Outline
Thesis: The historical rhetorical and philosophical tradition concerning truth makes embracing postmodern communication theory difficult for both applied rhetoricians i.e. those who create useful texts like technical communicators as well as the cultural at large. Embracing this new view of communication is critical for rhetoricians and audiences to produce and use texts that work in the information age.
I. Beginning of Rhetoric and Philosophy
a. Sophists and empowered view of language
i. Language has incredible power to persuade
ii. No absolute Truth only conditional truth.
b. Plato, Truth and rhetoric
i. Rhetoric not based in Truth amoral for Plato
ii. Truth was a felt-sense that philosophers could feel but not communicate.
c. Plato wins the Truth debate plunging Western culture into a 2500 year search for Truth while simultaneously stretching the string that tethers language to truth tighter and tighter.
i. Aristotle on Truth
ii. St. Augustine on Truth
iii. Bacon on Truth
iv. Locke on Truth
v. Nietzsche on Language
II. The string snaps: in the Twentieth Century philosophers like Wittgenstein and Foucault begin to understand that Truth is irrelevant—there’s only language.
a. Wittgenstein tries to create a view of language that ties language to truth but he can’t do it and abandons the effort.
b. Foucault finally declares an end to “the tyranny of the signifier.”
III. Modern communication theory and applied rhetoric (technical communication): the more practically minded apply the end of Truth to texts and language.
a. Brief history of technical communication and communication theory
b. How such theories empower both technical communicators and their audiences.
c. What happens when communicators and audiences don’t understand how the discursive reality created by texts work.
d. What rhetoric and technical communication departments can do to banish Plato and truth in their contemporary texts. (We can never really banish Plato, but we can place him in his historical context.)
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1 comment:
Kendall,
Thanks for the note. You do not have to find a reference with Plato’s forms, although referring to his cave analogy is what many people do. Wittgenstein is a good theorists to bring in when talking about the age of mechanical reproduction in some way. If you’d like to paraphrase or summarizing Wittgenstein, that would make good sense. And there are connections to be made between Habermas and Plato as well.
Postmodern communication theory, as I understand it, embraces the idea of multiple discourse spaces. The more opportunities for discussion the better.
Anyway, I like your outline—you’re trying to do a paper that provides a wide range of connections, and that works well here. Most articles that are published tend to narrow—perhaps only example Bacon on Truth for instance. But, your paper sounds like it makes interesting connections and builds out of a number of ideas that come out of our course.
Now, there are many theorists in communication departments that would agree Plato should be banished or read entirely historically. I personally think there is a lot to learn from them, still, in contemporary rhetoric and tech comm courses. Now, is there more to be applied and learned from Twentieth century philosophers? Perhaps. But thinking through the debates in the classical period—what is truth, why do we need to know what truth is, is education or context or leadership or successful politiking more important than truth—gives us insight into good technical communication. In the last few years TCers as leaders has become more and more discussed. We can learn from Isocrates here.
Turtles, all the way down.
Rich
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