Socratic Chat Room

Image credit: speakfirst      Walter Fisher was truly on to something with his notion of the narrative paradigm. Such an idea is evident in many forms of discourse and literacies. Believing that all “narratives have a rational structure that can be analyzed and evaluated” almost seems like common sense to me (Herrick, 2018, p. 254. He broke the rationality of stories down into two criteria, coherence and fidelity . Coherence of a story is when we question whether or not all internal elements of a story share consistency or hang together. The fidelity which questions a story’s moral consequences in a social context is further broken down into five sub criteria’s, fact, relevance, consequence, consistency, and transcendent issue (Herrick, 2018, p. 254). Fisher categorized argument as a species of narrative, which I’d also have to agree with. Narrative, being an account of connected events, is a large part of what argument is. Even though an argument generally consists of di...

                                             Image credit: PRIZM Institute      The first thing most of us do upon waking up every morning is to reach for our phones or tablets to see what happened in our social circles and the rest of the world during our slumber. This readily accessible information at our fingertips would surely seem like beautiful magic to someone living 400 years ago. Take George Campbell for instance, a renowned writer and rhetorical theorist from the late Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. Campbell studied and wrote about ethics and psychology during his time which he discussed in his works titled The Philosophy of Rhetoric. You might be thinking. . . what does this have to do with my smartphone? Well, Campbell’s studies rhetorical science, which are closer to today’s philosophy, deduced that each mental faculty spo...

                              Image credit: Apple Insider Steve Jobs gave the commencement address for the graduation class of 2005 at Stanford University. During his speech, he shared three stories from his life to congratulate the students for their success and motivate them on their future endeavors. Of the three stories he shared, the first, which Jobs said was “about connecting the dots” (2005), most closely represented a citizen-orator according to Quintilian’s system of rhetorical education. More specifically, Steve Jobs’ first story was delivered with the same steps Quintilian taught his students to think of judicial speeches. I can’t think of many better ways a billionaire can capture a graduating classes’ attention than to start out a speech with how they dropped out of college. Jobs opened the story with,” I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around a...

                                                                                          Image credit: The Times Weekly     We encounter various forms of rhetoric in our everyday lives. While watching the news, attending a sermon at church, or even discussing policies at the office, circumstances or settings dictate the way rhetoric is delivered. Aristotle described the division of rhetorical situations into three separate forms of oratory which he coined deliberative, epideictic, and forensic.      Just yesterday, President Biden signed a law making June 19 th a federal holiday. Known colloquially as Juneteenth, it marks the last enslaved African Americans learned ...

                                                                      Image credit: Martina Badini/Shutterstock.com Never will there be a time where ethical and social responsibility shouldn’t be shared among the population. Unfortunately, there always has and always will be some sort of situation or crisis whether it be close to home or across the world that begs us to contemplate our own ethical and social responsibilities. Some of the main questions typically include, why aren’t we all on the same page . . . and for what reasons? For instance, we should all agree that the health of our environment is key to survival, yet while some feel as though it’s their civic duty to fight to protect the earth, others feel less inclined and in some cases flat out disagree. When considering ...