I don’t want to get philosophical, but instead rhetorical. What is “truth” in rhetoric? Within our discussions in class, we spoke about the rhetorical aspect of truth and briefly distinguished it from the philosophical concept of truth. They are not the same thing, but rather two ways to approach and view our knowledge. And these truths vary and change, but can be used to persuade us into believing a certain way. So to begin, we discussed how truth comes from knowledge. I found this very simple to understand- you can’t believe in a truth without first having some sort of knowledge of it. However, what I questioned was if this knowledge also involved understanding. Is the mere knowledge of a “truth” enough for belief, or does belief in a truth require understanding? Before we went on in our discussion, I held the stance that in order for truth to hold, it must be known AND understood, meaning that there needs to be evidence and support in order to have the audience or listener understand what the truth is about and have the opportunity to believe it. This ties back to the concept of rhetorical truth where we ask the question: How do we know what we know? I will elaborate a bit on this in the next section.

So to continue, another aspect that was elaborated on in our discussion was this difference in rhetorical and philosophical truth. In rhetoric, there is a cultural construction of knowledge where we ask the questions: what is known? How do we know it? However, in philosophy, we have what is seen as universal truth where the question asked is: what can be known? And to stick to rhetorical truths, what needs to be shown in these truths is evidence and backup to claims of truth. With this in mind, let me introduce the ideas of episteme, doxa, and techne which we elaborated on in class. Episteme means knowledge or “justified true belief.” The word derives from the Ancient Greek word for knowledge or science. In other words, it means truth that stands as fact. This may be through evidence and testing and shows it as absolute fact. Doxa, however, juxtaposes episteme. Doxa means common belief or popular opinion. Behind doxa there is no real evidence except the fact that others believe it to be true. Doxa therefore changes from person to person and brings the variety in truths in rhetoric.

However, one thing worth mentioning is that episteme and doxa are not separate realms or spheres of thinking. We discussed in class that these concepts are more like a spectrum. There are varying levels of each where a truth is seen closer to episteme or closer to doxa. Furthermore, one of the important things to keep in mind is the concept of logos and its influence in doxa and episteme. I already touched a bit on it, but to elaborate a bit more, logos works as the separation between doxa and episteme. The evidence behind a truth establishes it as doxa or episteme and creates the foundation on which the truth stands.