Deuces, Team! :)

Here we come to the last blog post. Where the heck did the time go? How did we get to the very last set? I'm very thrown off by this, but alas it is upon us. I'm just going to try to untangle my thoughts on Perelman, my in class write, and the discussion that followed.

Believability. Man, Doug, I think you really hit a spark with me when you asked about believability again.I'm going to bring us back to my idea of looking at life through a lens (I seem to like those a lot as of late). As you know, I believe that people prefer to view the world through rose-colored glasses--I think that we don't tend to like to look at life through the dirty lens of reality. We, humans, would rather skim over the bad things, or rationalize those things to ourselves in order to better process them than see atrocities for what they truly are--atrocities. I think what is believable is, in part, the things that we can rationalize in our rose-colored perception of reality. We believe the things that "logic" tells us are possible. We believe the things that seem "reasonable" to us. The things that we believe tug on our sense of "logic", "reasonability", and "rationaality" all of which are really only human constructs of value, therefore we are still only believing what society dictates to be believable. We believe the things that seem unreasonable to us, but only under the premise that those things take place in fiction.

(I think fiction is actually quite an intriguing topic, when it comes to beliefs. We know and understand that whatever is happening in the story is not taking place in our world, yet we get sucked into the story as if it is reality. We have no expectation that it should mirror reality, therefore when good things, bad things, wild things, unbelievable things happen in fiction, we believe it to be possible within the fictional realm. For whatever time we are engulfed in the story, we believe that to be reality. We have this deep-set awareness that it is all fictional and potentially impossible in our world, and yet we believe it anyways--even for a short period of time.)

Sorry, total tangent. Anyways, we believe things that society dictates as normal. We find things believable when they are things that we can understand from our own narratives. If certain good or bad things have happened to someone, in their life, then they are more inclined to believe it happened to someone else because they have first-hand experience with that thing being a part of reality. I feel that we believe in narratives that we've experienced ourselves, narratives that we can at least empathize with, or narratives that we feel have the potential to come to fruition.

What's sometimes more interesting is the things that we struggle to believe. I think it is curious that more often than not we have difficulty believing in humanity itself. We don't like to look at the world through a dirty lens, and yet some of the most rose-colored things in life we don't believe. We are confused when someone is kind, compassionate, and thoughtful. We struggle to believe in humane feats such as service and philanthropy. It's as if we know that humans are good creatures and yet we deny the amazingly average things that we do for each other. A lot of these are things that I wholly believe we should be embracing with arms spread wide. Apparently, that rose-colored lens only tints the dark things a nice, pink color--they don't seem to brighten the already good things that we should be believing humans are capable of doing. We also don't believe that horrible things happen, which surprises me much less. It's as if we are aware that terrible things happen to people, yet we have a hard time fathoming that they actually happen. I think this comes back to our personal narratives. We never think its going to happen to us--whatever that horrible it is. We should be able to believe that human kind has the potential to be relentlessly cruel and ardently caring.

Whatever we believe, we believe it for what seems like good reason to us, within our reality and within our personal narrative.

I'd also like to touch on Anjeli's ideas on agreement. I think she hits the nail on the head when she says, "It goes against human intuition to imagine that two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, but that's exactly how we find clarity to complex questions--understanding how both sides can simultaneously exist in the answer slot." I think here, Anjeli says a lot of what I am trying to say about believability. Humans are inherently inclined to agree with each other. The reason we disagree is because we actually want to come to an agreement, we want the other party to understand what we are saying and agree with us, even on some small level. We have opposing opinions, opposing beliefs, and, as humans, we only wish that the other side would see the way we see and believe what we believe. I think we want to believe in the good, the bad, the wild, the unbelievable--yet all logic tells us it cannot be so. Which brings me all the way back to the very early in the semester problem of Logic vs. Rhetoric. I think rhetoric, in this case, is that which reconciles what we believe and what we should believe so that even the things that we don't believe have the capability of obtaining believability.

Boom.

Going Out in Style

Seeing our blog nears its finale, I find myself sentimental.  I must share, posting after Kim is my favorite.  Your questions provoke the writing mind. (-:

Particularly, this stands out: “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?”

I had not before devoted much to recognizing how large a role community plays in rhetoric.  After all, if the opinions, consensus, and camaraderie of others were irrelevant, persuasion would go job-searching.  There would be no need to convince others if creating larger networks and taskforces was unneeded.  Rhetoric therefore, is not only evidenced in every interaction and knowledge-making process, but is also the result of intrinsic drives towards shared goals and purposes.  We want to agree with each other—otherwise persuasion would cease to exist.  Argument, generally seen as representing human strife and disparity, actually evidences a desire to see the same together, to concur.  *insert head nod to Jim Corder.* 

Which sounds all good, until Perelman writes, “All intellectual activity which is placed between the necessary and the arbitrary is reasonable only to the degree that it is maintained by arguments and eventually clarified by controversies which normally do not lead to unanimity” (p. 159).  For those having difficulty untangling P’s multi-layered sentences, what he seems to say is, “We measure the reasonableness of thinking (and thus knowledge) to the extent we debate it, usually ending in disagreement anyway.”  Real hopeful guy, this Perelman.  Before unwrapping the quote, I want to call out his spectrum-ends of “necessary” and “arbitrary.”  It’s a curious binary, different from others we have thus encountered.  Rather than proposing two fundamentally opposed ways of thinking (square vs. groovy, rhetoricus vs. seriousus, etc.), Perelman presents the opposing ends of what we think.  At first, this seems viable because we can distinguish between those which are necessary thoughts (to find food, for example) and those which are arbitrary (is the dress white or blue?)  But soon the line blurs—is intellectual activity surrounding the concept of gravity arbitrary or practical?  Yes, gravity is a conception based on human observation and subjective reasoning, but it also plays out practically: “ouch, shouldn’t have tried to fly off my dresser.”  I doubt intellectual activity will ever be definable on a neat, linear, spectrum.  Nice effort though, Perelman. 

What was I going to say before my tangent?  Perelman writes that thoughts and perceptions (intellectual activity) are only as reasonable (I read that as worthy) as we keep discussing them.  Which makes sense, because the age-old conversations, the ones we keep having over and over again (existentialism vs. essentialism, role of logic, acceptable epistemologies, do souls exist, etc.) carry great weights in meaning.  If singular agreement could be easily found, it would have.  So I’m thinking “yeah dude, I hear you” until he writes that those intellectual concepts are eventually clarified through irreconcilable disagreement.

What does the inability to find agreement clarify if not that both sides are correct simultaneously?  Perhaps Perelman meant just that.  For example, that nature and nurture both determine behavior and personality.  These huge questions are clarified not by absolute disagreement, but by recognizing that the two opposing answers are likely not polar opposites, but a simultaneous, multi-dimensional, “stacked” answer.  That rational thinking and romantic thinking are two methods of understanding, both “true” in their own right.  It goes against human intuition to imagine that two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, but that’s exactly how we find clarity to complex questions—understanding how both sides can simultaneously exist in the answer slot.  If humankind, inherently desiring agreement, can stand adamantly opposed, how can it not mean that both sides contain truth? 

It's easy to throw punches at Perelman for his sentence-layering, which requires intense front-loading of information before delivering the punch line which then subsequently changes all the previous clauses.  Yet he communicates through a retrospective, reframing, method.  Call it dense, but isn’t that how knowledge works?  As we accrue understanding, it causes what came before and seemed confusing to now enter the light.  And then we know.