Lecture #3 February 4, 2004

Gorgias 2: Socrates versus Gorgias (pp. 1-20)

Outline:

A) the role of rhetoric in ancient Greece

B) Socrates' question

1) definitions

2) Gorgias' definition of Rhetoric

C) Socrates' proof that the oratory-teacher is responsible for students' wrong-doings

D) Critique of Socrates “proof”

A) the role of rhetoric in ancient Greece

First, what is rhetoric, or oratory, and what does Gorgias teach? Essentially, rhetoric is Communication Science: how to persuade or convince and audience. Rhetoric is the guidelines for persuasive speech.

Ancient Athens, as well as many other cities in Greece, was run by assemblies and committees of male non-slave citizens. There were relatively few government employees or career officials. So, law-courts and legislative bodies were all run by citizens whose main occupation was something else.

It was expected that a man would defend himself in court, speak for his own views in legislature, and so on. Articulate, persuasive speech could therefore make a great difference in success in life. A major part of the training to become a powerful person was training to be articulate and persuasive. (You could do things like: get a public service project built on your property, to your profit. The friends of the governor of Connecticut profited in exactly this way, but too overtly. Political power has always translated into personal gain. Why do corporations and interest groups make contributions to political campaigns?)

So, Gorgias is the most renowned of the people who train young men to speak persuasively. Gorgias is a Sophist, one who purveys knowledge important for the gaining of power. Gorgias is an early and important and skillful teacher of the "communication skills" one finds today among advertisers, public relations workers, politicians, and celebrity-spokespersons.

The only real difference is that in classical Greece, there were very few media, so speech-making was all-important. There were no newspapers, no TV, no billboards, and no radio. There was writing, but there was no simple way to make multiple copies of a document for distribution. So, public discourse and debate, making speeches in assemblies, was the only medium for achieving political power and getting political jobs done.

Plato (and Socrates before him) was concerned that this sort of persuasion was displacing serious political discussion. "Spin-doctors" instead of statesmen were determining public policy. Politicians were saying what people wanted to hear rather than the truth. The Gorgias argues that people like the sophists and Bush’s public relations advisors should be replaced by serious seekers of the political good. The “political good” means “what is good for the country.”

A) Socrates' question: What is oratory (= rhetoric)?

Polus responds by launching into a praise of oratory, saying what a wonderful thing it is. Socrates requests that he say what rhetoric IS. He explains to Gorgias that he is asking for a definition, a formula which says what a thing IS

1) definition = formula saying what a thing IS

A definition gives NECESSARY and SUFFICIENT conditions

a definition of a phenomenon must specify properties which single the phenomenon out.

NECESSARY and SUFFICIENT conditions single the phenomenon out.

NECESSARY CONDITIONS: what phenomenon has to have.

Humans are mammals

It is not enough to name a property the phenomenon has to have. the thing must be distinguished from everything else. "Humans are mammals" is not a definition because other things meeting the condition are not humans.

not a definition because non-humans (dogs,etc.) are also mammals

So, for instance, Gorgias says that rhetoric is a craft of using words whose effect is achieved through words alone. Socrates points out that this definition covers things other than rhetoric, as well. While the proposal does give a necessary feature of rhetoric, that feature does not suffice to guarantee that the phenomenon is oratory.

giving SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS: conditions which nothing but the phenomenon has.

Humans are professors

It is not enough to name a sufficient condition because, while a property may guarantee that the case is a human, many humans lack the property. You're all human, for instance.

necessary AND sufficient conditions for thing:

what it and only it is

A triangle is a three-straight-sided (closed) plane figure.

A square is a four-sided closed plane figure with equal sides? Necessary only.

A square is a four-sided closed plane figure with equal sides and four right angles. Necess&Suffic

(One difficulty is that it is really only in mathematics and mathematized fields that you get perfectly precise definitions in this sense. So, if there are definitions, everything is able to be mathematized.)

2) Gorgias' definition:

after a process of narrowing, [craft of speeches; craft of speeches using words without physical production] Gorgias' definition is arrived at, which gives necessary AND sufficient conditions for ORATORY /Rhetoric: A craft of persuasion about justice and injustice (what is right and wrong) in law courts and assemblies.

[this is a definition Gorgias has offered, so it is a premise Gorgias accepts]

ORATORY /Rhetoric: A craft of persuasion about justice and injustice in law courts and assemblies.

B) Socrates' proof that, on Gorgias' own terms, the oratory-teacher is responsible for the wrong-doing of his students

distinguish between :

Learning/knowlege and being convinced/conviction

true true or false

two kinds of persuasion:

1) teaching-persuasion which leads the mind by legitimate reasoning, giving the real grounds for a truth

2) conviction-persuasion which leads the mind by other means. MAY lead person to believe truly, may convince of falsehoods

both occur by persuasion: two kinds of persuasion: a persuasion which leads the mind on by legitimate reasoning, giving the real grounds for a truth, and persuasion which, while it may get a person to believe truly, may also convince a person of false opinions. (thinking-through)

Plato's ideal of a persuasion producing knowledge (learning) would be the presentation of a mathematical proof. [proof of the Pythagorean theorem]

The model here would be math. Take the following claim: 953 x 62 = 59086 I’m guaranteeing that this is true. Many of you will believe me, just because professors generally say what they think is true, and I probably did the math. My words produced conviction. But if I had said 953 x 62=57086, you would probably have believed that, convinced by conviction-persuasion.

