Okay, so I know this post is late. I also know that I have no clue as to what I'm talking about here, so please don't hurt me if it comes out sounding all weird.
In class we were discussing Karl Popper (kind of), but more so the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, and I think this distinction is very important to understand. However, I don’t really feel like discussing it at this point. I’d rather discuss something that might or might not be connected to this idea instead.
I’m completely drawn to the idea of rhetoric as epistemological, i.e. it creates knowledge, because I whole hardly believe this. I think that it is through negotiated discussion that knowledge of things is created, not just understood. True, if a tree falls in a forest, that event exists outside of man and the knowledge of man. But that event does not in itself contain any knowledge. It is only through the rhetoric of discussing that event that the knowledge is then created, and that this knowledge then is distributed and also understood.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m getting at with this, because I just finished reading a Heidegger chapter that completely rattled and hurt my head so please bear with me here.
As far as Plato is concerned, I’m completely with the Sophists on this one. I don’t really care if there is a perfect world, or a perfect Idea or Form for everything in this world. It doesn’t matter to me, since I already believe that rhetoric creates knowledge. Our knowledge of the world and universe doesn’t exist in some ideal form of the world. It exists in what we negotiate about the world. I think that Plato was just scared of having his world turned upside down, and thus he wrote the Republic as a means to find that perfect world again. But I don’t think that perfect will ever exist to us, because even if it did, rhetoric wouldn’t help us at all to create a knowledge about and for it. Thus, there would be no knowledge of it, and then it might as well not even exist to us. It’d be the tree falling in a forest without anyone around.
Anyways, that’s my take on it. I don’t believe in the hard social-constructionists that state that everything in our world is socially constructed, i.e. that this keyboard I’m typing on doesn’t exist; only my idea of the keyboard exists. But I do believe that my knowledge of what this keyboard is and what it means is created through the rhetoric that surrounds it.
So yeah, I’m going to sleep now…
I love the tree in the forest comparison, because I've been chewing on that myself in terms of the social construction of knowledge.
ReplyDeleteIf a tree falls in the forest,does it make a sound? I would argue that if a tree falls in the forest, it creates compressions of sound waves that travel. If it reaches an ear or an antennae (any organism, not just human) and the waves are recieved, then a sound is made. But this is only if sound is the reception of sound waves by a system and turned into an neurological response. If sound is more than that-if it is a human's recognzition of cause and effect-then no, a sound is not made unless it reaches a human ear.
What about this? If an artist was in a forest, and painted a tree, and died and no one was around to see the painting of the tree, is it art?
The general idea of an "epistemological" understanding of rhetoric is that language doesn't merely record or report, but it generates. The idea behind this is that without meaning, for us, nothing exists. We give natural objects meaning, and therefore create them... for us. "Sound" as a word only means something as something encountered by a person and understood through discourse. As Daniel is saying, I think, is that physical activity "means" something and therefore "exists" for people only when it is given meaning through discourse. When we discover at so many million miles away a planet with two suns, as happened recently, we have, for humanity, "created" it. We presume it has been their for the 14 billion years of the universe, but we can only be sure of its existence since we "created" it by giving it meaning, for us. I understand the objections to this, but it makes sense to me, so it as a concept has been created, socially constructed. As far as... who cares? This idea of socially constructed meaning gives Rhetoric and interpretive communities a new ethos, and helped me get tenure.
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