Well, well, well. Since our prompt
was quite unassertive, and since Kaylee covered the bruising of Perelman’s
text, I might just bud off my in-class write today as it links to
believability, persuasion, etc. I need to start here because I have to admit
the Perelman reading itself didn’t really shift the way I perceive the role of
persuasion in rhetoric…it’s still there, it’s still tangential, it’s still not
the most interesting part of rhetoric to me. My synthesis paper actually helped
me figure out what I am most deeply intrigued by now within this study, which are the
mechanisms behind how rhetoric “travels” or “situates” and where it is “located”
or “locates” in the first place—is it embodied, is it felt, is it precognitive,
is it only in our consciousness and is that
an abstract or a material phenomenon, or both, neither?
So…Doug’s question today: “Is there a difference between
what is believable and what should be believable?”
But what do you have to know before you can even decide do I or should I believe in something?
Does believing or should-be-believing matter at all if we don’t have someone to
believe with or to tell our belief to, judge our belief against, etc? In fact, these
questions seem to be at the base of all my observations these days: “but how do
others perceive what I am perceiving—I feel like my perception is so irrelevant.”
That seems to be the more frustrating part for me…the part where I am
constantly considering relational perspectives to mine. It seems simple to
distinguish something should be believable to us individually, but what we
really want is to have our beliefs believed by others, to find relation, to
find a network of belief. But where does the rhetoric come from, where does it
go, when does it linger long enough to become a belief, a network of belief, or not long enough to
create a new critique of something, a new-non-belief, belief?
I am currently experiencing this tug of war in
my project for this class on Neurorhetorics—there is this push in the field of
Rhet/Comp to hook up with cognitive neuroscience to make the field look more
reputable and self-evident in its intellectual prowess. But some Compies really
begrudge this move because it is giving in to a “making something believable
according to society” when it should already be legitimate in its own right.
But what is that own right? And what are the heuristic systems
or mechanisms exclusive to sciences that’s simply cannot inform studies of Rhet
and Comp…that is where I currently remain skeptical. I have heard the argument
that Humanities already have sufficient heuristic systems to find and make
meaning, but I think to say those systems are wholly separate from “scientific”
heuristics is short-sighted…we use the scientific method every day in rhetoric:
hypotheses based on precedent and observation, the experiment (e.g. social exchange),
and a reflection data analysis and conclusion of the social exchange. And by
definition, the scientific process has to be rhetorical because we made it, so
why would we be so quick to cast aside help from the sciences? Why can’t
rhetoric come from a scientific mechanism? Is there scientific mechanism that
isn’t rhetorical?
Okay. I’m gonna stop now. Gotta
leave something for the course project. J
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