An attitude toward invention I'm emphasizing invention because doubt is critical to effective rhetorical thinking but it should only ever be expressed to yourself our at most your inner circle. Once invention is over -- once you have examined each possible proposition from all angles, anticipated how it will be refracted through the prejudices and commitments of every potential audience, demystified and demythified the rejected alternatives without becoming enamored of a new myth or mystification (It's turtles all the way down) or you have run out of time -- once the time for invention his over, then speak and act with conviction. If you can't commit, then inaction is your best course of action. based on Platonic dialectic reminder about dialectic
and the various forms of relativism demonstrated by Protagoras, Man is the measure of all things.
On every issue there are two arguments opposed to each other.
Concerning the gods, I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist; for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life Gorgias, Nothing exists; if it did we couldn't know it and if we could know it we couldn't communicate it.
Combat seriousness with laughter and laughter with seriousness.
The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. and The Dissoi Logoi. The Thracians count it an adornment that their girls tattoo themselves, but in the eyes of everyone else tattoo-marks are a punishment for wrongdoers.
Or: Phroneis, practical wisdom, a kind of agnosticism maintained by skepticism informed by sophistry -- not Plato's representation of "the sophists" but an ontology and epistemology built out of the words that remain of the men Plato used. And we're using now.
Skepticism is a solvent. Applied thoughtfully it can reveal a second or third surface that might inform a different understanding. Applied indiscriminately it leads to Phyrronianism, The adjective Phyronnian comes from an infamous Greek general who won a war but destroyed his city in the process. Anything paid for by sacrifice greater than the thing's value can be called Phyronnian. which as Sextus Empirics demonstrated uses logic against reason to prove knowledge is vanity. Derrida was a Phyronnian. Knowledge is vanity, but if we stop there then we have arrived at Cynicism, Diogenes of Sinope was a kind of philosophical anti-hero and a favorite subject for chriea throughout the rhetorical tradition. He lived in the streets, slept wherever he pleased, with whomever would have him, drank only water and begged for his food. He rejected all material comforts and conventional beliefs. He was fierce, caustic, a Socrates gone mad, Plato said. But he was revered for speaking truth to power: when Alexander the Great came across Diogenes dozing in a sunny spot between market stalls, he leaned over him and nudging him he said, "I am Alexander the Great. I can give you anything. What would you have?" Diogenes opened one eye and said, "Step aside. You're blocking the sun." Later Alexander was over heard to say, "If I could not be Alexander I would be Diogenes." Lest you admire Diogenes too ardently, on another day he was seen masturbating between stalls in the market place. Appalled passersby shielded their children's eyes and shouted for shame. He shrugged, "Would you could relieve hunger just by rubbing your belly," he said. More ... ultimately an anti-social, parasitic way of life. If we apply skepticism to everything but our cherished beliefs, then we get a potentially lethal dogmatism or a hermetically sealed conspiracy theory, impervious to evidence and reason.
The cure ought be no worse than the disease.
Sophisticated skepticism doesn't transgress reason because it rejects absolutes. It is agnostic rather than nihilistic; it seeks context and perspective and acknowledges biases, cognitive and cultural. Thus a sophisticated skeptic looks closely at the various possible representations of the relevant elements before selecting one "reality" or amalgamated "reality" on which to build a new one. The best decision possible given the information available at the moment when the decision has to be made, which implies awareness of timing, Kairos.
Sophisticated skepticism is an antidote to contemporary American politics.
Words are only magical, capable of conjuring existence (ideas into being) if you mistake words for things. Good and evil are adjectives, not nouns. Gorgias' assertion that nothing exists is like a Zen koan, only it offers to solve the puzzle. Is there a thing called "nothing"? Yes? Then nothing exists. Does that mean that the set of all things is actually empty? Or that the set of all things contains only one thing which is "nothing?" Each of those ideas is absurd, and together they assert that words are not things; thoughts are distinct from being. "The map is not the territory", as Korzybski said. Just because you think it doesn't make it so. Just because you can't see past it doesn't make it real. And just because someone else's beliefs are incomprehensible to you, doesn't make them incomprehensible. Just because your internal monologue is who you identify with doesn't mean you are the voice in your head.
Belief is a manifestation of inventional exhaustion or a lack of imagination.
Think of a 4 year old playing Why? with their parents. How many Whys? before they resort to a threatening BECAUSE of a reference to some unquestionable source, the bible or god or "I said so." Why? is maddening and being asked to justify your beliefs can quickly lead to confusion, mythologizing, hostility, puzzled silence. For the sophisticated skeptic, exhaustion comes slowly. We train on a daily basis, entertaining as many different interpretations as we can think of and seeking others from others. We Google (and Bing etc.) everything we can think of to wonder about and look at more than just the first echoes. We don't want to stand still until we can't keep moving, either because we have run out of evidence or come up against a paradox or because of timing have to make a decision. Even then we try to remain provisional, ready to change our opinions as more information becomes available or we notice something we missed or our circumstances have changed and so we see something differently.
