Philosophy majors, help me out.

[Laelth]

1. I'm a rhetoric major, but here's what I can tell you.

From the point of view of rhetoric (the first academic discipline ever taught in schools in Western Civilization), philosophy (the second academic discipline taught in schools in Western Civilization) and rhetoric are oppositional. Philosophy (at least according to its founders--Plato and Aristotle) believes in one, universal, discoverable, and knowable truth. Science is the child of philosophy (as it also holds that objective truths about the world can be discovered and known through the scientific method and can then be described through the language of mathematics--i.e. F(g)=Gmm/r(squared)). Rhetoric, on the other hand, holds that on all the questions that really matter to humans, there is no truth, and if there were some truth, people couldn't know it, and if people could know it, they couldn't communicate it. This notion was expressed by Gorgias of Leontini circa 400 B.C. It's called the Gorgian trilemma. It says this: "Nothing exists. If something did exist, we could not know it. If we could know it, we could never communicate it."

Both points of view (you might call rhetoric "relativism&quot survive in Western academics (although philosophy has overshadowed rhetoric for a long time). A practical scientist, i.e. an engineer--one who applies science--is, naturally, a philosopher at heart. Philosophy, science, and engineering all seek one, discoverable, knowable, and communicable answer to questions. An attorney is a practical rhetorician. Rhetoric doesn't really believe in a discoverable truth. As such, there is seldom one, right, true and discoverable answer in a courtroom. That's what we have juries for. Flawed, less-than-fully informed people have to make a decision with incomplete knowledge and without any certainty that they have discovered any "truth." Instead, as we all do with most decisions, we do what we think and feel is right and then hope for the best. That's rhetoric. It's also politics. Neither discipline is scientific in any way. They're "arts" that have their foundations in the rhetoric taught in Ancient Greece at the birth of democracy.

Hope that helps.

For more, see this: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict: An Historical Survey - HERE.

-Laelth