Plato (in Gorgias) would have had us believe that dark rhetors (he used the word demagogues -- Gk. people leaders) use rhetoric to distort our perceptions of reality in order to enthrall and mislead us. Thus we need to learn how to distinguish rhetoric from reality and the only way to do that is to find methodological certainty, indisputable, rock-solid premises on which to build systematic knowledge. Plato's method was dialectic. Subsequent philosophers and metaphysicians offered alternative methods. Today we have scientific methods and statistical measures to approximate as close as possible a real world independent of our perceptions, traditions, prejudices, and pre-existing beliefs. But we still crave certainty and our closest approximations only approximate empirical reality at best, and even that knowledge can be easily defeated by people who don't understand the known. In the case of vaccinations, for example, science has done remarkably well in preventing and in some cases nearly eradicating some diseases, like small pox, but that knowledge is contested by people who don't understand it and their resistance limits the success such knowledge can have. Why do people resist better ways to understand our world?
Do you have a yes or no answer for each of those questions? If your answers were more often "I don't know" or "maybe" or "it depends" or "I need more information", then you are thinking critically and good on you for it. 😉 If I followed up one of your yes or no answers with, "How do you know that?" would you have a follow up answer? If I asked "How do you know that?", would you have a follow up answer to your follow up answer? How many answers down can you go?
After two or three answers to nearly any question, most people arrive at some version of one of the following thought-stoppers:
Maybe it isn't true; I won't fight you on this, but I believe it is true and I don't really care if you don't agree with me or even if it isn't universally true because it's my truth.
In my experience ....
If you aren't a scientist, then when you make arguments from science you are really making arguments from borrowed authority. If you are a scientist,
then instead of saying science says you would probably say something like, "current research seems to indicate an 83% probability with a reliability rating of
+ or - 5%," because for people acting in their capacity as scientists, Truth, absolute certainty, is only ever truth, the probable, where probable is statistical likelihood given limits and caveats.
At the foundation of any thought analysis is an untestable hypothesis. All arguments that rest on untestable hypotheses derive their certainty from faith and circular reasoning alone.
Why do you believe in life after death? Religion. Why religion? God. Why? Because God! Or, Why do you believe death is just death? Because I don't believe in an afterlife. Why? No God. Why? Because no God!
Neither of these positions warrants certainty and yet nearly everyone holds one or the other with conviction. True agnostics are rare.
Most people firmly believe things they don't really know that much about.
We tend to call untestable hypotheses self-evident truths, which suggests they don't require argument rather than they can't be argued effectively. I believe X is true because I refuse to believe X is not true: I believe because I believe. The only alternative to an air-tight but circular argument is an open ended admission of ignorance -- "I don't know why I believe what I believe." Most people dislike this alternative so profoundly that they will evade it without realizing they are. If they don't know, they will just make something up and then stand by it.
Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher and propaganda theorist put's the need to opine a bit more harshly: "The majority prefers expessing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them a feeling of particpating." (Propaganda, p. 139)
Often the less well-founded a belief, the greater a person's adherence to it.
Do you want to admit that you don't know if the water you are drinking is safe? Well, it hasn't killed me yet. Not yet. Not that you know of. 🖕
But this time don't let me put words in your head.
Think of something you know, something you firmly believe is true. How do you know it is true?
Once you have identified the relevant source of supporting evidence for that answer, question the evidence, and then question that evidence again. How many questions does it take before you arrive at an untestable hypothesis expressed as a self-evident truth?
We inhabit a socially constructed reality that exists, as far as we know, in an empirical reality we only have scientific access to and even then most of us don't have direct access to that approximation of reality. We might live in a simulation, but we can't determine that with certainty, not yet at least even though there are people who are certain one way or the other.
Most of life's questions don't admit truly certain answers because they refer to socially constructed realities, a complex mixture of imaginary constructs (hallucinations, memories, rumors, conclusions drawn from unexamined premises) social constructs, some of which have real consequences (race is a powerful example but so is love), misperceptions, lies perpetuated by vested interests as well as errors not yet perceived as such. The goal of rhetorics of power is to simplify complexity and then make those simplifications impervious to outside influences with increasing levels of conviction and decreasing levels of awareness. Rhetorics of power work, to the extent they do, because most of us prefer certainty to uncertainty, a resounding YES (or NO) to a carefully worded "Well, maybe; if ... ."