So you don’t KNOW that its right. If you want to know, you do the math. Then you’ve derived it from its real grounds. That would be teaching-persuasion.

real education oratory

produces produces

Knowledge Conviction

Gorgias: acknowledges that orator produces conviction, not knowledge, about justice:

does orator know about justice?

[This would be an embarrassing admission for Gorgias if he said “no”—then orators don’t know what they’re talking about]

now, the oratory-graduate, the pupil himself: does the oratory-graduate know about justice? (i.e does he know what he's talking about?

Gorgias says “Yes,” and that if the student does not when he enters the program, then the oratory-teacher will teach him. Gorgias goes on to praise the great powers that rhetoric can bring to the practitioner. He says that, of course, these powers can be used for good or ill.

ORATORY-TEACHER (like Gorgias) IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR MISUSE

[analogy: teaching my nursery-school daughter how to box effectively—intended for her self-defense, but used to oppress her colleagues]

[ text p. 15-17]

Socrates is astonished that an orator could commit injustice:

Socrates expresses astonishment that the orator, as described by Gorgias, could commit injustice. Why?

This is the crux of Socrates' argument with Gorgias:

Socrates gives an argument that, according to what Gorgias has admitted, an oratory-graduate must be a just person, not someone capable of using rhetoric for bad purposes.

ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY:

Just as someone who knows/ learns about carpentry becomes a carpenter, so someone who learns about justice becomes just.

PREMISES: several cases:

Just as someone who knows/ learns about carpentry becomes a carpenter, etc. If

When you acquire an ability, like playing the violin, you do indeed become a violin-player.

Lemma: GENERALIZATION FROM CASES

for all subjects, to learn subject = become someone of that kind

JUSTICE IS A CRAFT you learn:

for all crafts, to learn craft = become a man of that craft

________________________________________

SO: to learn about justice = to become a just man [= to do just things]

Thus, no-one who has learned justice can be unjust.

SO : Gorgias' claim that oratory-teacher is not responsible for the wrong-doing of his pupils is refuted: If the oratory-teacher's job includes teaching the student what justice is, then student will have been made just. Therefore, if student acts unjustly, student was badly taught.

________________________________________

So, the oratory-teacher IS responsible for students' just and unjust behavior.

D) critique/discussion of Socrates’ argument

Is this a good argument?

No.

1) There are counter-examples to the argument-form. You can learn something without becoming characterized by what you learned.

Someone who learns English history does not become English

Someone who learns criminology need not become criminal.

Someone who learns what cheerfulness is may not become cheerful.

Someone who learns what goldfish are does not become a goldfish.

2) On pages 11-12, Gorgias has said that he teaches what is just and unjust. So, if the argument by analogy, that you become what you learn were good, it would show that a person would become both just and unjust.

So: Socrates has presented a very weak argument that still persuaded Gorgias (or at least got Gorgias to admit defeat)

Why? This is slightly tricky: Plato/ Socrates thinks the conclusion is true, based on his other views that we went over last time.

To make the argument good, you would have to defend two assumptions:

1) learning what justice is = acquiring a skill—a body of practical knowledge.

Notice that “learning justice” is ambiguous between “learning what justice is” and “learning to be just”

2) justice is a skill such that ONE CANNOT AVOID BEING JUST ONCE ONE HAS THE KNOWLEDGE.

(he also must assume that injustice is just the lack of that skill, rather than a failure to exercise that skill Otherwise, if injustice were itself a skill, then the opposite conclusion would also follow.)

That is: You cannot knowingly choose evil.

The reason Socrates thinks these assumptions are true is that he has an argument to the conclusion that acting justly = acting in your own best interest = looking out for your own welfare. (This argument comes in the next section. Basically, doing wrong actions harms the soul by making it disorderly and corrupt.)

Plato takes it as obvious that nobody acts against their own interests on purpose.

To defend this, he has to argue that doing injustice harms the person doing injustice more than any alternative action. So, if you knew what injustice was, you would never knowingly commit it.

This is defended in the next two parts of the dialogue.

A corollary of the assumption that justice is a kind of knowledge:

Bad people are improved by education.

If justice can be taught, and to learn what is just is automatically to become just, then:

1) education can make good people

2) since what is good is the same for everyone, conflict can always be resolved by discussion

people only intend to do the wrong thing because they do not understand what the right thing is, or are otherwise misinformed. So, all conflicts can be solved by discussion and information.

Many people, from Plato to the Quakers to modern Pacifists, have held the hopeful view that Justice is knowledge (of something) and so teachable; and that no-one can knowingly do an unjust thing. So, conflicts can be resolved by enough talking.

Meanwhile, the argument as its stands is weak, because the conclusion, that learning justice makes one just, does not follow from the analogy.

Why did Plato present Socrates as giving a bad argument?

Plato is illustrating Sophistical techniques: using invalid argument to DISPLAY trickery. That is, the intent is “Here’s the sort of thing rhetoric does.”

Socrates is illustrating exactly the Sophistical techniques he is criticizing: He is using invalid argument to DISPLAY trickery and also to give students an opportunity to criticize. The topic of the dialogue is RHETORIC. Socrates is showing how rhetoric works by doing it. (In the interests of truth and reason, he ARGUES for the missing premise (in this case that once a person has learned the real nature of justice, the person will necessarily be just) in the next section, the debate with Polus.

[One likely hypothesis is that these dialogues were supposed to be exercises for students in the Academy, Plato's school. So, students were supposed to listen to the dialogue, and make critical comments about the arguments. ]