Misinformation, Rhetoric, and (Post)Modernism, Pt. 3
"Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?"
This is the third part in a three-part series. In part 1 I developed a critique of what I called fact-driven arguments that builds on the excellent work of
over at , among others1. I suggested that an over-reliance on fact-driven arguments and the assumption of an objective reality accessible through universally-shared “reason” are insufficient for addressing the complexities of how people form beliefs. Instead, I suggested that knowledge is inherently mediated by individual and collective contexts—our "Umwelten"—which shape our perceptions of truth. In part 2 I provided a summary and some context of the Gorgias for those unfamiliar with it.Here I build on the challenges outlined in part 1 regarding the limitations of fact-driven arguments and the mediated nature of knowledge. Part 3 delves deeper into Plato's Gorgias to examine the interplay between rhetoric and philosophy in the pursuit of truth. By analyzing Socrates' use of the elenchus and its effectiveness in persuading those with differing worldviews, I explore how ancient insights can inform our modern struggles with misinformation. Ultimately, I argue that embracing the constructive role of rhetoric, rather than relying solely on facts and reason, can help bridge divergent perspectives and foster genuine understanding in today's complex information landscape.
The Elenchus as the Gold Standard of Argumentation
The “Socratic method,” as practiced by Plato’s “Socrates,” reveals different sides of itself in different texts, evolving along with Plato’s own views. Beginning as a free-form, unformalized style of dialectic in the earlier dialogues it gradually becomes more formalized as “Socrates” starts referring to his “method” of dialectic. In the middle and later texts it takes on more maieutic characteristics, where “Socrates” aids his interlocutors in “recovering” knowledge by helping them remember the innate knowledge buried within each person’s immortal soul, according to Plato’s developing theory of anamnesis. Ultimately the method comes to be subsumed under the geometrically-founded metaphysics of the mid-to-late Plato, as in the The Republic or Timaeus.
The Socratic elenchus, as just one component in the Socratic toolbox, stands out in many people’s minds, however, as one of the most enduring contributions of Greek philosophical thought. In certain contexts elenchus means “refutation” or “censure.” In Plato’s Socrates’ hands, the word comes to signify a searching or testing. The Gorgias includes several elenctic arguments, as well as other elements that we might just call rhetorical. I would suggest that this elenctic style of argumentation can be seen as either a “dominant mode” of argumentation, or at least that we might take it as the gold standard of argument within the context of the Gorgias according to Plato’s “Socrates.”
There are some caveats to this claim. First, the elenctic mode of argumentation would not be the best mode for discovering empirical facts. To discover the prices of goods at the market, or whether it is raining outside, inspection will suffice. It might also be differentiated from the calculative accounting of merchants or the deductive reasoning of geometers, as well as from the knowledge pertaining to techne. Learning medicine or shipbuilding proceeds via hands-on training and instruction. The elenchus is the gold standard, however, for discovering what we might call moral knowledge. While to our ears this might sound fairly circumscribed, for Socrates and his interlocutors moral knowledge concerns “what the best way to live is.” It therefore touches on almost all aspects of life, from the ordinary cultivation of virtue through habit to political arguments and action, including war and peace. The form of knowledge which is best arrived at through elenchus involves existential questions that affect all of us.
Finally, I would bracket historical questions of what might really have been the dominant mode of argumentation in 5th and 4th century Athens, whether Plato really thought this or would have agreed with my characterization, and questions about how far we might extend this argument temporally and geographically to Plato’s interpreters through the millennia. The point is that in many of Plato's dialogues, the elenctic method serves as an arbiter of truth for Socrates and his interlocutors—at least within the dramatic confines of the textual narratives. In the Gorgias, specifically, the presumed superiority of this method at the level of content, i.e. what Socrates says and what the others concede, is put in direct tension with prototypically rhetorical methods at the level of form.
Can we be more precise about what the elenctic method is? G. Vlastos, an analytically-minded philosopher and scholar of ancient philosophy, argues that the Socratic elenchus is designed to attack untrue beliefs by pointing out they are inconsistent with other, more deeply held beliefs. In the cooperative search for moral truth, only an interlocutor’s own beliefs matter, and the elenchus is only successful when the interlocutor themself is convinced that what they had originally claimed to believe is actually contradicted by other beliefs, unearthed in the dialectical questioning, that they hold more deeply. When Polus claims that “it is better to commit injustice than to suffer it,” (call this proposition P), Socrates finds that Polus also believes that “it is more shameful/base/wretched (athlion) to commit injustice than to suffer it” (call this proposition Q), along with a few other propositions (that we can label collectively as R). Then, through a chain of deduction, Polus is forced to admit that holding P is not really consistent with Q+R, and Socrates claims that P’s logical contradictory must be true: “it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.”
