Discovering the ESADE Business School in Barcelona was a great experience. Looking for some theoretical concepts about storytelling and knowledge transfer, I enrolled in this seminar led by Hans Siggard Jensen and Eduard Bonet. Here are the main points that I found interesting.
Eduard Bonet (ESADE, Dean, President of EDAMBA) on Background concepts of rhetoric
"Today a manager produces symbols. He is a sensemaker. That is why rhetoric is a new central concept in management. Narrative is a way to convey knowledge and make sense of it.
Where does the concept of rhetoric come from?
The concept of rhetoric is based on Aristotle’s work “On rhetoric”. Rethoric is finding the means of persuasion. It is not only the act of persuasion; rethoric is the art of finding the accurate mmans of persuasion in a specific situation. He classifies rethoric in three situations. Audience is a technical term in rethoric. The speaker to the audience
- Celebration (“celebrative rhetoric” or “epideictic”): the speaker shows himself (rhetoricians), the audience is just enjoying the story. It develops the values of the society. Example: when something is celebrated in a company, there is a cocktail. A speech is always organized to ensure that it is not “celebrating for celebrating”. Behind this speech, there are some values that are vehiculated.
- Delibaration in the Assembly (“deliberative rethoric”): the audience that makes the decision, who accepts future plans. That is the objective of the rethoric. Benefits we can expect from our actions
- Court of law (“juridicial rhetoric”): the audience has to make judgments of past actions.
What are the means of persuasion?
- Logos: arguments we produce when we are talking
- Ethos: the image we produce in our words and the credibility that the speaker manifests
- Pathos: the feelings we are raising to the audience with our words.
This classification shows that the best argument without credibility is not useful at all.
We have to separate logic and rhetoric.
Two kinds of arguments of logic are available:
- Deduction: rhetorical deduction (“Enthymeme”)
- Induction: rhetorical induction (“Examples”)
> Valid reasoning: if the premises are true (all men are mortal), the conclusion is necessary true (all the mans are mortal). It is syllogism. It is mathematical reasoning.
- Rhetorical deduction: arguments we understand without any “reasonable doubts”. Example of the law court that decides this person is guilty because there is a lot of evidence against somebody. In a novel, there is a lot of evidence against one person and…and at the end, it is another one. It is because it is illogical that a novel is surprusing. It is common reasoning and not mathematical reasoning.
- Rhetorical induction: arguments by examples. The structure is to take the knowledge of the past to the knowledge of the existing situation. It is a past example for a future situation. The case method is pure rhetorical reasoning.
1. Deliberative decision: “go or not go to the war”
2. Past example: “the war against the persians was a success”
Reasoning with a past example has two problems:
- it is a single observation
- it transforms into an implicit general law
Now, let’s make the distinction between episteme and doxia.
Episteme: examples of geometry with axioms which are evident. Theoreme is based on proved axioms. Theoremes are improved by valid reasoning. Logic rules the world of “episteme”. It is pure scientific knowledge (ex: mathematics). Theoreme is episteme.
Doxa: the instrument of doxa is rhetoric. Rhetoric rules the world of “doxa”. Doctorate comes from “doxa”. Knowledge in management comes from “doxa”. Doxa is “opinion” accepted by the scientific community without reasonable doubt.
To conclude we can say that:
- logic is based on valid proofs and reasoning (logos)
- rhetoric is an extension of reasonable arguments by caring of ethos and pathos
In research, you have to guess and introduce hypothesis. Rhetoric involves any kind of human activity !
Ethos, Logos & Pathos should help me to understand narratives mechanisms and to construct powerful stories.
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