Author: Benjamin Pomerantz

"Truth,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is derived from the German triuwida, meaning trust, loyalty, and faithfulness. Trust in particular has been important to rhetorical theory—one of Aristotle’s modes of persuasion, ethos, refers to the ways in which a speaker can enhance their credibility and trustworthiness when giving a public address. But does presenting oneself as trustworthy make one truthful? This question hints at the idea that “truth”—though often used in reference to factual, objective information--is also quite subjective, as certain information and experiences can be “true” to one person but “untrue” to another. The tension between objectivity and subjectivity has made “truth” difficult to define for rhetorical scholars, but to emphasize that tension, I define truth as that which exists as an objective fact or as a subjective element of one’s reality.

Truth and rhetoric have a long, complicated relationship, one dating back to the famed philosophers of Ancient Greece. In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato warns readers that rhetoric is a dangerous tool used by those with power to persuade others to meet their needs. Although much of Gorgias is dedicated to invalidating the use of rhetoric in public discourse, Plato acknowledges that rhetoric can be useful when it disseminates absolute truth, or knowledge disseminated by the gods and revealed through philosophical techniques (Kastely, 1991). Centuries later, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian would agree with this sentiment, arguing that while some orators may abuse their power and use rhetoric for selfish reasons, the true orator is the “good man speaking well”--that is, someone using rhetoric to convey absolute truths to a wider audience (Logie, 2003).

Aristotle, however, noticed that absolute, objective truth is not the only form of truth available to human beings. While he acknowledged the existence of absolute truth, he also revealed a second type of truth that is more attainable: probable truth. According to Aristotle, probable truth refers to the production of knowledge based on human beliefs rather than god-given, philosophical knowledge, and it is probable truths that we rely on when absolute truths are not available (Rowland & Womack, 1985). For instance, in a common court of law, judges and jurors have to make decisions based on probable truths, for we can never truly know what happened in a given case. Though piles of evidence can be provided in attempt to determine the absolute truth, ultimately it is knowledge based on belief and assumption that guides trials. When Platonic, philosophy-driven absolute truth is unavailable, humans rely on probable truths to create a civil society, according to Aristotle. The very fact that probable truth is based on belief implies that rhetoric is needed to create, shape, and persuade masses of people to follow these probable truths.

In the many years since those of the Ancient Greek philosophers, the road to determining objective truth has generally been a slow one. This process, however, was expedited by the introduction of science and the scientific process during the Enlightenment Period. The goal of science was to reveal truth, and societies that took part in the scientific process began valuing objectivity. Because facts, supported by data, are objective, the more knowledge that was created based on these facts, the more objective our knowledge of the world was. Scientific objectivity became “a new epistemic virtue” (Datson and Galison, 2007) during this period. Accordingly, society’s trust in science led to a heightened distrust in rhetoric, which was viewed as a falsifier. Whereas truth based on science was understood as purely objective, people who used language to persuade others were increasingly distrusted. The advent of science and its association with truth furthered the dissociation of rhetoric and truth.

Today, that dissociation of rhetoric and truth continues to exist—in fact, people use the term “mere rhetoric” as a way to indicate that what is being said is not truthful, that it has no substance. This dissociation is shown quite clearly in the invention of the Trumpian buzzword “fake news” to describe modern news media. News organizations like CNN and The New York Times have long claimed to report truthfully on events happening in our world, helping them gain validity in the eyes of consumers. However, President Trump continually insists that these media corporations are presenting “fake news” to their viewers in order to appeal to the political views of their base. By vocalizing his distrust of American news media, President Trump places news media into the category of “rhetoric,” while claiming that his own reporting about America’s goings on is truthful. Of course, in valuing his own beliefs over the reporting of the news media, President Trump is actually using rhetoric to match the beliefs of his political base. In essence, Trump uses rhetoric to silence a former “truth” (news media) and to create a new “truth,” one that meets the beliefs and expectations of his own supporters.

The above example of Trump’s creation of a new truth for his political base hints again that there are multiple types of truths. While objective truths exist independently of human belief—for example, radioactivity, whether or not a person believes in it, exists objectively—subjective truths are based on the beliefs of each individual person, and are part of producing one’s self. Depending on a person’s individual experiences, something may be true to them that may not be true to another person. Say a child has a monster under their bed, for example. To the child, this monster would be a truth, a piece of their life that very much exists. To the child’s parents, teacher, or babysitter, however, this monster likely does not exist in their consciousness, making the existence of the monster only true to the subjective consciousness of the child. Similarly, if the child grows up and no longer believes in the monster, then the imaginary friend no longer exists subjectively in the former child’s life.

