discussion (e.g., climate change). A claim is an expression of a particular view about a topic. ("I make the following claim about this topic.")
The "transmission model" of communication best describes how we will approach rhetoric.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Transmission has only the limited use of communicating information, and it is only a small part of the communication process. Our approach to public oral communication can be described through the more complex models of speech communication and public sphere theory.
Ideographs function primarily to distort reality and therefore should not be used.
Answer Key: False Feedback: We can ask a whole series of critical questions to test the merit of an ideograph. We should be suspicious of ideographs, but they are not categorically unethical.
In our course, there are no graded written assignments.
Answer Key: False Feedback: Your written speech outlines, for instance, will be assessed and awarded points by your instructor.
Whereas a topic is a word or phrase, a claim is a complete propositional sentence.
Answer Key: True Feedback: A topic is only a theme. A claim is a speech-act that commits a speaker to a specific view about something.
Rightness of fit is a characteristic rhetorical principle that expresses a flexible standard that depends on judgment rather than some fixed external measure.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Aristotle said that rhetoric is useful "where there are no rules or systems to guide us." In the unpredictable, messy hurly-burly of everyday life where there are too many shifting variables for any pre-determined formula, we often have to improvise, employ 'rules-of-thumb', make a "best guess", size things up. Appropriateness in these circumstances is the closest thing to a workable standard.
Locating stasis is a way to advance a debate with a diverse audience.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Finding the kernel of the argument among factions moves the argument forward by identifying the nub of the matter. It has the value of at least sorting out what is not contested or significant and moving a debate to the decisive question.
The rhetorical technique of adaptation can even shape the speaker's perspective.
Answer Key: True Feedback: In a humanist rhetorical approach, the speaker's modification of appeals is not just strategic: Having to face an audience with different viewpoints forces the speaker to construct a discourse that can constitute a new point of view.
In rhetoric, a claim is a statement someone makes to somebody about something; i.e., it comes from a specific speaking voice in a specific context and is spoken to a specific audience.
Answer Key: True Feedback: In classical logic, a proposition stands by itself. The author is irrelevant, and the audience is presumed to be a universal audience. Rhetoric is born out of concrete situations responding to specific needs and particular audiences.
"Inherent issues" are the issues that an audience needs or wants to have answered when the speaker makes a claim for their assent.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Note that inherency, like so much else in this course, is audience-dependent. Inherent issues can change over time, place, audience composition and culture because what is important to one audience is not necessarily important to another.
The public is a construct; its identity is always shifting and changing.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Publics are always forming.
The reciprocity of invention and convention means that relatively stable traditions are modified by innovation, while innovation is tamed by tradition.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Rhetorical invention is the creative you bring to a speech-act. Rhetorical conventions are the cultural constraints and genre expectations of your audience.
Where conventional communication theory treats the speaker as the author of a public speech, our approach explores the role of the audience as authors of the speech.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Slide 6 of the lecture makes this point several times: "Eloquence always depends on the speaker's audience, and he must govern his speech in accordance with their opinions" (G. Vico). "The great orator, the one with a hold on his listeners, seems animated by the very mind of his audience" (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca). "It is the audience which has the major role in determining the quality of argument" (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca).
In rhetoric, constraints are not bad; they are the resources of rhetorical invention.
Answer Key: True Feedback: We probably normally think of constraints as a bad thing, as a limitation rather than an opportunity. In rhetoric, constraints provide the boundaries for you to work within (just as artists sometimes do the best work and will often become highly creative when they have limited materials to work with.) So you know you have only five minutes to present a complex argument; that gives you a good gauge of what kind of efficiency you'll have to employ in boiling down your source materials.
The inherent issues or main ideas you need to cover under your speech claim are those that have to be addressed for your audience to be persuaded.
Answer Key: True Feedback: When you make a claim, your audience needs certain issues to be addressed; that is the very definition of inherency. If you don't address these issues, your audience will be probably go away unsatisfied and unconvinced. You should cut out any issues that do not adhere to this rule.
According to the textbook, publics are created by rhetorical appeals.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Yes, we are creating the reality we collectively live in all the time by the way we speak to each other, the language we use, and the rhetoric we practice.
According to the theory of the rhetorical situation, a motive (as distinct from a wish) only exists within a situation in which the successful attainment of a goal is possible.
Answer Key: True Feedback: "A child may wish to fly to Mars," whereas a citizen is motivated to vote for real change. (TB 131)
A statistical index is a form of reasoning from sign.
Answer Key: True Feedback: A sign is something that stands for something else, usually something we can't observe directly. Statistics reveal to us normative attributes of a population through quantitative sampling procedures, giving us access to data we otherwise don't have access to. (TB 269)
From the perspective of rhetorical situation theory, it is not primarily the speaker who decides what to persuade the audience about, but the situation itself that calls forth a response.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Again, the speaker is only a midwife who gives an audience the means to respond to the situation, and it is primarily the situation that 'calls forth' utterance. The gunning down of a Ferguson teenager with his hands up in broad daylight is what calls forth protest and shapes the character of the demands.
