Sometimes even a single word such as rhetoric can have a lot of different meanings that influence one’s way of viewing new concepts. According to ancient Greek philosopher Plato, rhetoric has potential for winning one’s soul by dialogue, but it may also diminish one’s ability to speak the truth. He sees rhetoric as sophistic because sophists are only interested in opinions and beliefs about justice, not justice itself. Nonetheless, since rhetoric is used to not only persuade or change the thinking of someone else but also to discover epistemic truth, its salient message is to attune to the ambient environment within which rhetoric itself exits. In vibrant and attuned environments, ambience plays an interactive role considering it is the setting …show more content…
In Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (2013), associate professor of English at Purdue University, Thomas Rickert, states that “an ambient age calls [humankind] to rethink much of [their] rhetorical theory and practice, indeed, calls [humankind] to understand rhetoric as ambient” (3), acknowledging that rhetoric is no longer just centered upon its basic dichotomy of subject and object but rather extends outward to include material and informational environment which can change one’s understanding of how human beings and the world are. Therefore, Rickert is trying to persuade that human beings and the world are embedded together and are part of each other. An American literary theorist, Kenneth Duva Burke defines rhetoric as “a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Leggett), maintaining that by using symbols, things such as statues or documents that represent or stand for something else by way of resemblance or association are what persuade cooperation. Burke believed that persuasion is more in relation to identification through symbolism. For example, Martin Luther King chose to speak at the Lincoln Memorial because he knew he could make the connection in that ambience through the use of symbolism to reinforce identification with his message. Although some assert that rhetoric is ideological in the sense that one’s