If we had to limit our beliefs to only those things we know with absolute certainty, either we wouldn't believe much because so many questions are hard to answer with certainty or we would believe with certainty things we have no certain reason to believe. This is the problem of knowledge and thus the problem of Truth in everyday life. We seek certainty where it can't be found and when we don't find it, we assert it or buy it from someone selling it with great assurance and panache. What price are you willing to pay (and to whom) to believe you know the Truth? Or maybe Truth is a secret that can be revealed if you just ...
Given that science fails to offer absolute certainty to life's biggest questions and is both hard to understand and easily dismissed by many because it provides statistical likelihoods instead of certainties, as well as at best offering a narrow range of application outside of labs, we seek more certain forms of reasoning and what we end up with is faith, compliance, resignation or one of two kinds of rhetoric. It may be that artificial intelligence will replace scientific method as the best method for finding and testing accurate statements about the real world.More ...
Despite incessant appeals to "reality," most of us live in our heads and our communities, places where reality is almost always only socially constructed, a specific kind of realism where truth is relative and maintained by community standards, norms of behavior, expectations, and our very moldable and fallible memories as well as the prognostications of pundits and prophets and experts, credentialed and self-appointed. To an outsider a given group's reality might seem preposterous, but to the insiders the outsider just doesn't get it. Perhaps they come from elsewhere and so don't get it (foreigners). Perhaps they are new here and so don't get it yet (noviciates). Perhaps they are incapable of getting it (idiots). Perhaps they get and reject it (enemies). The concept of perspective, different worlds existing simultaneously in the same world, can help people overcome direct prejudices, but perspective requires kinds of thinking most of us only imagine we are capable of. Walk a mile in someone else's shoes is easy to say but not even close to accurate, a metaphor for an aspiration, the illusion of a reality. I can readily imagine I know where you are coming from, and vice versa, but we don't really know and the more firmly we think we know the more likely we are farther from the truth let alone "the Truth": The Dunning-Kruger effect.
From Wiki: "The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[1] whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. The Dunning-Kruger effect is usually measured by comparing self-assessment with objective performance." ( link)
Not all insiders are willing participants. Some are just there because they can't find or even imagine another place to be; some are unaware of the rhetorical situation they are living in; some know what's going on and are unhappy with the situation but hope to improve it or their place in it or have some other reason for not trying to get out (dependents who rely on them, fear, identity issues, learned helplessness, ignorance of options, fatalism, self-righteousness).
Socially constructed realities are maintained by faith but also by acquiescence, subordination, and oppression. Faith is a decision-making mechanism based on stories, preferred testimonials, rituals, norms, and expected roles and behaviors from which the faithful draw conclusions about the world and which they will defend from any real or imagined opposition. Faith, in most cases, is impervious to other forms of reasoning. This is why so called "rational" argumentation rarely changes a person's mind. Often the better the evidence to the contrary the more dug in the faithful (adherents to any socially constructed reality) get.
We get dug in because rhetors often abuse facts in the pursuit of dominance. They will insist they aren't telling people what to think but rather showing them how to think by presenting just the facts. But "just the facts" are in fact cherry- picked facts; thus they distort the sample space and craftily lead their unwitting listeners to draw inevitable but incorrect conclusions. People get used to the idea that facts endorse the orthodox view and so when presented with contrary facts, they disregard or discount them. Any assertion that doesn't support their faith is a lie or an error. It's all spin. When John Snow (1813 - 1858), for example, thought that cholera might be waterborne rather than airborne,He never thought it was dragon-born, btw.
his colleagues shunned him and even after he invented the statistical methodology upon which the science of epidemiology is based, the methodology that lead him to the primary source of London's cholera outbreak, and even after he came up with the demonstrably true solution to the problem, removing the pump handle from the one pump in London supplying cholera to the whole city, even then, after the outbreak subsided, his colleagues rejected his new science because the rate of infection had been falling before he removed the handle and blah, blah, blah, resist, resist. Hindsight, history, clearly tells us that Snow was right and they had it all wrong but it was all of them against a new way of thinking and doing and one against many never wins the first match. Would we have been better off if they had conceded immediately? Well, given that subsequent research has supported Snow's methodology, yes. But they didn't have the knowledge derived from all that research. They didn't know what Snow knew. What they knew was different and wrong, as it turned out. They had faith in what they knew and no faith in a new upstart science.