Vlastos calls this the “standard form of the elenchus” which can be broken into four parts2:
The interlocutor asserts a thesis, P, which Socrates considers false and targets for refutation
Socrates secures agreement to further premises, say Q and R (each of which may stand for a conjunct of propositions). The agreement is ad hoc; Socrates argues from {q, r}, not to them.
Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, that Q &R entail not-P
Socrates then claims that he has shown that not-P is true, P false.
One big problem, as Vlastos points out, is that the fourth step is not logically sound. It is not a valid deduction that P is false, because Q and R have not been established as true. An interlocutor like Polus could simply say, hold on, you are right that Q and R contradict P, but I still believe that P is true, so I will drop or modify Q and R. But in most of Plato’s dialogues, the interlocutor is completely willing to agree that P has been shown to be false. What is perhaps unique in the Gorgias is that Callicles comes in to take the place of Polus to continue asserting P: “No, Socrates, you have embarrassed Polus and Gorgias by pointing out that they hold inconsistent sets of beliefs, but I will continue to argue that it is better to commit injustice than to suffer it.” Callicles, in other words, will modify Q+R rather than give up on P.
Perceptive readers might also have noticed that Socrates makes multiple claims to know something in the Gorgias, despite being famous for claiming not to know anything. Here, he confidently asserts(479A) that he knows it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, and that he will stand in this truth against all the world (472B). He further asserts that this truth is obvious for all to see, “held firm and fastened — if I may put it rather bluntly — with reasons of steel and adamant” (508E-509A). In Vlastos’s modern reconstruction of the elenctic method, Socrates can make these assertions because he is committed to two further “meta-elenctic” assumptions3:
Whoever has a false moral belief will always have at the same time true beliefs entailing the negation of that false belief.
The set of elenctically tested moral beliefs held by Socrates at any given time is consistent.
How are these meta-elenctic beliefs justified? Socrates has gone around testing those who claim to know things. Every time he meets someone who claims to hold a belief that Socrates considers false, he finds out that their belief is inconsistent with other more deeply held beliefs, and therefore the false belief should be rejected. Moreover, no one has shown that Socrates holds inconsistent beliefs according to Socrates’ preferred form of dialectic. According to Vlastos’s modern reconstruction of the Socratic method, then, the beliefs in A and B are justified according to an inductive argument. Socrates is confident that no matter what false belief P is asserted, he will be able to find other beliefs that contradict it.
And yet, Plato gradually moved away from this rigid form of elenctic reasoning as his philosophical views evolved. Vlastos speculates that part of the reason Plato embraced geometrical reasoning to develop an elaborate metaphysical scheme was his disenchantment with the elenctic method. If the meta-elenctic assumptions A and B were really true, then it should be possible to prove to anyone, through Socratic dialogue, which of their beliefs were false. It should likewise be possible to prove to anyone that the beliefs Socrates holds about the good life are true. That Socratic dialogue in practice often failed to do any such thing might have driven Plato to seek stronger arguments rooted in geometric reasoning.4 Not many people today find Plato’s metaphysics appealing, however. Luckily the Gorgias presents an alternative, mirror-image to the “philosophy” of the elenchus in the form of “rhetoric.”
