Lecture notes for Enlightenment Rhetoric: "The Age of Reason" (1600-1800)

This historical time period is characterized by a growing belief that human philosophy and science could improve the world. Practices like the “Spanish Inquisition” were shown to be examples of religious tyranny and superstition, and the thinkers of this era set out to create a world governed by true knowledge of human nature.
Interestingly, efforts to see the world in a way that is free from religious or classical teachings led many thinkers to other kinds of dogma--the dogma of the scientific method, or the dogma of "universal grammar" or "human nature" or "human psychology." Throughout the Age of Reason, a conflict brews between those who would imagine human nature to be singular--that all people are alike and therefore all language is subject to universal rules that can be taught prescriptively--and the rare thinkers who conceived of human knowledge in contexts.

The Influence of Francis Bacon

Language Reform: Bacon's interest in clarifying vocabulary influences The Royal Society of London and others who believe it's possible to strip language of ambiguity (these "language police" actually carry Bacon's thinking to an absurd extreme--Bacon was merely interested in reducing the amount of rhetorical flourish in scientific discourse).
Psychology: Bacon divides the mind into faculties, which are trained by corresponding academic disciplines: Reason (philosophy), Memory (History), and Imagination (Poetics). Bacon sees appetite and will as faculties as well, which influence us to acquire and to act--these are trained by more personal discipline.
Inductive reasoning: Bacon wants to reject the kind of learning that begins with dogma--either church dogma or the dogma of deduction from classical sources. Deductive learning, argues Bacon, can not produce new knowledge, so Bacon argues for the importance of first-hand observation, followed by a process of logical suppositions. This is called inductive reasoning. However, Bacon warned against narrow empiricism--the idea that sensual perceptions are reality. He clearly recognized the ways that the perceiver's individual faculties and historical context influence what is perceived, and therefore urged the study of epistemology--the study of how we can know what we claim to know.

Descartes: a method for inductive reasoning that leads to the scientific revolution

Only evidence drawn from the senses can create new knowledge, so we have to throw away the received wisdom of ages past and begin again to discover and name the world.
Descartes exaggerates Bacon's emphasis on induction, and develops the first true scientific method of investigation: 1) definition, 2) division into parts, 3) addition of processes in sequence, 4) search for causality.

Four mental operations: 1) conceiving: forming ideas and attaching words to them; 2) judging: connect and compare ideas and formulate statements about them; 3) reasoning: test for fallacies and prejudices; 4) organizing: prepare ideas for presentation

The Royal Society of London: language reforms

A body of “language police,” who attempted to trim language down to precise, almost mathematical relationships. This follows the suggestion of Francis Bacon, who saw Chinese as a model language, since the characters were not words but things.

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was also influential in this mode of thinking. Locke thinks we all perceive things the same, at a broad basic level. And that we can express our perceptions clearly if our language is precise and simple.

Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, lampoons the Royal Society: “Many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which hath this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a great bundle of things upon his back.”

Several attempts at prescriptive dictionaries resulted from the language reform movements (Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) is considered the first). Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary (1755) started as an attempt to prescribe usage. However, Johnson came to realize that language is historical and subjective. His dictionary became a piece of literary art—each entry like a personal essay, in the Montaigne tradition, about Johnson's attempt to define the word.

The Language Reform movements of the 17^th and 18^th centuries did result in the contemporary discipline of Linguistics. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac believed that humans have a “universal grammar,” a basic language “package” that we’re all born with regardless of cultural or familial heritage. The search for the paramaters of this “universal grammar” governed much of the study of Linguistics until the 1980s.

The idea that everyone, at some central level, has the same perceptions also led to Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s writing on educational reform and government—writings that significantly influenced our declaration of independence and the idea of natural rights.

Archbishop Fénelon: On the Education of Girls (1687). This treatise argued that ignorance fostered frivolity in women, and that a basic curriculum of reading, writing, math, and home-ec, beginning at an early age, would encourage women to be more sensible home-makers. Despite the rhetoric of “natural rights” and “common perceptions,” women were stilled barred from official positions in most sectors.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)

Giambattista Vico, in “The Study Methods of Our Time,” argues that knowledge cannot be separated from language. Knowledge is tied to human motives, human cultures, human imagination, and all of these ties are related to language. Vico, in other words, is a social constructivist.
Vico is self-taught--no university education, but rather, his father was a bookstore owner, and Vico's education consisted of his reading while working in the shop. In 1699, he was appointed professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples.
Vico worries that the increasing focus on Descartian knowledge will lead to a society in which learning and learners are isolated from their social contexts.

George Campbell: Rhetoric and Epistemology (1719-1796):

Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric: "praised as the turning point in the development of rhetoric in the eighteenth century, as the first modern rhetoric, and even as the first real advance in rhetorical theory since Aristotle" (Bizzel and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition).
Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric addresses some common stylistic concerns, such as pulpit eloquence and literature as moral instruction. Campbell’s arguments are most significant, though, in the way they connect language with the creation of knowledge (epistemology).

Campbell follows Bacon in dividing the mind into “faculties”: understanding, imagination, the passions, the will. Each of the faculties responds to a particular linguistic style: the understanding responds to argument and clarity (which may be mathematical or scientific); the imagination responds to eloquence and beauty; the passions respond to Aristotelian pathos (more dramatically moving than beautiful); the will utilizes vehemence. These mental faculties and varieties of language are, according to Campbell, internally connected in a natural, psychological way. Speakers who persuade most effectively will travel through the four faculties in a sequential chain of appeals.

For Campbell, scientific proof (the Cartesian method) is just another variety of belief. Just as the scientist appeals to the understanding, so does the rhetorician: the question is not whether scientific demonstration is more accurate than argument in language; the question is which is more appropriate in a given context. For Campbell, moral reasoning through rhetoric takes precedence over scientific reasoning in all cases where absolute certainty cannot be reached; since absolute certainty is almost impossible to reach, because of the influence of language and culture on all our understandings, rhetoric is generally more important than science, to Campbell.
Campbell: the persuasive speaker must "excite some desire or passion in the hearers" and then "satisfy their judgment that there is a connexion between the action to which he would persuade them, and the gratification of the desire or passion that he excites" (qtd. in Bizzel and Herzberg). This sets the foundation for what the modern discipline of Communication Studies calls "The Motivated Sequence." I probably don't have to tell you that this is a principle method of advertisers, politicians, zealots, and prospective mates.
On grammar, Campbell's view is distinctly modern: "Language is purely a species of fashion... certain sounds come to be appropriated to certain things, as their signs, and certain ways of inflecting and combining those sounds come to be established, as denoting the relations which subsist among the things signified. It is not the business of grammar... to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these [fashions], and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value" (qtd. in Bizzel and Herzberg).
So, Campbell is not a believer in prescriptivism. Standards for correct usage are "reputable, national, and present." So, the standard usages of well-regarded individuals is considered correct. The nation is the boundary of any particular grammar. And the present time-frame is the scope of usage standards. Things change, and even now, things are said differently in other countries.
Campbell: all paraphrases are interpretations. Though people strive for accuracy in their summaries of other people's words and ideas, this is not possible. People's faculties and intentions influence their representations.