it's called the pentatic method okay so the pin tab but what's happening in the pin tab is if you've been through 100b and you know you know you got the five parts of the pintad yada yada yada okay hold on to your hats because burke is is actually doing something uh a little bit more demanding with the pin tab so let's begin to understand the pin tab by understanding what burke thinks the pen tab is telling us so looking at the pin tab as a method part one here is what burke thinks the pin tab is revealing to us so to understand this method you're going to need to get acquainted with three terms okay terms that burke highlights as the negative the hierarchy and guilt victimogen purification now i i realize i just smuggled three terms into the third term but hold on because that's all one one idea in burke as we will see when we begin to unpack it all right each of these terms has an absolutely crucial element to understand so if you're going to understand how at least burke's vision of rhetoric and religion interact you need to understand these terms fortunately you should be able to get them there they're terms that we have actually touched on in one or two ways over the course of the semester so let's start of course with that first one the main term the main term is the negative now remember burke is trying to understand language and he thinks the best frame for understanding language is rooted in religion and he starts with this idea of differentiation what is it that language does okay the first thing language does according to burke is it excludes it shuts down it says no to every other possible meaning that's its core idea its core contribution actually is that language is constantly excluding possibilities language shuts down it makes a difference it tells me that one thing is a thing and not something else language is built on this it is the fundamental aspect so that when a word is spoken all other ideas are shut out of your mind and that single idea is brought forward so i can say to you sailboat and when i say sailboat you imagine one thing you don't imagine an elephant you do not imagine a uh uh you know the planet saturn or or a spaceship going to the moon you don't imagine any of those things when i say sailboat it calls to mind a specific reality and it excludes it shuts out it differentiates that thing from all the other almost infinite possibilities there are that's the power of the negative now if the negative sounds familiar to you if that's ringing a bell it's ringing a bell because um it burke is basing this on that old ad that we explored earlier that old idea that we explored i mean mysticism called apophatic theology he's looking at the theology of the negative remember the theology of the negative is where you keep saying no over and over and over again right you you say well um that's not the reality i'm talking about that's not the reality i'm talking about that's not and you you keep doing that and if you do it often enough then even though you've never said what the reality is the negation sort of um pins it in right it sort of makes it visible to you even though you never actually defined it all right that's what burke means by the negative the core of language the very power of language is in no it's in not it's in exclusion it's in differentiation it's in bringing a single thing to mind rather than something else it it's it calls to mind the sailboat not something else the same thing happens when i say horse okay i call horse there you are you think of that animal you do not think of a tardy grade you do not think of cockroaches you do not think of a poodle when the word horse is spoken it's a word that negates other meanings and brings a single idea to your mind all right now these ideas that language can work with they don't even have to be material realities they can be non-material realities they can even be fictional realities if i say to you flying monkey well guess what there it is right there okay that's the power of language i can bring to your mind this and not anything else in the world all right the power of that language then is in the ability to exclude and those exclusions create a certain power for us they give us the power to create categories to put things together that share some named qualities right so when we look at the examples you know we have up here look you know we can put together a category things that really exist okay well that would be a sailboat and a horse now sailboat and horse are in the same category and flying monkey is not in that category right so there we are we we've got a category now but we could also have other categories we can say uh you know animals okay well now the flying monkey and the horse they're in the same category in the sailboat is excluded this is what the knot gets you this is what the negative does the negative is the property that allows us to create categories inside our language and it is the the ability to make categories that creates the possibility of human thought burke says you cannot think humanly without the not the negative and the negative is not found in nature it is not a natural category it is something humans bring to nature through language so the fundamental foundational idea of language the negative is what begins to make language act in a sort of kind of transcendental way now here's the thing these categories that we can found and put together they're not limited to material realities there are also moral categories and of course moral categories are also rooted in the negative there are certain things you do not do right certain things um that uh are not allowed so we we have these categories of behavior as well so the negative creates the possibility of human thought it creates the possibility of categories and we have moral categories too that is to say um these these um categories of behavior that we create well we can categorize categorize some of those behaviors as well as not good not fitting into the category of the good excluded from good okay that gives us our sense at this point of the first take home that we want to have from this idea of the negative the negative is first and foremost an inevitable part of nature you cannot avoid it if you speak speech by nature words by nature exclude all right they say no to all the other possible meanings they focus us on one meaning that in itself is good because that creates categories and categories are what makes human thought possible all right and finally it's also what makes moral judgment possible now with those take-homes we've started with the negative in our three terms here are the others down here three major terms that we've got to get our minds around we've started with the negative and we've got three take-homes it's inevitable it categorizes and makes thought possible and it gives us the ability to make moral judgments which is a good thing right you don't want a world nobody wants to live in a world where everything is okay uh you want to live in a world where you know people cutting your throat in a back alley and taking your money is not a good thing that's the world you want to live in right and that gets us very quickly to the second of the major terms that we need to unpack and that's hierarchy