Rhetoric and the Outside View
In today’s parlance, “rhetoric” is synonymous with propaganda. Rhetoric is all the extra stuff around the facts that works to obscure what the facts are really saying. In the Gorgias, it is identified with makrologia, or long speeches with flowery prose whose primary objective is to praise things as good or condemn them as bad. But as an influential post-war translator of the Gorgias, E. R. Dobbs, says, even though Gorgias’ style might seem to us affected, repetitive, and boring, it “bewitched” his contemporaries. Plato’s Socrates accuses Gorgias of essentially being a “verbal magician” who can change how things appear. In the ancient world, rhetoric was literally likened to a drug, capable of acting on the body no less than the mind.5
Dodds characterizes the real Gorgias’ own extant writings as the work of an “indefatigable stylist” displaying “dazzling insincerity” and unconcerned with the truth. At the very beginning of the dialogue, the fact that Socrates shows up after Gorgias’ well-attended speech signifies a certain contempt for rhetoric. Socrates represents “philosophy,” rhetoric’s opposite, and is therefore concerned above all with plain speech and the search for truth. The whole point of the dialogue can be thought of as an extended argument that rhetoric is simply a grab-bag of tricks for getting people to think what you want them to think. It is an amoral means most suited for immoral ends. Another influential commentator, Terence Irwin, says that “one becomes a ‘true rhetor’ only insofar as he abandons rhetorical techniques.” Yet Plato on the whole appears to treat Gorgias with respect. The character is no mere caricature, and it is Socrates, not Gorgias, who verges on the side of self-parody by repeatedly breaking his own rule that questions and answers should be kept short.
As Dodds points out, the modern reader might be inclined to side with Callicles’ assertions that it is worse to suffer injustice than to commit it, as Nietzsche did. The reader is exposed to seemingly fallacious arguments, such as “the power of a tyrant to do whatever they want is no power at all”—because power that is ignorant of the good, used to do something not in the interest of the tyrant’s immortal soul, is by definition not real power. Socrates at multiple points uses dissociation, a rhetorical tactic in which a concept like “power” is split into a hierarchy of two or more concepts: there isn’t just “power,” there is real power, which involves acting for good ends, and apparent power, which involves acting however one wishes, and which is no real power at all. The reader is subjected to increasingly lengthy Socratic makrologia, shot through with metaphors and analogical reasoning, culminating in the ending myth about the judgment of souls in the afterlife. The “philosophy” advocated by Socrates comes to look like the mirror image of rhetoric, secured not by deductive reasoning from incontrovertible facts, but by a fable that Socrates believes to be true. In other words, the reader is put into a position requiring discernment between two competing visions or Umwelten of reality—one where rhetoric and philosophy are essentially the same thing, and one where philosophy is something wholly different from rhetoric.
In what might be called the “conventional” interpretation of the Gorgias, the reader is ultimately moved by Socrates’ “appeal to the experience of living.” Plato gestures toward an entire Athenian way of life familiar to his audience, and which he thinks only brings misery, when he has Socrates and Polus talk about Archelaus. Represented by Callicles, that way of life prizes military strength, riches, demagogic rule, and imperial aggression. The Gorgias points a finger at rhetoric as enabling and encouraging:
“the whole way of life of a society which measures its ‘power’ by the number of ships in its harbours and of dollars in its treasury, its ‘well-being’ by the standard of living of its citizens […] a society whose basically corrupt principles led to the corruption of all its institutions”
Socrates, on the other hand, represents the rejection of a life whose highest value is the avoidance of death. The only way out of the cycle of violence is to “wake men out of their dogmatic slumbers into genuine intellectual curiosity” and encourage them to seek wisdom and virtue. The reader comes down on the side of Socrates who demonstrates that even though Callicles claims that it is better to pursue power through rhetoric, rhetoric requires debasing oneself to flatter people that Callicles claims are inferior to him, imperiling his soul. The merits of this interpretation are that it fits into the larger portrait of a pious Socrates developed in the Platonic corpus.
One problem with that interpretation is that it is underpinned by what we might call a mid-20th century confidence in the underlying myth of eternal judgment. Dodds, for example, writing after the devastation and horror of World War 2 could appeal to a widely held belief in the Christian Allied countries that the last half century of war and genocide was driven by a corrupt and corrupting thirst for power and domination. One reason that the Gorgias remains relevant today is that when we look back at it from the vantage point of the 21st century we are thrust into the position of the discerning reader. Which rhetor is more persuasive? Callicles or Socrates? And perhaps more importantly: why? The critical distance afforded by the intervening millennia helps put into sharp focus how much our own Umwelt influences which arguments are persuasive. Upon reflection we might even find ourselves offering different arguments, drawn from our own network of beliefs, to support Socrates’/Callicles’ conclusions whenever their own arguments seem deficient. In other words, regardless of Plato’s own aim, regardless of whatever he actually thought about the strength of the arguments, the genius of the dialogue consists in its equivocation between philosophy and rhetoric. Plato has Socrates adopt rhetorical techniques to advance an argument against rhetoric. While the content of Socrates’ utterances are that rhetoric is incapable of leading us to truth, and only philosophy can do so, it is only through a non-elenctic, non-philosophical myth that Socrates can actually provide a foundation from which the rest of the argument can proceed. As Allison Murphy says, in the Gorgias :
rhetoric pretends to be what it is not […] philosophy pretends not to be what it is
Perhaps even Plato was aware of how invertible and slippery the arguments in the Gorgias were. In the text, Callicles and Socrates are explicitly assigned the roles of the twin brothers Zethus and Amphion from Euripides’ lost play Antiope. In presenting Callicles and Socrates as twins, Plato deliberately draws attention to the resemblance between these supposed opposites. Plato’s audience themselves were probably confused about the difference. Valiavitcharska argues that the historical Gorgias himself was concerned with what he called “correct speech”6 in his teachings and writings. That is, he probably didn’t view rhetoric as a means of deception, nor as speech that merely flattered the opinions of his audience. Instead, there is a strong connection between truth and a rhetorical form of “correct speech” that relied upon orderly reasoning to provide an accurate account of an ordered cosmos. While Plato may have parodied the excesses of rhetors like Gorgias and his students,7 the Gorgias’s reliance on rhetorical speech to secure its arguments suggests that Plato might have thought that Socratic elenchus faced an impasse. How can elenchus alone persuade those who maintain a different set of priors without eventually just demanding acquiescence to something like Socrates’ governing myth? Socratic philosophy itself seems to depend, in the last resort, on what we might call epideictic appeals.8
Epideictic, the rhetorical genre of praise and blame associated with encomia, funeral orations, and political speeches, is directed towards fostering a communal spirit. It draws on a common language concerning shared ideas about how the world actually is. Even if it is merely a “knack” or “experience” as Socrates says, it also establishes a common ground or space for “giving reasons.” It is precisely this aesthetic aspect of rhetoric that operates outside of the logical space of the elenchus. Friends are people who see the world in the same way, and can point to shared truths capable of operating as premises in further arguments. Socrates more than once says of Polus and Callicles, “we are friends, no?” Friendship can be seen to extend beyond good will, to a shared sense of reality which is the precondition for doing what Socrates identifies as philosophy. Without that shared sense of being, the elenchus, as a highly personal form of inquiry which seeks assent from both parties in the dialogue before proceeding, simply fails in the face of antagonism.
Premoden Pragmatism?
Stepping back a bit, we might note how uncommon Socratic style questioning is. Most people react quite negatively to it. A would-be elenctic questioner rarely gets very far today, online or in real life, before an interlocutor senses where it is going and attempts to divert it in order to avoid the coercive force of deduction. This seems no less true back in ancient Athens. The conversation between Socrates and his interlocutors repeatedly threatens to break down on both sides. Polus and Callicles accuse Socrates of playing to the crowd and seeking to win rather than seeking the truth. They accuse him of not being in earnest, merely joking, or being contrarian.
Even Socrates’ claims to be sincere are always tinged with irony, as though he knows that a contradiction is coming. This is profoundly irritating, not only because of the implied superiority of the questioner, but also because of their apparently destructive aims. Tarnopolsky points out that the dialectical method is “insufficiently therapeutic,” because while it threatens to shred beliefs by pointing out contradictions, it is incapable of actually offering a positive vision to replace them. Is this true? Sheffield counters that, ideally speaking, the practice of Socratic questioning as kind of a willingly embraced self-governance, inculcates its own values in place of a Calliclean drive to acquire beliefs that flatter one’s own self image. Just playing the elenctic game produces psychological changes that encourages more truth-seeking behavior, and ultimately, better choices.
What many interpreters identify as central to Socrates’ philosophical practice is the notion of internal harmony. Socrates repeatedly asserts that he will go on repeating what philosophy tells him. That is, he will remain steadfast in the network of beliefs that hold up his Umwelt because they ring true, at least until someone can show him where the propositions that he asserts are contradictory. The picture of true knowledge is founded on a musical metaphor of internal harmony. The only thing that matters is this internal consistency, no matter what the crowd says. The Socratic elenchus is not an appeal to a third party judge and jury. The opinions of the hoi polloi do not matter unless they are taken up and persuasively argued for according to Socrates’ preferred method. Nonetheless, the Gorgias leaves us wondering about how anyone could change Socrates’ mind about the afterlife. What kinds of arguments might persuade him that his mythos or fable is not really a true account at all? And how would he go about persuading someone who flatly denied that there was anything true about it?
In saying that he believes this account, Socrates resorts to a transcendent knowledge claim about the immaterial world. Yet the Gorgias might be seen as making another, simultaneous argument that has to do with the compulsive power of rhetorical persuasion. Socrates makes a literal claim to transcendent knowledge, but makes in the form of a much larger narrative that is intentionally designed to persuade without resorting to reason and logic at all. It mobilizes allegory, metaphor, and aesthetic analogies all at once to present a picture of reality that can persuade irrationally, which is to say, without appeal to logic.
Whether or not this persuades us, in the 21st century, we can imagine that this argument might very well have been persuasive to at least some in Plato’s audience. We can also imagine how such an appeal might be crafted today: by appeals to “human rights,” egalitarianism, fairness, or any number of widely believed moral foundations that might undergird the claim that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. We might even imagine an appeal to “moral realism” with a sophisticated modern philosophical apparatus to justify it. My claim is that this too, would be an irrational appeal that ultimately boils to epideictic rhetoric rooted in aesthetic predilections governed by an individual’s Umwelt. Because rhetoric is the indispensable ground and precondition for truth-telling and truth-seeking.
There’s nothing inherently modern or postmodern in making this claim. It’s just a claim about what all of us do all the time, even the scientists. So where does this leave us on the idea of “misinformation”? First off we might recognize how ill-suited the Socratic elenchus is for today’s hypermediated environment. Fact-driven arguments, as discussed in part 1, are neither good nor bad. They might even be seen as a path-dependent evolutionary outcome of rhetorical strategies designed to be persuasive under conditions of increasing complexity. We rely more than ever on experts to convey knowledge about things that we do not understand. If increasing complexity is a consequence of technological change then the proliferation of mediation (and what Latour would call hybrid objects) is a consequence of that increasing complexity. So-called “postmodernism” would then just be a symptom of hypermediation, falling out of the whole “modern” package that unleashed the undreamt of energies of buried fossil fuels into the productive, creative circuits of human activity.
The persuasive power of fact-based arguments is not predicated on a reified claim to transcendent knowledge. It is of course true that some people find such claims persuasive. The revealed truth of religions works this way. Others find claims based in an external, objective reality secured by a deistic theology persuasive. But they are persuasive because they appeal to someone’s already held belief; they are not self-justifying and independent of other beliefs. As Leo Strauss points out, reason cannot refute revelation. To take seriously the side of philosophy/reason is to take up a set of antecedent commitments that cannot be justified by reason, precisely because they are antecedent to it. Scientific claims of fact are often persuasive not only because they adhere to a mostly consistent set of scientific norms, but because so many people have already been persuaded of science’s ability to tell the truth about the world that they inhabit. They have experienced science’s power to transform the world first-hand.
Fact-based arguments trade on the widespread persuasiveness of “scientific claims” while actually being premised on much more contestable “non-scientific” norms. Narrow fact claims only make sense and are justified within the regime of scientific practice and discourse that produced them. The problem is that most tendentious fact-based claims are not properly circumscribed within narrowly defined scientific practices. They are “hybrid” claims extrapolating from fact to what we should do, or “how we should live.” The problem only gets worse if there is reason to doubt the scientific practices themselves. And this is where the divergences in worldview start to impact the persuasiveness of fact-based arguments. Simply pointing to more facts won’t be any more persuasive.
So the question for “misinformation science” and its critics should be: are we undermining our own position here because we no longer care about persuasion? Are we using arguments ill-suited to get others to adopt certain higher-order beliefs of ours so that we can then proceed to coerce them through deduction to adopt other, more concrete beliefs downstream? I think if we took seriously the idea that “truth” is not rooted out there in an external reality, but inside the aesthetic experience of each Umwelt, we might figure out better ways to communicate truth to others mired in falsehood. Reality, like history, is what hurts, and we’d all be better off with more truth. The first order of business might be not only to seek out friends, but to make them. Because truth is hard to come by between enemies.
from “orthos” — from which we get orthodoxy (correct opinion)
Greek noun epideixis refers to “showing” or acts of displaying. Epideictic speech is verbal pointing in aesthetico-conceptual space. Epideixis and related derivatives appear frequently throughout the dialogue.