Aristotle's and Plato's influence on how we communicate today.

For good or bad we communicate with the intention of convincing or to persuade our audience that the words we speak are indeed the truth. True to the Aristotelian rhetoric, justification of the knowledge base of the speakers is greatly desired. Compare these two examples; if Yoichiro Nambu, a 2008 Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, or Pee Wee Herman, beloved TV show host of “Pee Wee’s Play House” during the 1980’s, managed to get on national television and said “the world will come to an end in 11 days”, who are you most likely to believe?

The first thing that would jump out at you might be, because it would for me, is ethos. Ethos is our appeal to the credibility of the speaker. Here we are faced on one hand, with a TV personality that is synonymous with wacky, cartoony, and borderline delusional characteristics, running around in his red shoes, pale skin and cowlick screaming to the top of lungs “it’ll all be over in 11 days ha ha”. Hum, questionable? On the other hand we are presented with a physicist in a white lab coat with glasses speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”. Don’t know about you but when I see a lab coat, I think genius. Sure you could go online and Google him to find out more about him, but he’s wearing a lab coat.

The next two parts of the art of discourse play a much more personal and tighter role in rhetoric. Logos is an individual’s attraction to the message based on logic or reason, and pathos is the attraction based on emotion related to the message itself. I my opinion, the first of the two that I would engage in would be pathos. The reason being is because Pee Wee Herman telling us that we’re going to die would probably make me laugh after thinking about what kind and how many drugs he’s on. Given that, I wouldn’t make it past the pathos phase because I would disregard the message completely. Now a physicist in a white lab coat with glasses on, speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”, might make me soil myself just a little, not that much…..yet.

In Pee Wee Hermans' case, since the emotion generated wasn’t taken seriously, I wouldn’t go on to the logos portion of the rhetoric. But, big butt, in the case of the physicist in a white lab coat with glasses on speaking in English with a very heavy Japanese accent preaching “11 days till the end of existence on earth”, would push me into logos because of its plausibility. In comparison, Plato, to whom Aristotle was a student of, believed largely in dialect as leverage to the art of persuasion. The idea is that if we use different words from the norm (big words, words with different pronunciation or in another language) our story can be just that much more persuasive and compelling. One last example is, I’m just student doing an assignment, do you believe anything I've written on this blog?