Rhetoric & Cognition

Status: draft as of 28 Apr 2022

1. Moving the Minds of Others

Rhetoric is broadly defined by ancient thinkers Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian, or the anonymous author of the Rhetoric to Herennius, as the art or science of being able to move the minds and emotions of other people towards the true or the good. Aristotle defined rhetoric as ‘the power of observing in each instance the possible means of persuasion’. Rhetoric allows us to construct “enthymemes”, or explicit arguments, with the aim to persuade an audience of what is likely to be true. On the other hand, Quintilian and Cicero broadly define rhetoric as the ‘science of speaking well’, a definition which is predominantly concerned with the practical aspects of rhetoric. Let’s consider each author’s contribution to rhetoric and its impact and relation to cognition. I’ll begin with Aristotle.

Besides offering a generalised framework for rational deliberation, Aristotle argues that it is useful to restrict rhetoric to the narrow definition as “the power of observing in each instance the possible means of persuasion”. This narrow definition allows for rhetoric to aid in the construction of explicit arguments (enthymemes), which in turn aim to persuade an audience of what is likely to be true. Rhetoric, under such a construal, is the counterpart to dialectic, the art of philosophical argumentation. Both aspects, that of philosophical argumentation and rhetoric, are available to all, since, for Aristotle, everyone is able to discern, criticise or maintain some form of argument. Explicit arguments, or enthymemes, are the ‘body of proof’ in rhetoric. He writes:

…whoever is most capable of observing from what and by what means a syllogism comes to be would also be the most skilled at enthymemes, grasping in addition the subject matter of a given enthymeme and their differences from logical syllogisms. For the same faculty is employed in understanding what is true and what resembles the truth, and human beings are naturally and sufficiently inclined towards the truth and for the most part hit upon it. Therefore the person who is skilful in attaining the truth is similarly skilful in attaining what is likely to be true.

A common misunderstanding of rhetoric is that it is employed to persuade. But this isn’t true. Rather, the task of rhetoric is to find the actual or possible means of persuasion in every circumstance. Aristotle compares rhetoric to medicine; the aim of medicine is not to create health, but to promote it to the fullest possible extent. And likewise, the task of rhetoric is to find and promote the actual or apparent means of persuasion in every situation, irrespective of topic. In order for persuasion to count as rhetoric in an any instance, it is necessary that persuasion promotes the true and the good to the fullest extent possible.

The person who deploys these advantages in a just manner provides the greatest benefit; if unjustly, he does the greatest harm.

Aristotle claims that this task - to deploy such advantages in a just manner for the greatest benefit - is the task of no other art but rhetoric.

2. Character, Emotion and Logic

According to Thomas Habinek, rhetoric has usually been sub-divided into two distinct organisations, one which concentrates on the means of persuasion through character (ethos), emotion (pathos) and logic or argument (logos), while the other system is practical in nature, chiefly concerned with the tasks of the orator, that of invention, arrangement, memory, style and delivery. Aristotle’s philosophical account of rhetoric follows the first system of organisation, especially since his account concerns human motivation. And moreover, one of his main contributions to rhetoric is deliberation, namely how to act or which course of action to take in a given instance.

The presentation of a persons character to an audience is the foundational basis of persuasion where spoken language is used, and it forms the basis of believability of a speaker, where any prior idea of a person is ignored, since it is on the basis of reasonable conduct during a speech or conversation that we form judgments of character. Confidence in a persons character is thus obtained through speech. Character, then, is the most effective type of rhetorical proof. However, that’s not enough, since character only establishes confidence, but for persuasion to occur, Aristotle claims that the audience must be led to an emotion or truth, since “our decisions are not the same when we are grieving as opposed to rejoicing, or loving as opposed to hating”.

When we depict truth through speech, or reasonable arguments for some probable truth, based on believable or sound statements, we have the basis for persuasion concerning a given topic at hand. But in order for us to fully use the means of persuasion, not just its basis, we moreover must be able to:

…reason syllogistically; to understand character and virtue; and with respect to emotions, to know what each one is, its quality, and the means and manner of bringing it into existence.

For Aristotle, a person can prove ethos, or character credibility, as a speaker by three primary means: (1) show and have good sense, (2) have virtue or excellence and (3), have good intentions. Aristotle claims that people who fail to show one or all three attributes will appear unreliable in their speech and guidance to an audience. He writes:

Either through foolishness they hold incorrect opinions, or although holding correct opinions, through malice they refrain from expressing them, or they are sensible and fair-minded but lack good intent - which is why it is possible for people to who know what is best not to advise it.