If our identities are faith-based -- I believe X becasue people like me believe X -- then changing our opinions means changing our minds and that means changing who we imagine we are. Most people find the prospect of changing their identity scary, actually unconscionable. There's an ancient cigarette ad that underscores this point. "I'd rather fight than There are basically two different kinds of socially-constructed, faith-based realities: ideological and religious.
Ideological socially-constructed realities are secular belief-systems presented as a choice between "reality" which is dogma, and lies or distortions or errors, that is everything else. Marxist materialism, for example, argues that all perceptions are a function of economic conditions and only people who have learned (been indoctrinated) to see how capitalism skews understanding can see the world for what it really is. Consumerism, to take an opposite example, leads us to believe we need a new wardrobe every season, the latest kitchen appliance, the latest phone, computer, car and, well that list is endless and constantly being refreshed. Because production costs decrease the more units are produced, more units need to sell and so advertising has to manufacture desire and thus we are taught to serve the production machine by buying more and more readily disposable stuff. The same economic mechanism feeds the fast food industry. We are encouraged by greed and false economy to super-size our meals at the expense of our health and the environment. To resist is to submit to communism.
Some other ideologies are veganism, environmentalism, liberal humanism, conservatism, libertarianism, economics, and rhetoric. Had I excluded rhetoric from that list you could reasonably accuse me of promoting a rhetoric of power since I excluded or exempted my ideology from the rules I claim control all others. Rhetoric in the form of the sophisticated skepticism I am promoting is an ideology but it is not a rhetoric of power; it doesn't seek to control. It seeks to undermine control of one ideology over any others. If it were a religion, it would be agnosticism. But it is ideological, not religious. It also isn't going to sell well because it is fundamentally unhuman. It rejects storytelling. It rejects happiness and despair, the mechanisms of desire that drive narratives and conflicts. It is akin to Buddhism, perhaps, a kind of Switzerland, a place so unwilling to pick a side that it would take an extreme act of unwarranted aggression, a once in a millennium breach of basic human decency, to make it pick a side.
An ideology can embrace scientific method only if the science can be bent to serve ideological aims. Often the connection is purely metaphorical, not real science but "scientific." When real science gets in the way, it has to be halted, usually by defunding it, or by channeling it into technological advances, things that amuse and distract the people, give them incentive to increase their participation by making them work harder so they can pay for the next important phone or gaming console or car, a fancier house, perhaps one located closer to the inner circle from which the ideology emanates.
Religious socially constructed realities are threatened by science because scientific method is perceived as anti-faith. They could just be considered different realms separated by different forms of reasoning, but if they intersect, that intersection is a crisis for some faith-based groups and so resistance is appealing and in some cases recommended or even required. Faith-based realities tend to be fatalistic; things are the way they are because it has been so ordained and any effort to alter the situation is sacrilege. Thus Hector is poor because God doesn't love him the way he loves the rich. Like ideological socially constructed realties, religious realities tend to be binary ways of thinking and speaking, divisive rhetorics of power in other words.
We also have inter-subjective realities, where a small group of people, a couple or a family, build a worldview out of shared experiences, on what the hallmark industry calls memories. Ideally these are our most cherished realities because they are shared with only or family and very close friends. But of course not every family meets the ideal and some are the absolute opposite. Broken inter-subjective realities lead to Folie à deux, murder-suicide, and the appalling abuses of children you hear about almost daily; witness Lorie Vallow and Chad Daybell.
If a reality is permeable, can be tested (threatened) by new evidence or correctives applied to old procedures or contact with outside individuals or groups, then that reality can change. Open societies (and thus the people who inhabit them) are open to change. Change, however, threatens the status quo and anyone whose power comes from the status quo as well as all those who fear change because they can't imagine positive improvement, will resist change. Anyone who wants to acquire power can either work within the existing reality or attempt to construct their own, by creating a unique vocabulary, a narrative that other people can find a place in, a villain to struggle successfully but constantly against, a set of ritual practices that affirm that narrative, and a set of rules to keep everyone in their new place, safe from the outside world and other realities. Rhetorics of power are used to maintain but also create these shared realities.
