Socratic Chat Room

                                                                                                Image credit: Medium      During the classical era, in Cicero’s De Inventione , he introduced a conceptual way of dividing and ordering speech known as the five canons of rhetoric. These cannons (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory) have maintained their validity through the centuries with each cannon’s purpose evolving to meet today’s digital rhetoric. The practices of all five cannons can be translated to digital rhetoric and are described in Eyman’s Digital rhetoric: Theory, method, practice.      The first can...

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...