Amplification is a rhetorical technique that draws out a description so that audiences are encouraged to think about it more and pay attention to it.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Amplification "extends the time listeners have for contemplating an idea and helps them bring it into sharper focus." You amplify a topic when you "define it, repeat it , rephrase it, give examples of it, and contrast it.
Just as the law of the land can be modified by judicial rulings on individual cases, the norms we live by in a society are modified by rhetorical acts.
Answer Key: True Feedback: An example of this capacity of rhetoric would be Martin Luther King's non-violent campaigns for social justice that ultimately led to civil rights legislation.
Rightness of fit is a characteristic rhetorical principle that expresses a flexible standard that depends on judgment rather than some fixed external measure.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Aristotle said that rhetoric is useful "where there are no rules or systems to guide us." In the unpredictable, messy hurly-burly of everyday life where there are too many shifting variables for any pre-determined formula, we often have to improvise, employ 'rules-of-thumb', make a "best guess", size things up. Appropriateness in these circumstances is the closest thing to a workable standard.
The common cause fallacy is the causal association of two factors that are themselves in reality caused by a third hidden factor.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Defense hawks are saying that ISIS terrorist activity in Iraq has been caused by recent American non-intervention policies in Syria and Iraq ["The U.S. pullout from Iraq gave ISIS an opportunity to grow."], whereas peace activists are saying that Western military intervention in Iraq is what created the political instability that has given rise to ISIS ["Western military adventurism has given rise to both terrorism and Americans' war weariness].
The textbook explains that rhetorical style uses two broad techniques for magnifying the effect of your voice before an audience; using words in non-literal ways, or changing the order of words in a sentence or sentences.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Examples from the first group of techniques include metaphor, simile, personification. These are only a tiny fraction of the stylistic figures. Likewise, antithesis, inversion and parallel structure are only a fraction of the stylistic patterns of word, phrase or sentence order that create effects of meaning.
Hegemony is the dominant ideology of a society, exerting social control over people without the use of force.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Hegemony illustrates the power of ideas: Ideas are not bombs, ships, or dollar bills, but ideas form the belief systems that direct how we use those concrete things.
A circular argument is when a claim restates the supporting material.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Here is an example: "Freedom of speech is for the common good because the expression of opinions is ultimately in the best interest of all" (TB 281). What you want to do in an argument is reason from a commonly accepted or known starting point to something not generally accepted or known that you wish to establish.
Oral communication is an event of meaning produced by the interaction of audience and speaker.
Answer Key: True Feedback: How we understand an issue isn't predetermined; it evolves as we're in conversation with one another. That means that public communication is an event of meaning. The issue is not the same after we finish talking about it.
An ideograph is a compact word or image that evokes a whole network of meanings and values.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Ideographs are a kind of shorthand -- a little goes a long, long way.
The loci communes are the starting points of an argument grounded in an audience's common values or beliefs.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Loci communes are shared cultural presumptions. Locus is the Latin word for place. You look for those 'places' where you can ground your argument in already accepted views.
An ideology is the typical ways of thinking about the world that help shape human action because it normalizes day to day social, political, economic and cultural structures.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Normalization is just like what it sounds: What may be completely arbitrary is made to feel normal by the assumption of large groups of people that it is the norm. Think of the fable "The Emperor Has No Clothes."
"Inherent issues" are the issues that an audience needs or wants to have answered when you make a claim for their assent.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Note that inherency, like so much else in this course, is audience-dependent. Inherent issues can change over time, place, audience composition and culture because what is important to one audience is not necessarily important to another.
Rhetoric is an art that helps us deliberate in the messy muddle of public life where there are not absolute categorical rules to guide us.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Public deliberation should use strong evidence and logic whenever it can, but we often have to make important decisions without fail-proof evidence or absolutely convincing arguments.
The inherent issues or main ideas you need to cover under your speech claim are those that must be addressed, or else your audience is unlikely to be persuaded.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Read Textbook p. 40. When you make a claim, your audience needs certain issues to be addressed; that is the very definition of inherency. If you don't address these issues, your audience will be probably go away unsatisfied and unconvinced.
According to Professor Arthos, the strength of example as support for an argument is its vividness, and its weakness is that it is such a limited sample.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Rhetoric uses examples to make an issue come alive for an audience with truthfully rendered detail, textured description, or potent imagery.
Rhetoric provides techniques to lessen the limitations of scopus.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Scopus is the rhetorical term for human perspective, i.e., the perceptual limitations of any individual. Communication is a way for each of us to help others see a side of an issue that they cannot see from their own limited point of view.
According to the theory of the rhetorical situation, rhetorical persuasion can produce visible and concrete changes in reality only if there is an audience capable of acting on its beliefs through organized channels.
Answer Key: True Feedback: See TB 121. In this theory, rhetoric is addressed to possible actions that people can take to address pressing issues in their community or society, and it depends on the ability of an audience to effect the change called for.
"She is the sole breadwinner for her family" would be an example of the figure of synecdoche.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Synecdoche often evokes the whole by referring to a part of something.
As a rhetorician your language should be as concrete as the subject permits.
