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The usual definition of what rhetoric is: the art or skill and the record, if any, of speaking or writing formally and effectively as a way to persuade or influence people. (Britanica Dictionary). The only problems with this definition is that "formally" now only means "publicly" to small and big and international audiences, in almost any manner: stiffly, casually, grammatically, or in slang and vulgarity. The other problem is that "effectively" has technological dimensions the ancient Greeks and Roman could not have imagined, and audiences although generally literate are often unwary, and some are highly educated and yet credulous.

Rhetorical, because of how well-studied and prepared the authors have been, now means that a rhetorical question is not a question, but instead a statement, i.e., not expecting an answer. Rhetorical questions often leave a dialogue with a "speed bump" that begins to cast a long shadow over the conversation. Such is the nature of rhetoric as a reflection of the mind's "attitudes."

To begin, we should visit the "Forest of Rhetoric", if only to get a grasp on how complicated rhetoric really is, and to acknowledge how long and how unevenly the field evolved among the ancients and later.

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The word (or particle) trope means "change," as heliotrope plants "follow the sun," thus slowly changing the direction they face. In rhetoric the very important figures of speech, the so-called Master Tropes — Metaphor, Metonymy, Synechdoche, and Irony — indicate how the brain is working, what strategy is used, what and how in more conceptual detail the brain (and the mind that has developed in it) is doing to assemble an idea in language.

The human brain reasons ratiocinatively especially when it encounters anything completely new. It operates ratiocinatively, that is, by way of testing and, if successful, producing analogies (ratios) of one concept to another. So, a ratio looks like this in language 2:1 or "2 to 1." You can also say: for every two of these there's one of those. A typical dictionary will say that a ratio is a quantitative relationship. Actually, in the human brain ratiocination deals with both the quantitative and the qualitative relationships between the elements upon which we focus our attention.

Ratiocination is a neural process that tests sensory inputs against the information already "acquired from infancy onward as 'concept'" and kindled into an engram of actual neural tissues spread out in one level or another of various sensory and motor cortexes (cortices), an established pattern of neurons we call up as memory.

Understand that the absolute newness of a visual perception, say, evaporates very, very quickly and is succeeded (maybe and probably superceded) by the next moment's vision of what that perception might be. In the human mind an "iconic" car, for instance, was establish in our minds as very young children, and over the ensuing years it has been resolved into an engramic pattern of pieces: doors, fenders, windows, wheels, tires, tops, portholes, spoilers, emblems, colors, etc., so when we see something that begins to look like a car, our brain verifies that it is a car by finding and stimulating the concept "car," and we get a mental picture of a whole car usually and then we are "reminded" (excellent word!) of the parts and features and the usual assembly. If the first moments of seeing the object all register as "a car," then the brain rekindles the engram of neural tissue that are associated with that concept, reenforcing the engram. Most of the ratiocination occurs within what we call memory and unconscious ultra-rapid rationcinative processes.

This process begins in infancy and builds a dynamic engram matrix by trial and error, with erroneous engrams left to fade away and the actual tissues used in other more efficacious engrams, sort of "over-writing" the old useless ones. The process produces a unique mind, each one different because the sequences of engram development are unique ... and the tissues are unique except in identical twins, and similar if not unique between parents and among siblings.

Eventually, humans acquire some of the complexity of their "native" language, which is a process that provides a very useful, but unfortunately incomplete, index of what we have experienced and rekindled often enough to be called our mind, including its "human nature," discussed in an very important background essay "Habitus", which is the way a person of a particular background perceives and reacts to the world, arising from the sum result of information acquisition common to a given culture and, therefore, each person's almost and not quite unique experience, overlaid onto those motor and social-behavioral systems inherited.

For the record: I believe ratiocination (quantitative) is just one important kind of the broader category of analogizing (ALL numerical and linguistic and prelinguistic) "objects" of thought, or "proportionalizing" them, if that helps. The vocabulary each of us has is inherited from eons and millions of language practitioners, some of whom were not as good as others as they invented and sometimes misused words (and numbers). English is the most syncretic major language on Earth, and that provides us with multitudes of options for expressing ourselves, but not enough to fully express ourselves, hence employment of figures of speech to invent new shades of meaning for old words and expressions. English also contains multitudes of possibilities to have created linguistic index engrams that lead our minds off into new and sometimes productive and sometimes unproductive ratiocination and analogizing.

