• Oral
• Song
• Poetry

• Memory
• Performance

Vision Statement of the socio-political community

To understand the story is to be given a message on how to live in the community: to resolve conflicts, to solve problems, to do the right thing.

• Bridge:
  1. the message constructs a bridge to move to and fro from normative community to lived experience.
  2. as bridge, message weaves a boundary or a portal through which intellectual, emotional, and moral thinking may wander.

• Stories or tales:
  1. Exemplify a challenge to virtue
  2. Illustrate a common problem
  3. Resolution of good and evil
  4. Establishes a paradigm of acting in the world
• Function of stories:
  1. Acculturation
  2. Initiation into norms of the socio-political community
  3. Source of guidance

Not reflexive on how the bridge (that transmits the norms) is designed and how that design shapes intellectual, emotional, and moral thought. Short of impulse to be critical of the norms, the bridge on which they are transmitted and thus the assumptions that follow intellectual, emotional, and moral thinking.

• Socrates (Web Resource) (Image)
• Plato (Web Resource) (Image)

• Oral
• Written

• Inventing, finding or discovering truth
• “Reason” or critical thinking
• Orchestrating a Dialogue

• Recognizing fallacies
• Questioning
• Posing objections to all doubtful propositions until “the cows come home,” i.e.
  1. Until objections refuted
  2. Until “original truth” replaced by one better to withstand critical examination.

• Working out the truth of assumptions
• Concerns the rational certainty of a claim
• Habit of constant questioning
• Question and answer
• Cross-examination
• Digging and rooting out the foundation on which a truth is constituted
• Finding truth stops evil

No guarantee that questioning and critical thinking will lead to appropriate action: We may be convinced by a person’s arguments and unmoved to change or act.

Does not address motivations: assumes that no one consciously chooses to act evil.

Not every dialogue ends in agreement.

• Sophists (Web Resource)
• Aristotle (Web Resource) (Image)
• Isocrates (Web Resource)

• Oral
• Written

• To reflect on a situation defined as indeterminate or contingent
• To make the situation clear, so that a shared perspective emerges in light of uncertainty
• To unite community and pursue a course of action

• Aids in resolving ambiguities and in interpreting how disparate parts fit together
• Deals with issues for which there are no certain outcomes
• Recognizes that great deal of the world not determined by nature but by actions of human laws, political systems, etc, are products of human design
• Approaches problems by figuring out what action to take since human actions depend on what we want to accomplish, what we value, what we find intellectually, emotionally, and ethically appealing
• Makes clear what is vaguely and poorly understood
• Authority determined by content and language of presentation
• Weighing all sides: envisions audience that listens to both sides and weighs judgment toward the stronger argument

• Relative
• Outcome of votes and judgments many stand as (an accepted social) truth