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I D E A 3 A Philosophical Rhetoric The third general idea I believe is basic to Plato concerns the nature of a philosophical rhetoric. All the ways of maintaining descriptive truth through interventive truth have to do with the presentation of truth or knowledge, including its presentation to oneself. Now, the presentation of truth involves , for example, its orientation to particular audiences or compositional and stylistic choices of sequence, syntax, phrasing, and word type. Even where one is concerned purely with the content of the arguments that are presented, one can—and, I argue, often must—consider the particular choices of issues that are being argued for. Further, since the same point can be demonstrated or suggested equally well through an indefinite variety of arguments, one can consider why the particular presented lines of argument are chosen. All of these considerations belong to the field of rhetoric, traditionally defined as the art of persuasion or, a little later, as the art of speaking well.1 These particular kinds of rhetorical considerations are independent with respect to the truth: one can present a glittering, intricately composed, and persuasive argument that is thoroughly flawed with respect to logic and evidence . (In fact, rhetoric has very often been understood to include or be included by reasoned argumentation or the forms of legitimate persuasion, what Plato calls dialectic. As already discussed, Plato himself understands rhetoric as part of truth-seeking discussion in the Phaedrus (though not, I should note, in most of his work). But I shall use the term here to refer only to those dimensions of rhetoric that are independent with respect to truth or at least to descriptive truth.)2 The ways of maintaining descriptive truth through interventive truth, therefore, have a connection with rhetoric, which in turn is independent with respect to the truth. But since all these ways of maintaining interventive truth as descriptive truth also have to do with the possibility of truth itself, they are also more than rhetorical. In fact, as I try to show here, their connection with rhetoric, specifically in the respects in which it is independent of a concern for truth,   Ideas of Truth and Knowledge is their connection with the possibility of truth itself. Differently put, rhetoric is not simply external to truth, simply added on to it, but is also essential or organic to it, involved in its very nature.3 Let me stress that this is not to say that truth is reduced to rhetoric but that rhetoric plays a part in truth while also being external to it, so that they are also independent of and irrelevant to each other. Rhetoric is often taken to refer to public speaking, but like Plato in the Phaedrus, I use the term to refer to all kinds of presentation of thought.4 One important example of the organic relation of rhetorical or presentational considerations to truth is the requirement not to present the truth as one sees it, either to oneself or to the other person, until s/he has come to see that truth for him/herself. As I discuss in Idea  and Idea , truth involves an element of risk on the knower’s part.5 Accordingly, if one is to make room for truth for the other person, one has to leave room for his/ her own risk. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes: All testing sets up the proposition to be tested not as something for one person to defend, as belonging to him or her, and for the other person to attack, as belonging to the other, but as something ‘‘in the middle.’’ And the understanding that emerges is not primarily an understanding resulting from agreement with others but an understanding with oneself. Only people who have reached an understanding with themselves can be in agreement with others.6 If one does not make room for the other person’s risk, then the conditions of truth, the truth about truth, are in conflict with the content of the truth, and one no more has truth than one does not have it, as in some of the examples in Idea . Until the other person has taken her/his risk, either to confirm or disconfirm one’s view of the truth, one can only take the risk for oneself. This means that one does not know for both parties, and therefore cannot rightly simply present this truth as established truth to oneself either , as...

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