display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 116 | Rhetoric is irrational about its means and its ends [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Rhetoric is a knack, because it lacks rational understanding of its object or what it dispenses (and can't explain the reason anything happens). | |
| From: Plato (Gorgias [c.387 BCE], 465a) | |
| A reaction: If there are cunning people who have the wrong sort of intelligence for morality, there must be cunning users of rhetoric who know exactly what they are doing. |
| 114 | Rhetoric can produce conviction, but not educate people about right and wrong [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Rhetoric is an agent of the kind of persuasion which is designed to produce conviction, but not to educate people about right and wrong. | |
| From: Plato (Gorgias [c.387 BCE], 455a) | |
| A reaction: Surely there must be good rhetoric (or at least it is an open question)? |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |