How Rhetoric Shapes Your Opinions

Rhetoric and Critical Thinking needs to be compulsory in schools, it's self defense in the information age.

Too many commenters dont get it. Some have profoundly ignorant comments. Her book is quite challenging. The last chapters are basically your final exam testing whether you actually now know how to apply the various lenses to elucidate common ground and the real differences given you have been introduced to formal rhetoric theory. What I enjoyed about this interview is reames highlighting shermers inability to consider other points of view and his unwillingness to change how he thinks about issues before latching on his particular closely held dogmas. My legal training included understanding negotiations which is what most lawyers spend their time doing. The Harvard negotiation project materials were my bible. Formal rhetoric theory was never part of my education. Should have been. Framing the issues would have benefited. Studying Western legal thinking took me to Plato and Aristotle and the whole of legal teaching is based on the Socratic method. Reames book puts all this in context placing it in contrast with the Sophists of ancient Athens.

Rhetoric is used to persuade not elucidate or edify so it stands to reason that rhetoric is used to tell people what to think and not make them better thinkers.

The stories we tell ourselves (believe) are the lenses through which we judge the veracity of information we believe to be true.

I enjoyed this conversation. Michael Shermer, if you'd like record another conversation with another rhetorician, maybe do one with Erec Smith.

Dave Rubin shook my belief in the power of conversation to converge on the truth Conversation seems to make you converge with whoever you're talking to

30:05 Why do pro-abortion people always frame the argument as a women's rights issue and ignore that anti-abortion people believe that a human fetus deserves as much protection, maybe more, as any other human? John Stossel is probably the only pro-abortion who framed the argument honestly, and I found him very persuasive.

i downloaded this book for free

I'm actually interested in what's true Not just a "better story" A truer view of reality

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The rhetoric of this is to accept the rhetoric in this. :D

So why doesn't rhetoric make diversitarians behave better?

Great conversation! I'd like to talk with her for another 5 hours or so!

The idea that you can always link evidence/data to back up any claim could be true If so, we who think we're atheists/skeptics because we're following the evidence where it leads are deluding ourselves. That's hard to accept

This was a big fat nothing. I learn much more by reading a Shakespeare play.

This was a remarkably unsatisfying interview. She’s one of the few people who, after speaking, convinces me that her book is not worth looking at because she is so vague and makes such anodyne and ambiguous statements. I learned very little except that Cicero came up with four good categories to pay attention to regarding debates. I hope you follow up with another person who teaches about rhetoric in a more clear fashion.

Shermer always goes back to that pizza story? I wonder why? Maybe he partakes.

There is an underwater pyramid beneath Rock Lake Wisconsin that the natives referred to as "under watee teepees." For the longest time, it was taken as just native American folklore, nothing serious or worthwhile, until indeed, it was discovery in the 20th century. There aee pyramids from China to Peru completely underwater that have since been discovered. If this isn't evidence of long-lost civilizations or a global civilization, i dont know what is.

Biased much ms rhetoric professor?