hello and welcome to steven reed's philosophy except i'm not really going to read philosophy i'm going to summarize it for you because this book is not public domain uh so this is book one chapter two aristotle's rhetoric he starts off by reminding us that rhetoric and dialectic are still in art and he tells us why he says that because rhetoric and dialectic are concerned primarily with the ability to recognize all of the means of persuasion in any given situation and no other art or science does that then rhetoric and dialectic must be a unique art or science he then goes into proof he says there are two types of proof that you can use in argumentation artificial and inartificial inartificial proof is proof that's given to us that we already have for example testimony or hard evidence you might think of pictures from a crime scene or video evidence all these things are given to us we already have them we do not need to create them we can just use them however artificial proof is proof that we must create through the power of dialectic and rhetoric that is to say we must invent it and he says there are three ways that we can prove things through rhetoric and dialectic and he says they are persuasion of character persuasion by changing the audience's frame of mind and persuasion through argument and demonstration you probably know these as ethos pathos and logos respectively first proof through character or ethos this totally relies on credibility aristotle almost immediately reminds us that those old rhetoricians the ones we talked about last video are still garbage and they said that having good character had nothing to do with persuasiveness but aristotle says they're dumb they're wrong there is no more authentic proof than character he says that good people will be believed just by virtue of their character even when what they're saying is highly debatable he does remind us though that the argument should take precedent that that we as discerning and informed philosophers should still hold the argument as being more important than character itself now i know aristotle has a lot more to say on ethos but he doesn't do it in chapter two he moves right along to pathos he begins again by bashing old rhetoricians saying that the other rhetoricians have only ever done pathos and they didn't really do it right it's important to remember that patos is about the audience and not about the speaker it's not about changing your own emotions it's all about changing your audience's emotions because he says emotion changes judgment if you're in a good mood you're gonna have a very different judgment than when you're in a bad mood and the entire purpose of proof through audience is just getting them in the right emotional frame to judge a matter this is obviously very important in law but it's also important in your day-to-day interactions with people if you want someone to make a certain judgment on a certain thing it's best to get them in the right emotional state first and as with ethos he says there will be more on this later now right before he moves on to logos he reminds us hey there are three forms of proof so it stands to reason that to be a master of these three forms of proof you yourself must be a master of reason and discerning good character and virtues and also discerning emotions if you can do these things you are well on your way to utilizing ethos pathos and logos effectively and then finally he moves on to logos he says everything all things every single thing is proved by example or enthymeme there is nothing at all that is proved by anything except for example or enthymeme he also says to be clear that enthymeme is the rhetorical version of deduction so deduction is what you use in dialectic where you list a bunch of premises to get someone to a conclusion whereas in rhetoric when you're speaking quickly and for impact in a large audience you'll use truncated or or shortened deductive arguments with implied premises and likewise examples are the rhetorical form of induction induction for those of you who don't know is where you draw conclusions through readily available evidence or data now it should be noted at this point that aristotle thought that seemingly valid stuff was just as good as valid stuff to an audience and it makes sense because if the audience believes it's valid it's good enough for them he didn't draw larger implications at this point do with that data which you will then he stops to talk about the audience he says that while examples are as persuasive as enthymemes and the memes are where the money's at and the memes he says specifically get the applause he he then goes on to bash the audience he says specifically it rhetoric operates on audiences of people who lack the capacity to comprehend a complex argument or follow a long chain of reasoning and then he talks about deliberation and deliberate ability he says that if you want your enthymemes if you want your arguments to be compelling they should be deliberateable or debatable arguable he says if you're only listing facts that everyone already accepts as true you're going to bore your audience and why should they care if it's not contested stuff that you're teaching or telling them so you need to know what your audience finds deliberateable and what they hold as undeniable fact he then says you may encounter some difficulties on your road to mastering rhetoric he says there are two things that may trip you up when giving your arguments the first is if you're using prepositions that were actually conclusions for previous arguments that had prepositions or if your prepositions are based off of nothing and that you just sort of state them as if you hope they're fact and the reason he says these two things won't work very well on rhetoric is because the first one is too long your audience won't be able to follow it because as he said before they can't follow long difficult arguments and the second one is people aren't going to believe you just because you want them to you have to offer some evidence or argument for your prepositions which may leave you in a bit of a pickle you're not supposed to use long arguments and you can't use no argument so what do you do you may have guessed at this point what aristotle says you should do end the memes and the memes for everything so he believes that fewer premises is better and if you can rely upon the knowledge of your audience that would be the best because utilizing those implied premises that you use in nth memes allows you to minimize the amount of verbal premises you need to give to get the audience to a conclusion speaking of end the memes aristotle jumps right back into them again he gives an example of how you can utilize implied information from the audience he uses an old greek example i'm going to give a contemporary example that's pretty much the same if i told you that the buffalo bills won their game in the playoffs you would know exactly what i meant because you know the buffalo bills are a football team and you know the playoffs refers to the super bowl playoffs and because you know those things i can tell you this short concise sentence and you can unpack so much information from that that is a good utilization of implied audience knowledge again the fewer premises the better and the more you can rely on implied premises from your audience the less you have to say he then says it's okay for things to be true for the most part and not necessarily true now this is interesting he says that there's going to be a lot of stuff that's usually true or mostly true and your conclusions are therefore going to be usually true or mostly true themselves and that's okay for example if you say dogs have a good sense of smell that's a dog so it has a good sense of smell aristotle says dogs usually do have a good sense of smell there are probably dogs that have lost their sense of smell for one reason or another but that's okay your argument is still true enough to use in persuasive rhetoric it's good enough to still be good and honest rhetoric next aristotle jumps into things he calls signs signs are just indicators based off of assumptions so essentially they're just statements that are meant to be taken at face value these come in two flavors fallible and infallible the fallible kind can be easily disproven with counter examples the infallible kind cannot the first one aerosol gives is the wise are just because socrates was just the implied premise here was that socrates was also wise now obviously this is this is fallible because there are plenty of people who might be considered wise that are totally unjust and aristotle also lists some contemporary examples of very unjust but potentially wise people the second one he says is an infallible sign this person is ill because they have a fever the implication here is that if you have a fever you're ill he says this is infallible because you can only have a fever if you are ill he also gives an example about lactation he says that woman is expressing milk therefore she must have given birth to a baby because to him those two things were necessarily causally related i'm not a biologist or lactation consultant so i will take his word for it though i would probably take the lactation consultant's word more for it moving on to oh my god more enthymemes is it just me or is aristotle obsessed anywho aerosol specifically says we should only be drawing and names from common knowledge and absolutely not from specifics because if you dip into particular sciences like chemistry or biology or history you may lose your audience in fact what you're really doing is dabbling in other sciences and other arts and not in rhetoric and dialectic he says that is a surefire way to lose your audience and actually diminish your own ethos because that because that data is generally not accessible to the common people and still be running into that problem we talked about earlier where you're giving a preposition that you're just expecting them to believe with no proof all right to summarize aristotle introduces ethos pathos and logos but never says ethos pathos or logos and the memes become incredibly important as they are the center to aristotle's rhetoric particularly in his logos he reminds us that our sign should be infallible because if they're not our audience will think of counter examples and make us look really silly finally aristotle says hey stay in your lane don't dabble in other arts or sciences when you're doing rhetoric because you will lose your audience almost immediately and you will diminish your persuasiveness well guys that is all for book one chapter two and aristotle's rhetoric i hope you enjoyed it if i got anything wrong please feel free to let me know and goodbye