Langsdorg: Callicle's Parlor - Gadamar - Heidegger - Hermeneutic Knowing

Langsdorf, L. (2007).  Callicle’s Parlor: Revisiting the Gorgias after Dwelling with Gadamer.  In P. Arneson. Perpsectives on Philosophy of Communication.  West Lafayette: Purdue University Press

Separates Learning and Knowledge from action and belief.

The object of Rhetoric is persuasive speech.

-       Persuasion that is in speech.

-       Persuasion that transcends to action.

Two forms of persuasion:

-       Provides belief without knowledge.

-       Provides sure knowledge.

Rhetoric moves to the ignorant to act without knowledge.

-       Those who are informed cannot be swayed by someone with less knowledge.

The author adds another type of knowing as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamar.

Hermenutic Knowing:

-       To make know to oneself or to make meaning, through interpretive understanding of reality.

Rhetoric belief without knowing relies on the ignorance of the audience.

Author splits sure knowledge:

-       Sure represents immutable ideas across all times and places.

-       Situated – relevant to circumstances and uses reality to guide without certainty based on the possible or the probable.

Author on the learning process.

Aristotle:

-       All teaching starts from what is already known.

-       Experiences give us knowledge.

-       Induction through experience.

-       Memory relies on perception.

-       Perception from memory and memory from experience.

Heidegger:

-       In interpreting people we use:

o   For Having: comes from culture

§  Ways of acting and thinking.

§  We take for granted

§  Invisible

o   For-Sight: To inform the ways we respond to particular situations.

§  Informs the viewpoints from which we develop knowledge.

o   For-Conception: Implicit ways of conceiving correlated to our actions.

For-Having is conduct

Fore-Sight is View point

For-Conception is Understanding

Putting it together:

-       What is already known is fore-Structure.

o   It does not come form sure knowledge, but from situated knowledge transmitted by communal practices.

§  Which are informed by community’s history.

-       Fore Structure is derived from the three fores.

In this way we belong to history.

We are this knowledge rather than we have this knowledge.

Both knowledge of the subject and rhetoric rely on knowledge, but of different kinds.

Rhetoric compliments knowledge of a field.

We bring a fore-structure to an event, but by participating with our “being” our for-structure is reconstituted.

In genuine conversation, not the opposition of wills:

-       Participants constitute the conversation.

-       We become each others events upon which four Fore-structures change.

Again – Sure knowledge, the pursuit of the clarification of ideas is fostered by situational knowledge.

Power of Rhetoric – the ability to bring together the audiences historical and cultural for-structure with the experts abstract information about particular ideas.