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On Aristotle's Enthymeme | Donovan Conley | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: On Aristotle's Enthymeme
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so i draw your attention to the second
chapter of the
first book of aristotle's on rhetoric which
which
can be found on around page
uh 40 this is in the kennedy
version of the of the text that we are using
using
um and it starts on number eight here
page 40 number eight in the case of
persuasion through proving or seeming to
prove something that's where i'm focused
right now
so what aristotle's doing here is he's
talking about
um sort of the distinctions between
rhetoric and dialectic
just think of philosophy for that for
stand in for dialectic um so
you know there's lots of overlap between
rhetoric and philosophy or rhetoric and
dialectic and he's sort of making some
distinctions here
and he's doing that by talking about the enthymeme
enthymeme
and the syllogism where things get
really murky i think is he calls the
enthume a rhetorical syllogism
it's like what is that right so here's
how i'd like to
sort of walk through this um you've got
the enthymeme which for aristotle is the
kind of the main
medium strategy um
sort of the means by which we attempt to
persuade others
is this business of the enthymeme we'll
get back into that
and then um in philosophy or dialectic
we often talk about syllogism so what's
the difference here all right so
in philosophy dialectic um the way to
think about
sort of the syllogism is you know if
you've read any of plato's dialogues
it's usually just like one or two characters
characters
talking back and forth question answer
question answer question answer
um and they start off with these big
questions right like
what is the difference between the
pleasurable and the good
wow right like that's a big question
it's a big abstract question
and the dialectical process is question
response response question question back
and forth back and forth
and so you can engage in dialectical uh
inquiry just sort of between two people
or a small group of people
sitting around a table right but the
point is is that it's this
really sort of deep abstract
investigation into sort of big broad
truths philosophical truths and if we
come up with these big broad
sort of certainties like the good
is that which benefits others
i don't know just made that up versus
the pleasurable which is that which
benefits the self and it's temporary or
something like that just made that off
the top of my head but let's just go
ahead go with it
and say that that's the definition of
the good and that's the definition of
the pleasurable
you can think of those sort of
definitions as these major
statements or principles or almost like laws
laws
right and you can walk around then you
can say based on this definition of
what's good i can look at this situation
and i can say good bad or whatever
that is a deductive process right you're
what you're doing is you're starting
from a big statement
right the good is blank or
the pleasurable is blank or war
is blank or love is blank parenting is blank
blank
teaching is blank um travel is blank whatever
whatever
right so the idea of philosophical
dialectical inquiry
is to come up with these big certain
truths right
and this is the very platonic kind of
project is to come up with these big
rigid absolute certainties and then once
you have these things you can walk into
any situation you can say i know what
that is because i'm operating from these
big definitions right
so that is a syllogistic deductive
reasoning starting from a big
certain premise and then deducing based on
on
a situation right and there's an allure
to this because of that certainty
business right if i have
in my brain or in my breast some
iron-clad notion of what it means to
be a um vegan
right or whatever then i can walk into
any situation and sort of apply
that certain knowledge and life is easy
now what aristotle says about the
enthymeme is sort of
similar to but different than what i
just talked about all right so he calls
the anthem a rhetorical syllogism now
well he says also on this in this
chapter here this ch this uh
page he says uh
and so he says just as in dialectic
there is on the one hand
induction and on the other hand the syllogism
syllogism
and the apparent syllogism and that's
the the fallacious syllogism
so the situation is similar in rhetoric
for the paradigm or the example is an induction
induction
and the enthymeme syllogism i want to
focus on just that one line right there
the paradigm or an example is an
induction the enthymous syllogism so
i think this makes some sense right um
if you've ever traveled maybe you went
to italy
and you ended up i had this experience
with my wife a few years ago we went to
italy we
encountered some like shady people and
now she's like i don't know if i like
italy right
based on a small sample or small
experience a local tiny kind of
isolated example you broaden right so
that's induction is to work from the
small to the general
from the from the the immediate
experience to the general kind of
reality right
deduction works the opposite it works
from the broad principle
down to the local experience so to
deduce is to take a principle
and apply it to a local situation
to induce is to take a local situation and
and
draw a principle out of it right you go
to canada
