September 13

In the Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students this week, I found the importance they put on premises, or the basis of an argument interesting in that it makes perfect sense, one must have a good foundation before building something.

The difference between deduction and induction was somewhat interesting in that two methods that are essentially opposites could both be used for argument support.  Induction seems to be building up, or widening, support for the argument while deduction seems to be narrowing through reasoning to support the argument.

I found it interesting that rhetors commonly use a community belief to support their argument, if gives rise to the idea that audience is a major part of an argument.  They would not use a community belief if it would not work, and it would not work unless part of that community was to hear and support it.  This was an idea repeated throughout the chapter whether it was called "common sense about the way people generally behave," (161) community belief, "common opinion of humankind" (160), or something else.  I think these ideas mirror the idea of commonplace which we talked about in class.  Both in class and book mentioned how these ideas of what is normal or acceptable change over time such as the examples in the book of men opening doors or women asking for dates.

I thought the idea that enthymemes were a powerful tool for persuasion whether the statements being used were true or not could be a very dangerous idea in our society.  If things are not being supported by fact, such as Bush's claim of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, bad things can happen as a result of those claims being supported, such as an unnecessary war we cannot seem to get out of.

After doing the reading I found that I understood some of the topics we talked about during the last class a little better; specifically syllogisms and enthymemes.  This was especially helped along by the repetition of the syllogism used in class of "1. All people are mortal.  2. Socrates is a person.  3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." (162)