Aristotle said that speakers convince their audiences in three main ways. So logos or logic, or something that seemed logical. Pathos, which is an appeal to emotions are basically putting the audience in the right frame of mind to hear an arguments and Ethos, convincing the audience simply because the speaker is credible, so basically you know I trust what she says because well she's in trustworthy and of these, Aristotle thought Ethos was potentially the most powerful. So that begs the question why do you trust what someone says? Do you trust them because of what they know, or because of what you think they know? And it's a tough question that actually sort of has been thought through a lot over the past couple of millennia and it can be resolved in a coupe of different ways. So for example Plato was usually concerned with this question. He knew how powerful rhetoric was. He'd seen the changes in Athens in his lifetime. And so what he does for this question is he turns. And he starts thinking about how to make sure speakers are moral. You pick up the republic and that book focus' on why the philosopher king should be in charge. You want the smartest guy at the top, Rhetoric, then, is very useful as a means to make sure that the ship of state stays on course. Now, Plato's contemporary, I Socrates, agreed. Though he sought to educate leaders. And he did this for a pretty hefty price. And he was educating them in the best cultural values. The person was the argument. In order to make the argument good you had better make the person exemplary because the person's character which was believed in part to be inherited from his ancestors would just appear in that speech. Now, we jump forward a little bit of time and and Augustine had undergone a personal transformation, in part due to this very question. So Augustine had been a rhetoric teacher, converted to Christianity, and then he quit his job. He called his former teaching position in Milan where he'd been a rhetoric teacher, he called it a chair of lies. I mean that's a dude who didn't like a job. I liked a lot of jobs. I didn't go that deep in there. I used to dig ditches. I didn't leave and be like, the only soil I turned was pure hate. I just didn't like the job. But anyways, in Augustine, in his book on Christian doctrine, he's very clear on this issue. He says, okay, moral truth comes from, for him, scripture. Then the pastor just needs to make sure to speak it well. So that's kind of one way that you can resolve this question. Now Aristotle, and many others since, have taken a slightly different approach to Ethos. So Aristotle saw Ethos as an inventional tool. So basically it's like, let's not focus on the morality of the speaker, let's think instead about how audiences ascribed credibility to speakers, okay? Is as well, okay, if you going to do this you need to identify the type of audience that you're dealing With, And then have speakers adapt accordingly. And what I like about this is Aristotle reminds us to think about how to play up the elements of our expertise that are going to highlight our credibility for a specific audience now, this approach speaks to the performance of credibility. So in this case, it's about finding your role, your persona and this persona might bend and shift a little bit in different circumstances but it's an identity that you inhabit when you perform. So basically it's like having passion in here is great but the audience needs to feel it. Knowing your subject up here, man that's necessary but it's insufficient. You have to perform your knowledge. You gotta know what you're talking about but you also gotta look like you know what you're talking about. Okay, Ethos allows us to think about, encourages us to think about, the performance of credibility. And in so doing, you realize, man it ain't magic, right? It's not beyond our understanding. With a little bit of diligence, we can crack open what the best speakers are doing, all right? We can imitate it. We can develop our own personas, okay? And actually that's what we're going to be doing over the last couple of videos. Okay? We're going to be talking about the different components of Ethos, arete, phronesis, and eunoia. Performing, basically performing your passion, your expertise, and your goodwill for that audience. So that's what we're going to be doing. But let me just go ahead and end this video by saying having an Ethos approach, it's not lying, okay? Ethos is an investment, and lying or stretching the truth can work in the short term, but it usually comes at too high of a long term cost. So when you have to see the audience again, you've got a real disincentive to lie because being caught in a lie costs you your Ethos, which will make future presentations that much harder. Right, so if I stretch the truth, for example, let's say I'm in front of a board of directors, and I stretch the truth to win a specific vote in front of this board of directors. Well, if they learn that they've been misled, well, I'm going to be in big trouble next time I talk to them, okay. I'm not going to be persuasive that next time. So what I'd rather do is build up my credibility in that presentation. Push hard for the vote that I want, lose but still win the long term goal of improving my Ethos for that board. Okay, Carefully cultivated ethos, and knowing how to perform that Ethos in front of various audiences, is really a long term strategy Strategy that pays off. >> [MUSIC]