In time the language used in analogies usually loses some or most of the surprise and "spark" they had when first encountered; they turn into plain language, like the idea of "the planetary electrons of an atom." A living language is a veritable cemetery of dead metaphors ... and onomatopoeia and acronyms and jargon, slang, misspellings, conjugations, parts of speech, fashionable and class pronunciations, and borrowing from other languages where the culture created different points of view.

According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or Linguistic Relativity, a person's native language literally shapes their thoughts and perceptions of the world. This idea is broadly accepted, but poorly analyzed and generalized. More popularly, their work seems to posit that Artic peoples have many more words for snow than are available in English or Swahili. So, if you ask an Inuit person whether it is snowing now, she probably won't be able to tell you by just looking out the window.

Given that a concept is a kindled pattern of neurons across many parts of the physical brain, it is remarkable that we are even capable of analogy. Mind must depend on substrate physical rules of kindling and remembering that are partly hierarchical and partly not. There is a latitude in the searching and fetching of ideas that permits tropes, changes to the "logic" of a concept: "All the world's a stage," or "couch potato" or "Bruce is a spineless chicken."

After eons of thinking about this, we have noticed that trope analogies are assembled differently, and we have names for the categories of difference:

The trope strategy called Metaphor assembles an idea in our minds by creating an analogy of one thing (concept) to another unrelated thing. "My love, a rose," which entails concepts of beauty, fragrance, texture, sexuality, and many others.

The trope strategy called Metonymy assembles an idea in our minds by creating an analogy of one thing (concept) to another already related thing. "The White House supports more involvement in the TTP."

The trope strategy called Synechdoche (sih.NEC.duh.key) assembles an idea in our minds by creating an analogy of a part for the whole or the whole for a part. Some think it is a kind of Metonymy, others not. "Lend me a hand, will ya!" "The rancher had 150 head of cattle."

The trope called Irony states some or all of a concept opposite or contrary to the the intended concept. "Well, my vacation was very educational," or in other words "... more brain work than I expected ... and I was a little unhappy about that." And, irony is very complicated and often misunderstood by the audience. So for instance, Sarcasm is a form of irony, usually meant to pinch or insult a little as opposed to straight irony, which is usually intended to be humorous or at least inviting or provoking further thought. Irony is associated with the dialectic and in this sense produces a "fluid" thought that moves from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.

All the tropes are fluid. If you study one closely you will notice your mind wandering (perhaps wondering) whether in the metaphor trope, the one whose love is "a rose," also includes thorns, and therefore becomes an irony trope. Yes it does, and that tells you something about the retrieval process going on in the brain; it is very dynamic, fast, and open to fluidity.

The ratiocinative process goes on moment to moment, each perception being subjected to ratiocinative proportionality comparison to what is already (provisionally) known. Our minds seem stable, but everything we do is in a sense provisional, and we convince ourselves, nevertheless, that it is firm, steady, and reliable, conservative people all the more so. We even blink our eyes sometimes to distinguish one flow of visual perceptions of that car from the one's after our eyes reopen a tenth of a second later. (Clearly, we also need to lubricate our eyes from time to time, but watching the blinking eyes in a political discussion on television, for instance is very revealing.)

Finally, before we move into Tropological Analysis more deeply, that is, why we choose one trope over another and what in the field of discussion is associated with the trope strategy and its results, it needs to be emphasized that the brain's principle function is survival of the organism. There are peaceful times when the new brain is assembling protocols for dealing with incoming information, and there are active times when the brain is working hard to process as much as it can of our environment and what is going on there. We know, for a very interesting example, that male human brains do not develop the ability to make fully reliable risk assessments in novel public circumstances (or even at home) until they are close to thirty years old. How that is possible, given that survival is the main background concern, is a story about the amazing complexity of the brain in the context of modern cultures, and by "modern" I mean also ... since the last ice age.

TROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

In the recent modern period scholars have been able to notice certain fairly stable correspondences between ideas and the way we say or write them to explain them. As to Ideas, Stephen Pepper's "World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence" is the single most respected such attempt to get at the nature of worldviews and the histories created under their influence. You should acquire this book if you are interested in pursuing the complexities of worldviews. The book contains a lot of noodling about evidence and jargon Pepper invents to get beyond the muddle in the academic and public minds about evidence in world fairly recently confronted by relativity in Physics and Philosophy.

The book is the fountainhead of much of 20th c. historiography, and has been hopefully embroidered upon by many, including Christopher Peterson, in a very short introductory essay only 15 years old in Psychology Today by Christopher Peterson, pieces of which I will add to the framework of our analytic matrix.

So, along with Pepper, we discard as "explanatory" the world hypothesis of Animism and the world hypothesis of Mysticism because both employ explanations for which there is no reliable and replicable evidence, only assertions, albeit broadly accepted assertions endlessly repeated by the faithful.

To enlarge on Peterson's explanations: the animistic explanation of why the neighbor played his music loudly at 2am is that music does not understand time of day, or that the phonograph, designed to play, wanted to play. One form of animism is called hylozoism which imputes human (or lesser) soul into inanimate objects like "my car loves the 405 path across Los Angeles."
Mysticism is much more prevalent in human cultures. It posits that the gods or the One God or a Supreme Being are responsible for reality, that they create it and, if you are looking for an explanation of why the neighbor played loud music at 2am, it was because God ordained it. Clearly mysticism is a cop-out from curiosity to dogged faith. Predestination "theory" was the culmination of mysticism and the dogged position that gave rise to "wealth righteousness" as proof of being predestined to heaven.

The relatively ADEQUATE World Hypotheses are, per the Wikipedia: Formism, Mechanism, Organicism, and Contextualism defined in the Chart below.

Formism (similarity) [category] found by METAPHOR producing PERSPECTIVE

Why does an orange look and taste like an orange? It's in the nature of an orange to be orange in color and round in shape and to taste like an orange. These are an orange's distinguishing properties, attributes, traits, or features--in short, its essence. The root metaphor for formism is identification of similarities and differences for phenomena. In short, things that appear to go together do in fact go together. Plato and Aristotle are examples of formist philosophers.(Wiki) "Formism explains in terms of placing whatever we are trying to explain into a category (form). Why did my neighbor play his music loudly at 2:00 AM? Because he is an a**hole!" (Peterson)

Mechanism (machine) [causes] found by METONYMY producing REDUCTION

Given 19th and 20th century technologies--steam engines, gas engines, electric motors, and computer--the machine is frequently adopted as a metaphor for understanding phenomena. Machines are described according to the parts from which they are assembled--for example, gears, wires, or chips. Machines remain at rest until energy is supplied from outside. The root metaphor of mechanism (philosophy) is identification of the parts and processes and their response to stimulation from the environment. Mechanistic philosophers include Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume. (Wiki) "Mechanism explains in terms of causes: events that regularly precede whatever we are trying to explain. Why did my neighbor play his music loudly at 2:00 AM? Because he passed all of his final exams!" (Peterson)

Organicism (living system) [inherent nature of] found by SYNECDOCHE producing a REPRESENTATION

We are immersed in a biological world of living organisms, both plants and animals, including ourselves. Living organisms are organized, self-regulating, and actively functioning systems. A seed planted in favorable conditions, unfolding and maturing into a tree, is an example of an organismic system. The root metaphor for organicism is inquiring how living systems maintain adaptive balances between acting on the environment and being acted on and supported by the environment. Organismic philosophers include Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. (Wiki) "Organicism explains in terms of the unfolding of the inherent nature of whatever we are trying to explain. Why did my neighbor play his music loudly at 2:00 AM? Because he is a young man who just moved into his own apartment!(Peterson)

Contextualism (historical act) [the larger context] found by IRONY producing DIALECTIC

