- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Giving up on persuasion?

In Reply to: My last post posted by Barry Stoller on November 13, 1998 at 01:29:29:

BS: While you may be confident that appeals to reason or emotions will change human behavior, your own behavior (like mine) shows that it, in fact, does not. (Our 'reasoning' with one another has accomplished nothing; your position is as it was, and so is mine.) I believe behavior (and 'points of view') can only be changed by actual contingent variables, not by 'reasons' or appeals to feelings. To assume that these contingencies are 'in our minds,' inaccessible to functional control, strikes me as one of the most hopeless of philosophies.

SDF: This all begs the question of why you started posting here in the first place. BTW, why did you think posting here would help your cause at the beginning, if your conclusion about reinforcement was as it is above? To resolve the issue, you might want to look at the historical phenomenon of rhetoric, as defined by Aristotle as the art of persuading people. In fact, you might think about reading Aristotle's RHETORIC -- esp. the Modern Library edition, which is less cluttered with modern-day commentary than the others. Aristotle's RHETORIC is IMHO the most straightforward of ancient Greek texts.

So the question remains: were the Greeks deluded in thinking they could persuade people through language?

Frankly, Barry, I thought you persuaded many of us, me included, that the discourse of behaviorism had beneficial uses in the formulation of social theory. Thanks for stopping by.
-SDF

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