While objective and subjective truths are the subject of much rhetorical scholarship, the field should begin to consider one other type of truth: intersubjective truth. Building upon subjective truth, intersubjective truth refers to anything that “exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals” (Harari, 2011). Essentially, intersubjective truths are ideas and beliefs that a large number of people hold collectively. For instance, to those who are die-hard supporters of President Trump, the ideas that Trump shares, including the ideas that Mexicans are invading America’s southern border, that climate change is not real, and that America is better off with him as president, are true in their shared realities. Intersubjective truth is important to the relationship between truth and rhetoric because it shows that communication is the driving factor that creates collective ideologies, beliefs, and narratives within a group of people.

Further complicating the popular understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and truth is the fact that rhetoric is needed to create and shape the narratives that societies believe to be true. In any given narrative, only certain truths get emphasized. The writers of those narratives—usually those who hold power within a given society—get to select which truths they want to include in their narrative. And along with picking which truths get to be included, the authors of narratives also get to select which truths get silenced--and often silence these truths purposefully (Connerton, 2008).  Take the Declaration of Independence, for example. Thomas Jefferson, with the help of other American Revolutionary leaders, wrote in the Declaration that “all men are created equal,” signaling the creation of a nation that would be based on the principle of equal rights and equal protection under the law. This statement may have been true for white, land-owning men in early America, but in practice, the principle has not applied to women, minorities, and those oppressed within American society. Essentially, the idea that “all men are created equal” is central to the collective American narrative, but excludes the experiences of all those who have not been treated equally under law over the course of American history.

The Western film genre also exemplifies how certain truths get selected to be included within cultural narratives, while others become silenced. In nearly every Western film, a white, male cowboy protagonist who has recently arrived in the American frontier are tasked with fighting a given enemy, most frequently American Indians. These films depict the American West as a vast, open landscape, meant for settlement by white Americans, and portray cowboys as defenders of the American frontier against “savage Indians.” Western films have helped to create and spread a historical American identity that essentially promotes only one particular narrative of America’s past—that white people had a God-given right to the land out west, took that land from the “savage Indians,” and settled there. As the narrative goes, the actions of these brave settlers helped push the border of the United States towards the Pacific Ocean and turned the United States into the expansive, powerful nation that it is today. There are, however, multiple narratives of American history from multiple perspectives. For example, in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explains, from the American Indian perspective, that “the United States [is] a colonialist settler-state,” and that it “crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015). This is why rhetoric is so important to the creation of truth--because when tropes, including the portrayal of white settlers as heroes and indigenous peoples as savages, get repeated, they help to shape the narratives that societies regard as true.

So how are rhetoric and truth related? Since the time of Plato, rhetoric has been regarded as the opposite of truth, as an obstacle to the discovery and spread of objective knowledge about our world. However, rhetoric can also serve as the messenger of truth. In addition, rhetoric helps shape our own subjective and intersubjective truths through the communication and dissemination of narratives and ideologies. Rhetoric can be both the antithesis to and the generator of truth; it’s our call on how we use it.

Works Cited

Connerton, P. (2008). Seven types of forgetting. Memory Studies, 1(1), 59–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083889

Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2010). Objectivity (Paperback ed). New York, NY: Zone Books.

Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2015). An indigenous peoples’ history of the United States.

Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. (J. Purcell & H. Watzman, Trans.) (First U.S. edition). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

Kastely, J. L. (1991). In defense of Plato’s gorgias. PMLA, 106(1), 96. https://doi.org/10.2307/462826

Logie, J. (2003). “I have no predecessor to guide my steps”: Quintilian and Roman authorship. Rhetoric Review, 22(4), 353–373. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327981RR2204_2

Oring, E. (2008). Legendry and the rhetoric of truth. Journal of American Folklore, 121(480), 127. https://doi.org/10.2307/20487594

Rowland, R. C., & Womack, D. F. (1985). Aristotle’s view of ethical rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 15(1–2), 13–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773948509390718