where i'm from you meet four nice people
and you say wow based on my personal experience
experience
i would say all canadians are friendly
right so that's an
inductive move is to say based on this experience
experience
small local discrete we can draw
these broader conclusions so the
induction so the example is a form of induction
induction
but the business of the enthymeme as
a form of deduction takes us
into this kind of murky realm of the
when you think of the enthymeme you
still want to be thinking about
deduction just like the syllogism the
syllogism deduces from a big broad
certain principle
to a local example the
rhetorical syllogism also deduces
from some kind of premise
to a particular example here's the key difference
difference
with the syllogism the dialectical syllogism
syllogism
you're starting from an abstract principle
principle
right you're dealing with morality
oftentimes big moral principles
all blank or blank all
uh acts of goodness are
sacrificial right that's a big broad statement
statement
abstract philosophical moral
right and so the goal is to be universal
with the syllogism
um whereas the enthymeme is not interested
interested
in big abstract ideas
the enthymeme is rhetorical which means
that it's dealing with
concrete pragmatic worldly situations right
right
but the key insight here is that we can
still deduce
deduced from what well not from
certainties not from certain truths
like with the syllogism probable truths
this is the key idea gang
probabilities in aristotle are everything
everything
when you read through those those
selections you'll see he uses phrases
like for the most part
generally speaking um that which can be
relied on um
in the greater number of cases he uses
this language of probability
everywhere and for aristotle the whole
game of rhetoric
is to operate in probabilities and with
probabilities right
so if i walk into a speech
sort of situation and somehow i discern that
that
half of the audience members are
canadian i can make a joke and say oh at
least i know half of you are
what's happening there is i'm deducing
here's a local situation right i am deducing
deducing
based on an assumption
about the niceness of canadians but i'm
still deducing
i'm deducing from an assumption or a premise
premise
about the niceness of canadians that is not
not
a hundred percent true i lived in canada
i was born in canada i lived there for
24 years and then i moved to illinois to
get my phd
and i can tell you that there are
a-holes in canada there are weirdos in canada
canada
there are really boring people in canada
i can also tell you that for the most
part canadians are pretty dang nice
right so in terms of probabilities
you're in pretty decent shape if you
like assume that canadians are nice but
not always
not a hundred percent the enthymeme is a
rhetorical syllogism because it deduces
from probabilities not things that are a
hundred percent true but things that are
reliably true like the niceness of
canadians right
so what's genius about aristotle's sort
of treatment of the enthymeme is that
you can find it operating in
any attempt to influence persuade
between one person and an audience or a
group or even another person or whatever
by drawing on assumptions about what the audience
audience
believes or actually is
right um but none of these assumptions
that we're drawing on
are a hundred percent certain what in
our our
social lives our public lives the stuff
that we debate about on a daily basis
what percentage that stuff actually we
can sort of draw
on absolute certainties most of the
controversies that we engage in
are controversies because there is no
100 percent on either side
right and even though this the sides
might think they're 100 percent
all this or all that the truth is more
generally in the middle in that kind of probabilistic
probabilistic
middle part right so things are not a
hundred percent true they're 72 percent
true or they're 44
true or they're 61 true or whatever we're
we're
always talking about spectrums here
right but
the business of rhetoric for aristotle
the business of reasoning and arguing
is the business of drawing on these
probable assumptions
in order to persuade an audience right
so i still remember when dick cheney was
um back when when george w bush was
campaigning for his second term and i'm
still remembered to this day
a speech that dick cheney vice president
dick cheney movie was made about him recently
recently
um he was giving a speech in front of an
audience and this was an audience of
mostly like conservative republicans so
it's a you know familiar audience to the
to the vice president and i'll never
forget he said
don't forget they were going up against
john kerry you might remember he has
senator john kerry
very wealthy senator he'd like been a
vietnam hero but he was perceived as
being sort of out of touch because he's
married a woman who was like a super gazillionaire
gazillionaire
the heinz ketchup heiress right
and so what what cheney was doing
is drawing on assumptions assumptions about
about
democrats as being soft on terror right
because democrats on the left are very
nice and very welcoming and inclusive
and they don't like to be
hard and so on right so knowing this
dick cheney said to his audience
we absolutely need to re-elect george w
bush for a second term because if we don't
don't
there's a very good chance that we're
going to get hit again
