Reading Response for Tuesday, December 2

For this last blog entry, I found the readings to be really interesting in the term of rhetoric. First off, I found Stephen Toulmin very interesting in the sense that he wasn't actually at all interested in rhetoric when doing his work on argument. What I really enjoyed reading about Toulmin was his interested in data and warrant. Toulmin focuses more on "logic of arguments rather than of propositions." He goes on to continue in his piece The Uses of Argument that "model is to demonstrate, first, that most arguments have a more complex structure than the syllogism and, second, that the syllogism misrepresents the very nature of argument by its arbitrary restriction to a three part structure." (1410) After reading about Toulmin, I found it interesting to be reading about a man who really wasn't focused on rhetoric or the subject even, but making such a huge impact on the idea of that "knowledge is the product of argument." I enjoyed reading about Toulmin because his perspective and views are so different than many rhetoricians we have read about before. I did enjoy this part in the reading as well. "Indeed, Toulmin shows little interest in rhetoric as a subject. In his first book, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics, he uses the term rhetoric to refer to emotional statements about ethical principles. In place of the terms rhetoric and argument, he clearly prefers the phrase practical reasoning." (14111)

Reading about someone who doesn't prefer the subject rhetoric, yet still manages to get his name in the giant Rhetorical Tradition textbook did something right in his life. I also really enjoyed reading about Michel Foucault as well. He came across as very philosophical as well as knowledgeable. In his reading, the one sentence that most stood out to be was the following: "Knowledge is created not by the act of observing, Foucault says, but through 'relations...between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioral patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterization; and these relations are not present in the object." I found this extremely fascinating to read about because he is not just claiming we obtain knowledge through just seeing and living, but through observation. Through really identifying and looking at what could is. I believe that Foucault offers a new perspective on what we call rhetoric and these last readings were really interesting to see how even though certain arguments and techniques can be classified as rhetoric, they don't have to be rhetoric.