It is only through the demonstration of those three positive attributes - namely good sense, virtue and good intent - that a person cannot help but come across as credible through speech to an audience. When all three attributes are possessed by the speaker, and they have demonstrated probable truth through argument, persuasion through ethos or character is thus fulfilled. It is important to keep in mind Aristotle’s claim that the audience cannot help but be persuaded through the confidence of character presentation. My interpretation of Aristotle’s basic claim is that persuasion through ethos is induced in us, in that it is a cognitive or emotional affect, one which we cannot control; the credibility of a speaker and their argument thus guides our minds to the persuasive ends of the speaker. I suspect that there is a social evolutionary reason as to why credible speakers who present good arguments are able to move our minds and emotions to a particular judgment. In his lecture series, Your Deceptive Mind, Yale Neurologist Steven Novella argues that when we interact with people that we deem to possess the elusive trait of charisma, critical thinking is inhibited in our minds. And so, I think, we become more prone to cognitive or emotional persuasion. While there’s still more to say on the nature of character, however I will here refer the reader to Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, book one, for further elucidation.

Now, what of pathos, or the emotions? Aristotle says that, in the context of rhetoric, emotions are those feelings through which “opinions are changed with respect to judgments, and are accompanied by pain and pleasure”. There’s anger, pity, fear, and the opposite emotions, such as calm, cruelty, or confidence. Aristotle uses the emotions for, first, how we can get to know the felt quality of the emotions and in which circumstances they arise. Second, how it is that we may rouse or stir similar emotions in ourselves and in an audience. He writes:

…here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. The same is true of the other emotions.

However, one of the more fascinating discussions that Aristotle conducts is with regards to the emotion of shame. So rather than proceeding with the analysis through the emotion of anger, I will examine Aristotle’s thought on shame, in which circumstances he claims it arises, and the state of mind that persons are in when they feel shame, and its importance for rhetoric, but more importantly, for how feelings of shame can help steer us to be good, or at least better, more virtuous persons. Aristotle begins part six, book two, of The Art of Rhetoric with the definition that shame is the feeling of “pain or disturbance in regard to bad things, whether present, past or future, which seem likely to involve us in discredit…it is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences…”. Shamelessness, the opposite emotion, he defines as “contempt or indifference” with respect to the same.

So under what circumstances could we feel shame? Aristotle lists various situations in which feelings of shame could arise in us, some of which include: (1) displaying cowardice, or surrendering ourselves willingly or unwillingly, (2) wronging people or oneself about money matters, (3) refusing to endure hardship, (4) boasting and talking about oneself too much, (5) praising people too much while ignoring their weaknesses, or being a flatterer. And so on. These are some of the conditions in which people experience the emotion of shame.

Aristotle claims that shame arises in us because we care about the opinions that others hold about us, and such people are those “who admire us, those whom we admire, those by whom we wish to be admired…, and those whose opinion of us we respect”. That’s because, for Aristotle, “shame dwells in the eyes”. He recalls a tragic but hilarious anecdote which brings the idea together:

…we feel more shame when we are likely to be continually seen by, and go about under the eyes of, those who know of our disgrace. Hence, when Antiphon the poet was to be cudgelled to death by order of Dionysius, and saw those who were to perish with him covering their faces as they went through the gates, he said, ‘Why do you cover your faces? Is it lest some of these spectators should see you tomorrow?’

It is clear, then, that in order to rouse or quell the emotions of others, we must fulfil Aristotle’s criteria: we must clearly be able to identify each emotion in ourselves and others, the state of mind in which they arise or dissipate, the kind of people with whom the emotion is usually directed towards or associated with in ourselves, and the particular circumstances in which each of the emotions arise or dissipate. The emotions can then be connected with argumentation so that persuasion can occur through the means of pathos.

3. The Tasks of the Orator

The art of discovering arguments in rhetoric is invention. It is generally treated as the first branch of rhetoric and is concerned with finding arguments and approaches to a given issue. The Roman orators, without straying from Aristotle’s thought, developed their own ideas with regards to the discovery of arguments. Their approach is based on identifying the crucial aspects and decisions of a discussion and then developing arguments towards a stance that pertains to the issue at hand. The arguments, once the critical issue and stance have been identified, can be both of a negative or positive sort. They are either a defence or a denunciation.

Habinek highlights that issues, sub-issues and stances can be a sort of scaffolding for the building of a case or argument, or indeed a series of arguments. The anonymous author of the Rhetoric to Herennius makes the case that success in a speech or discussion concerns three issues: (1) factual, where the dispute is about the facts or whether something happened or not, (2) legal, where the dispute is about a text or the interpretation of a text, (3) judicial, which concerns whether an act was just or unjust. While the structuring of invention or discovery in this way is largely applicable to a court room, it is also relevant in discussion. First, whether in the court room, in an academic setting or discussion, it is imperative to identify the key issue of contention. Once that’s been established, we then have to identify the rationale or motive behind the contention. The motive or rationale will structure the defence, general argument or denunciation. Any point of contention however must bear on the critical issue, that much is clear.

4. Cognition, Memory and Attention

A critical assumption in ancient rhetoric is a way of understanding the operations of the human of the mind. The ancient view resembles contemporary views of embodied cognition, the view that cognition depends on the physical embedding of the body in the physical world. This is contra to the view that cognition is a computational process firmly situated in the brain; that the brain is solely the seat of the mind. The ancient rhetoricians placed an importance on the interactions of the mind, thought, memory, attentional control of the mind and body, with the external reality which includes the worldly objects, and the preconceptions, judgments or opinions of other people. On the basis of embodied cognition, the validity of propositions—-statements which are true or false—-were to be determined by the impact they had on the minds and actions of others rather than the abstract rules of truth and falsehood. The implication is that propositions were verifiable insofar as they affected one’s mind or actions in a particular way. Being moved or disposed in a particular way provides worldly proof of the propositions in question.