Answer Key: True Feedback: That's a direct quote from the book: Rhetoric favors the concrete over the abstract, because it is easier to reach broader audiences if you use description that is specific, solid, tangible, a real part of people's actual daily lives. Once you've anchored your arguments in the concrete, you can build toward more abstract conceptions. Also, from an ethical point of view, over-abstraction often invites misunderstanding. We stop listening to politicians who speak only in vague abstractions.
Ambiguity can be an effective strategy for speaking to a composite audience.
Answer Key: True Feedback: The ambiguity of language is not always erroneous, especially if it provides imaginative room for finding common cause with people of different needs, wants, and values.
Because we can only ever see from a position, part of the task of communication is to help us overcome the limits of our singular perspectives.
Answer Key: True Feedback: The human condition is marked by finitude. This is not necessarily always a bad thing, since the sharing of different perspectives can enrich our experience of the world.
From a rhetorical perspective, reality is partly constituted by language.
Answer Key: True Feedback: The language we use with each other creates realities: For example, the language used to describe African Americans from the time of the founding justified and institutionalized many forms of racism that had concrete effects in people's lives.
If personal memory resides in each our individual subjective minds, "collective memory" exists the only place it can -- in the symbols, myths, and monuments that we share between us.
Answer Key: True Feedback: The term collective memory is a little odd if we think of memory as something subjective and private -- No can share exactly the same memories I have. And yet a social 'memory' is passed down from generation to generation through externalized forms such language, narrative, architecture, etc.
One function of a speech is to gather together the threads of time that audiences (who tend to live in the present moment) have not connected or have let go of.
Answer Key: True Feedback: The textbook calls this "overcoming time." If you think about it, that's another way that rhetoric is constitutive: It's even capable of 'overcoming' our temporal limits as human beings.
The "universal audience" in rhetoric is the speaker's conception of the audience who s/he is trying to win over.
Answer Key: True Feedback: The universal audience is what the speaker imagines may represent all the reasonable range of beliefs that s/he has to speak to.
Although rhetorical judgment is oriented to particular cases, and is grounded in historical norms, it is capable of establishing precedents that reshape those norms.
Answer Key: True Feedback: There's a perpetual feedback loop between our norms and our debates about them.
Rhetorical presence refers to the advantage that selection of certain data gives to the picture presented to an audience.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This advantage can be either reasonable or deceptive. It's deceptive if it distorts the argument in a way that misleads the audience. It's reasonable if it concentrates the audience's mind on a reasonable if distinct way of looking at the controversy.
Speakers and audiences coproduce meaning in the construction, maintenance and transformation of reality.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is a quote from the textbook, and the example the textbook offers is Ida B. Well's speech on lynch laws that spurred Americans to ban lynching. The eloquent rhetoric that made lynching a horror to Americans changed the culture. Audiences collaborated with the speaker to change the culture.
The "spider's web" of significance which human beings are suspended in is culture, the historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols which constitute our shared reality.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is another quote from the textbook, and the image figures the interrelatedness of the many aspects of culture: beliefs, values, meanings, social roles, myths, worldviews, experiences, etc.
Maxims as compact sayings that encapsulate beliefs could be used as good starting points for an argument to an audience.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is exactly what a good rhetorician does, and it is how you build effect rhetorical arguments. You build from common starting points that are lodged in the beliefs of your audiences to a conclusion that you wish them to accept.
Rhetorical "identification" is a communicative process that creates unity among diverse people by identifying their common interests or values.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is how the textbook describes Kenneth's Burke's theory of symbolic action. Identification is the shorthand term for this. (It's also the name of your fourth formal speech assignment.)
The agency of discourse is a two-way phenomenon; the power of symbols affects people, but people in turn shape symbolic language.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is the circulation that we've talking about since the beginning of the course. Are you starting to get a feel for the double movement of discursive agency, both how it shapes us and how we shape it?
Once you've decided on the inherent issues of your claim, you will need to determine how you can shape them into a 5 minute speech. To do this you want to be both selective and complete in your presentation.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is the real trick of your organization challenge: So much can be said on our topic, so you have to pair it down to the essentials by responding to the inherent issues (TB 41-42), yet you can't leave out issues that your audience needs to hear about (completeness, TB 44).
A post hoc fallacy is an error of reasoning based on a temporal relationship.
Answer Key: True Feedback: This is when someone argues that something is caused by something because it happens after it: The economy got better after So-and-So [Reagan/Clinton] got elected president. (We know that economic cycles rarely have anything to do with who is president.) TB 274
The public sphere model of communication is a circulating feedback loop.
Answer Key: True Feedback: Tradition, history, and commonly held values create the social assumptions underlying public appeals, but these assumptions can be gradually modified by the event of speech itself.
To say that rhetoric constructs social reality does not mean that things do not preexist language, but rather that meaning is not predetermined.
Answer Key: True Feedback: We attach meaning to things by determining their symbolic relationship to us. For instance, the Statue of Liberty comes to have the meanings it has for us only because we identify it in certain ways, tells stories about it, and give it a symbolic place in our culture.