Reflective Blog Post #1

Of the theorist we have studied thus far, based on the most relevance of today's society, I feel the Sophists' approach to rhetoric was most effective in regard to their persuasion on people's beliefs. They described how they felt human perception was reliant upon soley sense perceptions (touch, sight, hear, etc.), which are inherently flawed, in turn leaving the truth unstable and relative to societies. In the text, a line stood out to me on page 25 which elaborated "the Sophists' ability to see many sides of an issue encouraged cultural tolerance, which would be a stabilizing factor in a diverse society...". Given this text was written some hundreds of years ago, I felt this take was quite efficient and more of a systematic approach to the art of rhetoric since there was thought to 'consider both sides of the story' sort of ideology.

This text made me apply the a Sophist(icated) approach to ours where I aligned a few practices that are used. Sophist were known to teach their students how to argue for both sides of a topic which is a dialectic approach still used today. The theme of manipulation, or, persuasion as a nicer term, also ran across my mind while reading. On page 23 they emphasis Plato's take on the Sophists; I quote, "Plato encouraged the view that the Sophists were concerned merely with the manipulative aspects of how humans acquire knowledge-- that is, with how people could be persuaded that they had learned the truth, whether or not truth was in fact conveyed." This line made me question whether the idealistic approach Americans take on society (American Dream) is unrealistic and more or less a trick to get people to become reliant and cooperative with rules and regulations that may go against our deep beliefs. Overall the Sophist were pretty smart with their persuasion tactics and is evident they are still somewhat relevant today.