we meaning america and hit meaning 911 right
right
if we don't elect john kerry there's a
good chance that we are going to get hit again
again
the thing about the anthem is what it
doesn't say right
it doesn't say it because it doesn't
need to be said it's drawing on
assumptions of the audience now what
cheney was drawing on was an assumption about
about
democrats or the left as being soft on terror
terror
weak this is an old trope on
the right right the right is like we
love the military and strength and
the left is like yeah weak too
too loving and too inclusive right so he
was drawing on these assumptions to make
this argument that if we elect
carrie we're going to get attacked by
terrorists now there's a lot of stuff
that needs to get filled in there right
that terry that kerry is is a soft
um national security soft democrat
uh that democrats are weak and they
don't have what it takes and so on and
so on
he didn't have to say all of that stuff
it was just known it was assumed right
so the way i think about enthymemes is
like going fishing
right i don't know for certain if the
audience is going to believe this or
accept this
but i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure like
whenever i'm
giving a class and you know it starts
getting like super dead and people are
falling asleep
start talking about pop culture start
talking about movies start talking about
you know stuff that the art you
know the audience is going to react to
or relate to right and it
always works so you're based basing your appeals
appeals
this is all rhetoric's job for aristotle
is like
creating appeals you're going fishing
will this work
what if i try this what about this
assumption if i say this
how will they respond right and in doing
so you're attempting to tap
into assumptions and in doing that
you are engaging your audience right you actually
actually
are sort of needing them to sort of
oftentimes the way the enthymeme is
described is that the hearer
supplies the missing premise i think
that's actually straight out of
aristotle the hearer
supplies the missing premise right in
the sense that like i don't have to say
it i can just sort of tip
tip it off and you fill in the blank
with your own
attitudes about um whatever is we're
talking about right
this is the realm of the probable not
the certain
the more or less reliable that's it
that's the game of persuasion for aristotle
aristotle
and that's the function of enthymemes
for aristotle is to deduce
based on some assumption about what is likely
likely
right in cheney's case it was almost
certain that if he said something along
the lines of democrats are weak
kerry is soft that audience was going to
go yeah
hell yeah let's get another four years
of george bush right
and sure enough that worked right so
he's making a guess but it's an educated
guess about
what the audience is likely to accept
likely to agree with
like likely to kind of share right and so
so
um it's a really really powerful concept
i think because you really can't
persuade an
audience without some understanding of
how enthymemes
well sorry you can't persuade an
audience without
using antonyms and you can't really
understand the business of persuasion
without understanding
how enthymemes work but basically we're
dealing with the realm of the probable
we're dealing with deductions from
certain assumptions about what we're
talking about and what
what what we think the audience believes
or can accept
right um and we are inventing our arguments
arguments
based on all of this so when aristotle
talks about um
invention as artistic proof artistic proof
proof
is i have artistic license as speaker i have
have
some uh creative control over what i choose
choose
to say touch on invoke
right so unfortunately i'm writing i'm
giving this uh
or i'm creating this video a day or two
after trump's rally where he was doing
send him back right that whole send them
back thing highly emphatic in the sense
that he's tapping into
assumptions about the congresswoman that
he was talking about right
wrong true false
doesn't really matter rhetorically
speaking so much as the fact that he's
able to
he is abe trump is a rhetorical genius
because he's
he knows that he can go to these these
like i refer to him as fishing holes
right it's like there's some fish there
he can go to the fishing hole and he can
like throw in his
his hook and he can start saying send
them back or whatever he said where that
gets the crowd
chanting and you know lock her up or whatever
whatever
right he's tapping into shared
assumptions that's entimomatic
that's him knowing his audience that's him
him
sort of giving the audience sort of what
they want
and it's him advancing his agenda by
hooking into the audience's assumptions
all of that is emphymatic
okay all of it is inventional all of it
is artistic
um and that's the main thing right so
i just wanted to kind of hit on these
ideas because they're super core
to like everything else that uh that
aristotle's up to
right so let me see if i can try one
more time to just bring it in
we've got enthymemes we've got
syllogisms and
again aristotle calls the enthymeme a
rhetorical syllogism he calls it that
to distinguish it from induction right
induction works from an example
to the broad deduction works from the broad
broad
down to the example the the key
move here is not to um distinguish
the enthymeme from deduction the
enthymeme is deductive
