John Locke P. 814-815
This reading mainly talked about John Locke’s
rhetorical ideas. I think his ideas are interesting and refreshing. Even though
his ideas about rhetoric are not proven to be true, his ideas are relevant and
important. I think it’s interesting that he said syllogism is useless because
it doesn’t describe mental process of acquiring knowledge. I quite agree with
this idea because I feel like rhetoric is unpredictable if based on human
reasoning and brain functions. People cannot describe how they acquire or
create their knowledge because it happens too fast based on their mind; they
cannot tell what really happened during the mental process. The only think they
know is that brain works to create their knowledge, but they have no detailed
descriptions of how knowledge is created. Though syllogism, a device for
reasoning, states each steps of reasoning, it cannot fully explain how human
mind makes up these steps. Another reason that syllogism might be incomplete is
because it is based on words. Locke said that words maybe inaccurate because
they cannot reflect the complete human thoughts. People can only use words to
describe partial thoughts within human mind. That is why language based description
of reasoning could be incomplete and incorrect. Locke said word could describe
certain characters according to one person but different aspects for another. This,
he said, is because different people have different languages, and different
languages have unique way of describing things. Thus people can use different words
to describe a same object, and create different rhetorical effects. For
example, Western cliché like “howling at the moon” usually describes a
situation in which even if you explain, nobody would hear or understand. But Chinese
cliché says this in a different way; by translation, it would be “playing
instrument to a cow,” which means even if you play piano to a cow it wouldn’t
understand or appreciate it. English scholars probably would misunderstand this
phrase if they have no idea of Chinese cultures. In this sense, English and
Chinese cliché that describe the same idea created different rhetorical meanings
and comprehensions. If language can create inconsistent understandings to the
same reality, the use of words will be incomplete and cannot demonstrate the
entire truth.
Locke said “verbal proposition stand for
mental ones and that mental ones stand for real external phenomena.” If so then
it is very unlikely for people to really understand reality because their words
and thoughts are inaccurate. This reminds me somebody once said everything could
be a dream. You cannot know whether or not you feel is real because you cannot
prove that they are. This is the same as the ideas he put with words and
thinking. Because there are ambiguity and obscurity, people can never truly
understand the truth behind reasoning and rhetorical thinking.
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