It is deceptively easy to be skeptical in a sophisticated way with beliefs you are inclined to reject. It is exquisitely difficult to apply such skepticism to our preferred beliefs. And then there are the foundational ideas, the premises, the assumptions on which other beliefs rest that we aren't even aware we have. The not merely unspoken but unnoticed beliefs that shape many subsequent beliefs are the ones most resistant to even the most sophisticated skepticism. How do you test something you don't know is there? But it is there. Turtles, Turtles, Turtles, ...
Phyronnianism -- you can't believe anything because there's no ultimate turtle; everything rests on nothing. The phyronnian pushes each turtle aside until he or she claims there are no more turtles and nothing remains. There are no foundations on which to build and thus any building, any belief, is just another lie, and attempt to gain power over others by deception, coercion, or any means necessary. But are all lies equal for being equally lies?
Religions, pick a turtle, ceremonially aggrandize it, and then build everything on its back, denying the existence of any others or calling them false turtles.
Patriotism's turtle is "our country."
Conspiracism, the given (aka received) turtle is a lie. The real turtle is hidden by propaganda and corrupt legislation or by ignorance or ideology or collective insanity. "Analysis" or "criticism" -- do your research -- render the false turtle transparent and so reveal the true turtle hidden below. And that turtle is, of course, the last turtle. The one true turtle. Anyone who questions that turtle will be excommunicated, deported, institutionalized, imprisoned, or murdered. A more dignified expression of conspiracism is the hermeneutics of suspicion: Freudian analysis, Marxist analysis, and so on. Any rhetoric that claims to differentiate "rhetoric" from reality is some version of conspiracism.
Prosecution, the purpose of interrogation and cross examination is to establish a truth beyond a reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury or judge. Here we assume there is an ultimate turtle in this particular stack of turtles. There was a crime committed. This person did or didn't do it. Why (not in the sense of motive but in the sense of cause) they did or didn't introduces a new stack of turtles, perhaps an infinite stack of turtles.
Sophisticated skeptics know there's always another turtle because it's turtles for ever in all directions, as far as the eye can see and the imagination can reach. So we pick the one we think offers the greatest flexibility and we build on it. We are willing to contemplate the possibility of other people's turtles and prepared, if necessary, to abandon the one we've chosen for another one.
The problem is having too much faith in (and therefore fear of) the power of other people's propaganda and not enough skepticism about your own. You know the truth, and everyone who disagrees with you is a dupe or as shill or a fool or a demon. anyone who delights in the epithet sheeple is gripped by a combination of the fundamental attribution error and naive realism. I have a crib on congitive biases and critical thinking in general over here.
Every reality is just another realism, a set of assumptions about how things are, often tinted by beliefs about how things "ought" to be. All thinking is at some level merely wishful thinking. Even if you could make a philosophy of sophisticated skepticism, you probably shouldn't because no one would follow you. You would end up a hermit living alone in the wilderness or perhaps silently among other like minded folk who have given up thinking in favor of collective subsistence living. Unlike Alexander the Great, you wouldn't emulate Diognese.
Thus sophisticated skepticism isn't a belief system or way of life but rather an attitude toward invention. You maintain it until you have to make an argument and then you put away the contenders and build confidently, if provisionally, on the one you've chosen for the here and now as you think it best to be understood as.
The goal is to avoid thinking in such a way as to make some conclusions inevitable and others impossible. You are trying to keep yourself open, to things you want, things you don't, things you fear, but most importantly to things you've never thought of before.
Instead of a turtles we need an elephant for this, specifically the elephant in the parable about the blind people who are asked to describe a beast they've not encountered before and which is too big for them to take in the whole being. Thus each describes the part they have has available to them and then generalizes to the whole from the part.
The screen is more often than not our interface with cultural reality today. Hold your phone up in recording mode and hold it still. How much of what surrounds you is invisible to it? Now turn in a circle and see everything, but not all at once and not beyond the capacity of the particular lens you have invoked. When we see an event captured on camera, we don't know what happened before nor what was happening round about, nor what happened when the camera was turned off. We have a laser like focus on a scene but that scene only. This leads us, if we aren't careful, to conclude that what we are seeing is what happened. And it may well be that it is what happened, but a narrowed perspective is always dangerous to draw conclusions from.
The simpler, the more obvious, the representation, the more details were omitted or elided or fabricated.