the crucial part is to understand what
it is deducing from
one more example as uh or a sort of a
hypothetical imagine a scenario where
you have a workplace
and you have like um assistant managers
like let's say there's five or six of
them like senior employees right
of those senior employees let's say um
one of them is known to like never
volunteer when there's like hey we need
someone to head up this new
initiative hey we need someone to like
get a team together and go
and there's one employee employee
uh w let's say um never steps up
never does their share is just very
content to kind of hang back and
whatever right
now imagine a scenario where like the
regional supervisor
gets in touch with the office and says
hey gang i need someone
to head up this new uh project
and of the remaining what is it five
um let's say three of them
are like sorry i'm too busy i'm out of town
town
employees says well i guess that means
i'm doing it
this is an abstract example that came to
me a few years ago
somewhat based on real experience but
like okay so
everyone else would love to do it but
they're not unable to do it
colleague w is able to do it
but we know that that person won't so
the final person who's able to do it says
says
well i guess it means me then and what's
embedded in that statement
is an assumption about colleague w
who we know will never offer
so there's a certain deduction here that
the broad statement is
colleague w will not offer to do it
therefore i guess i'm doing it you know
what i mean
um and so what's that the last little
tweak here is what is that
statement based on it's based on actual
real world empirical experience
data real empirical data right
so if your colleague has is known over
the course of years
years and years like never offers never
says i'll do it never takes it on
at a certain point the truth about that
person is that they're not going to
offer they're not going to volunteer
that's the rhetorical probable statement
that is the probable statement that
you're operating from it's not 100
percent true it's not that that
colleague will
never offer but based on experience
based on everything we've seen
what we've witnessed what we've observed
what we know to be true
there's no chance that that colleague is
going to offer to take on that project so
so
the last remaining worker says well i
guess i'm doing it then
don't have to say the missing premise
which is because colleague w will never offer
offer
it's understood the rest of the audience
fills in the blank and they go yeah yeah
colleague w
will never offer so i guess you're doing
it now you don't have to say it it's understood
understood
it's understood that there's a truth
that's operating
it's not 100 true but it's more or less
true it's more or less true
that colleague w is not going to offer
so why bother why bother going through
the motion of like
asking and being told and i can't
whatever right
so there's a final twist
our probabilistic statements that we
deduced from
come to us from actual lived reality
not some higher source rhetoric is
concerned with
everydayness it's concerned with this
world this life
history as it's actually unfolded right
things as they actually are
good bad right wrong pretty ugly
whatever it deals with the here and the
now and things as they are
and so enzymes are deducing from things
as they are in that probabilistic sense
that we can sort of rely more or less
that the audience will accept this and
that they will agree
and that's how you persuade so hopefully
that helps finesse a little bit um
some of the stuff that i get into in the
the older video
but i don't really sort of dive as deep
in there as i think um
we we probably should at this point for understanding
understanding
the paper and understanding the the real
kind of nub i think of what aristotle's
up to in terms of his understandings of persuasion
persuasion
his understanding of audiences his
understanding of this question of
invention and rhetorical artistry
and this business of knowledge it's not certain
certain
it's not absolute for aristotle for
aristotle it is probabilistic
we can't know things we can know
something scientifically we can know
something sort of philosophically
but in terms of our everyday sort of
conducting our lives going about our business
business
it's the realm of the probable it it
generally is and especially
in the realm of the public in terms of
controversies in terms of debates in
terms of
you know issues that arise and we have
to kind of figure out what to do that's
the realm of the probable
and so we influence and persuade one
another enthumatically
drawing on these assumptions assumptions
about what the audience might
accept or what is true and real and so on
on
and that's the whole game of rhetoric
for aristotle and i hope this
helps clarify and maybe open up the
ideas a little bit more
and and helps get you thinking about
what's going on
the speech that i posted for the
assignment is this really
engaging powerful speech by emma
gonzalez after the parkland
uh school shooting from i think it was
last year
um and so that's what you're gonna be
asked to kind of
to to to read and view and use
aristotle's insights to try to talk about
about
what she's doing and how she's more
importantly how she's doing it okay
so hopefully this is helpful and um hope
all's well
otherwise and i'll see you on the boards gang
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