Rhetoric creates the socially-constructed and community-enforced realities we spend most of our lives living in. Rhetorically astute people understand that realities compete for attention and commitment and that a supple-minded person might embrace several realities: When in Rome. Less rhetorically astute people, on the other hand, are socially and psychologically so enmeshed in their "reality" they cannot imagine beyond it, even when their reality isn't ideal for them, when you would think suffering and frustration would be enough to make them look around for alternatives. Death or glory.
Malicious rhetors exploit people's commitment to their reality and use subtle and not so subtle techniques to first soften, then bend, then shrink, and finally replace that given reality with another reality without the target being aware of what has happened.
Since I am writing this in January 2022, let's consider the example of people who have chosen to remain unvaccinated against COVID and to accept the small-parentage risk of deadly infection in exchange for remaining true to their faith, that science is lying, that politicians are lying, that the media is lying, and that if they are to die, their time has come and god has called them home. Fatalism over human ingenuity; rhetorical suicide? Well, maybe the risk of it. Most unvaccinated people will survive the COVID pandemic. The consequence that more people will have died from COVID who didn't have to doesn't keep those individuals up at night because, according to their rhetoric, god decides who lives and dies while individual sacrifice to the greater economic good should be celebrated. But of course inside an antithetical rhetoric, that conclusion is both selfish and absurd. How do you reconcile such profound differences? How do you come to a consensus when the tenants of one world-view (rhetoric) are meaningless in another (rhetoric)?
Plato taught us that rhetoric hides or distorts reality in the service of specific interests, the power of a would-be demagogue primarily. But we are arguing that different rhetorics create different realities and unless there is some superior form of reasoning available that all interested parties can agree on, we are left with contested and contesting rhetorics. What is "real" is just what is mistaken for granted and rhetorical acts are what lead us to mistake our perceptions and behaviors for real and right when they are no more real or right than other possibilities we either can't think of or dismiss out of hand because we don't dare risk weakening our grip on our reality.
Therefore, the only way to assess the validity of a rhetoric is whether or not buying in actually improves your life in identifiable, perhaps measurable, ways: whether the rhetoric returns more than it requires. But we don't often get the chance to come at a rhetoric fresh. We are always inside another one first and so we need to see through it to another possibility. The process of seeing through is called "debunking" or demystifying or sometimes journalism or whistleblowing. An unfortunate consequence of seeing through for some people is a persistent suspicion that one is always being lied to by vested interests. Taken to extremes, demystification leads to conspiracy theories, which replace a commonly held rhetoric with one held only by a few who consider themselves Enlighted elite, the chosen who believe something everyone else thinks is crazy. And the more other people call them crazy, the more they believe. For them, being shunned is a sign of their righteousness. They think they are John Snow, Once you start to notice multiple rhetorics in conflict, the desire for an ultimate arbiter intensifies. One can't help but hope for an epistemological rescue, a method of thinking that leads to The Truth, but any way of thinking trying to pass itself of as an infallible epistemology is just another rhetoric of power. To know, to really know, is to know that we don't know much and that we have never been able to predict the future, which means we almost never operate outside of a rhetoric, a thought process designed to lead us inevitably to the illusion of an indisputably valid conclusion.
The more you know, the less certain you become. Because people value safety above all and because unshakable conviction is the epistemological equivalent of safety, rhetorics of power are inevitable.
Does this mean you need to develop your own rhetoric of power? I can't answer that for at least a baker's dozen reasons, but not least of all because I don't know you. The more important question is how well do you know you? How much are you willing to pay for certainty?Why Resist New Ideas?
quit switch." (link)
In other words, I would rather be wrong than stand corrected. And in the case of cigarettes, "The science isn't certain, and anyway I'd rather die of lung cancer than quit smoking."
Plato got it backward (or lied): rhetoric creates reality
dragon-borne, when in fact or at least as the rest of us understand "the facts", they are delusional.