Historical events--an election, revolution, or war--have no significance when considered in isolation. The significance of an historical act depends on its context: its relationship with events that precede and follow and the interpretations of these acts. The historical-context, or contextualist, metaphor, is selection among events, contexts, and interpretations and weaving these into coherent and meaningful histories. Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Henri Bergson, and John Dewey are examples of contextualist philosophers.(Wiki) "Contextualism explains in terms of the interplay between whatever we are trying to explain and its larger context. Why did my neighbor play his music loudly at 2:00 AM? Because it was Saturday night, and this is a college town!" (Peterson)

To review and summarize: Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, coined the expression "Master Tropes" and argued that Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony are not merely for embellishing discourse (verba), but have their separate "role in the discovery and description of 'the truth' or ideas (res)" So for the non-figurative roles (res) Burke said

And then Hayden White in Metahistory: ... recognized some of Pepper's language in Burke and so associated Pepper's four relatively adequate world hypotheses with Burke's Master Tropes, which I have inserted (above) in the Wiki explanation of the system.

The upshot of all this is that now we have reasonably well elaborated (coordinated) concepts that align with or associate with stated historical ideas, but also that because the Master Tropes as names for what the brain is doing in selecting word-evidence to explain things now a trope does create its own adequacy even though there might be countervailing evidence more reasonably included were another trope and worldview be employed!! The Chart contains 20 "signal" terms which provide "systematic" access to the others. It is still complicated, but it is a tool for understanding what The Forest of Rhetoric says (in "Trees: What is Rhetoric: Content / Form")

For example, a figure of speech such as "synecdoche" (in which a part represents a whole, such as referring to one's car as one's "wheels") turns out to be microcosm ... [of the thought processes involved] ....

and shortly later

Thus, rhetoricians divided form and content not to place content above form, but to highlight the interdependence of language and meaning, argument and ornament, thought and its expression. It means that linguistic forms are not merely instrumental, but fundamental—not only to persuasion, but to thought itself.

Then, White's book, Metahistory, vigorously shows how, for example, the Hegelian view of German history, selecting evidence of the senses as exemplars of the totality of the society, and then from reflecting on the mind's own operations, employs one organicistic synecdoche after another, some new, some just elaborations of root synecdoches, like the Weltanschauungen based on behaviors of one (or more) heroic person(s) or god(s) attributed to the entire Volk, and thereby maintains its logical coherence, its view of the Germanic as organically unified, despite lots and lots of ignored evidence that beyond the Bauer's plow Prussia and Westphalia shared very little cultural affinity with Bavaria or each other. The upshot being that Hegelians were over-confident about their politics and destiny, and of course that Kaiser Bill became over-confident too.

All pretenses aside, the tropological analysis of worldviews and the world hypotheses underlying them is extremely laborious. I have done it in the history of the evolution of the Russian science of Physiology which, being many years later to develop than Physiology in France and Germany, provided a "laboratory" for more rapid evolution from Mystical and Formist conceptions of how the human body functions toward a more Mechanistic view of the whole being made up of "cooperating" parts.

One of the questions I am posing myself (and you) is whether Fascism is a worldview of politics that is inherently "adequate" given the strength of its fundamental trope "the stern father figure." Likewise, whether Patriarchal systems are in modest decline or actually in a counter-revolution around the world, but both particularly in the US. Further yet, we need to examine whether the Formist US Constitution, and the Mechanist industrialism or the Organicist slavery/labor context is teetering into a Contextualist and destructively Ironic path, usually very dispersive and unpleasantly chaotic? Will our brains accept that chaos or revert to the safety of dominant Mechanist or Organicist worldviews? LOL & Whew!

Believe me, these analyses are on-going in academe because in the intense environment of a graduate seminar they provide a framework for what we take to be the larger picture of human political history, certainly no more bizarre than the physicists discussing quantum entanglement over interstellar distances!

Remember the tropes are fluid. My Metaphoric love, a rose, includes Ironic thorns. Organicism may turn out to be a special case of living Mechanisticism. My deepest experience was many years ago, but I have never been the same since, if you know what I mean. You need to think about the fluidity masking the passing reality of things. Take notes!!!

JB

Science: Rhetoric