With respect to memory, the ancient rhetoricians focused on artificial or externalised memory. For instance, they knew that the objects of the world, which for arguments sake can be said to be the same or the resembled objects that appear in perception, impact the mind more forcefully than the objects or contents of the other senses. Objects of visual perception are harder to ignore and may therefore trigger memory more resolutely. That is why, I think, they preferred pneumonic systems such as the infamous Palace of Memory. The idea behind the memory palace is that we can imagine a palace in our minds and place objects in the corridors, halls and rooms which stand for or represent something which we may wish to remember. As a basic example, if we want to remember the Sun’s orbital velocity around the Milky Way galaxy, we can place in one of our imagined rooms a cartoonish image of the Sun wearing running shoes and holding a sign that reads “251”, referring to its 251km/s velocity. The image of the Sun wearing trainers is memorable and will therefore stick in the mind. We can fill the palace with as many memorable things as we like. Then we can take an imagined walk through the corridors, halls and rooms in the order in which we want to trigger our episodic memory of the image(s) and symbols contained in the next, adjoining room. An entire walkthrough the palace should ideally constitute the totality of what we wish to remember. And if you are inclined in this way, you can have multiple memory palaces, composed of sheds or garages. And so on. The key here is to trigger one’s memory in order to induce recall. In this way, memory acts as a repository or “treasure house”.

However, first and foremost the ancient rhetoricians held in esteem a particular way or type of speaking that instilled in the minds of listeners a visualisation of the events that the speaker represents through language. This way or style of speaking, they claimed, guides the mind through a sequence of words, which in the minds of others, prompts images to be placed “before the eyes of the mind”. Speaking in a style that induces visualisation is a way of not just inducing events in a temporal order, but also a means of obtaining clarity. But moreover it goes beyond clarity, because visualisation in addition to bringing events before the eyes of the mind, also places on the mind images of people, objects and events as they actually took place in the world. Consider an example used by Quintilian that highlights the importance of speaking in such a way as to induce in the mind a clear and memorable image of what has taken place:

Our villain, burning with crime and madness, came into the forum, his eyes ablaze, his face flashing with cruelty.

Clarity is a notion they were deeply concerned with and they believe it is achieved through the making of something clear that was before obscure or ambiguous. So by placing images before the eyes of the mind, a type of clarity is achieved, since a resemblance is brought forward between the truth and the language of the speaker. It is no good to attempt to make something clear by something else that is itself not clear or contains ambiguity. Hence images induced in the mind that resemble the temporal order, and the truth of how they occurred and what or who was involved, will by itself achieve clarity. That’s because, in accordance with Aristotle’s thought, people grasp or understand when speech resembles the truth. So speaking that induces visualisation not only achieves clarity, but also goes beyond it, as it resembles truth. Likewise, they held that the mind is impacted most strongly, as it is by visual objects, by placing the strongest argument first (and sometimes also last), so as to create immediate impact on the minds of listeners. This is in connection with their view that rhetorical speech is not just concerned with impact on the ears, but the placing of ideas, arguments and visualisations in the mind. So, through a combination of immediate impact on the mind by using the strongest argument first, speaking in a way that induces visualisations in the mind, and with speech that resembles or coheres with reality, the mind is gently guided in that fashion.

Cicero believed that language needs content. That’s because the mind’s content cannot be observed without language. Likewise language is imperceptible without content. In the words of Quintilian, “separating words from thought, like mind from body, is the death of both”. This idea nicely links two aspects of their view. First, it links to their distinction between rhetoric and philosophy. Rhetoric, they claim, “unites language and thought, truth and beauty, and knowledge and wisdom”. This is in distinction to their view that philosophy is chiefly concerned with truth and the attainment of knowledge or wisdom. Whereas rhetoric has the broader aim of introducing attributes such as eloquence in the speaker, whether they are philosophers or not. Secondly, they believed in a singular or fundamental entity of existence. They held that “no entity can stand on its own”. Nature, being singular, is the thing which unifies all the arts. The arts are unified as the “display of nature”. Moreover, in a similar move, they unified all learning, as being tied together by “a single bond of association; when we perceive the explanatory power of reason, whereby causes and consequences come to be known, we find a marvellous unity and harmony of all branches of learning” (Cicero, On the Orator, I).

References & further reading

Rhetoric to Herennius (Anonymous)

The Art of Rhetoric (Aristotle)

On the Orator (Cicero)

Ancient Rhetoric from Aristotle to Philostratus (ed. Thomas Habinek)

Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good (Marta Jimenez)

Phaedrus (Plato)

Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Christof Rapp)

Your Deceptive Mind (Steven Novella)

The Orator’s Education (Quintilian)