Rhetorical Attack by Substitution and Buffer Overflow
Recently, I've seen following rhetorical technique used in several places:
The speaker takes a secondary aspect of some concept and presents it as if the entire concept boils down to that aspect. Or simply provides their own definition of the concept - one that seems acceptable if people don't think too deeply. (substitution)
They quickly build several layers of theory on top of that definition. (the buffer overflow)
After that, they use conclusions yielded by layers of that theoretizing to steer the audience toward the desired course of action.
All the while, the speaker relies on the definition they themselves postulated, but continues to use the connotations and emotional weight of the original concept.
For this trick to work it's highly preferable to have authority, charisma, and a degree of trust from the audience on your side. Otherwise, there's a high chance you'll be caught early and not allowed to get deep enough in step two.
It works better when delivered orally. In writing, you need more text to "bury" the conceptual substitution. This technique works worse on people with technical backgrounds (who tend to check each logical step and definition), and better on those in the humanities (who often evaluate the overall persuasiveness of the text).
This resembles a well known verbal reframing trick familiar to any specialist in rhetorical devices shielded by a thick layer of fluff. Proofs by intimidation and by avoidance may be abound but not necessary. Every step after the first one may might actually be correct.
Two effects underlying this rhetorical technique are very simple:
In most cultural contexts, people don't interrupt a speaker the moment they hear something questionable. They give the speaker a chance to explain what they meant.
People have limited ability to keep track of which statements follow from which.
So if the speaker's text is sufficiently large and branchy…
by the time they reach the end of their talk, audience may remember their argumentation like this:
Listeners end up debating the final layer of theory or nitpicking memorable statements from the middle layer. The issue lies in the very first premise - but everyone has already forgotten it.
An Example
How does this "substitution with secondary aspect" look in practice? Here's an example from a business training session I attended a year ago:
(One of the participants arrived late. The trainer stops him in view of the entire audience.)
Trainer: You're late, even though we agreed to start on time. Apparently, coming on time wasn't important to you.
Participant: No, it was important. I just had to make an urgent phone call.
Trainer: That phone call was important to you at that moment, but coming on time wasn't. I'll explain.
(The participant sits. The trainer cracks a few jokes at his expense and continues.)
Trainer: Listen to this story to understand what I mean. Suppose your friend says learning to play guitar is important to him. You ask what he has done for it. He says he bought a guitar. Okay. A month later you meet again and ask about the guitar. He says he didn't have strings and spent a long time buying new ones. Fine. Another month passes. You meet again. He mentions that he bought strings and watched a few tutorials on YouTube but hasn't actually played yet. Would you say learning guitar is important to him?
Audience (several voices): No!
Trainer: Exactly. Anything else was important to him - buying the guitar, buying the strings - but not learning to play. The same applies to any life goal. Someone wants to lose weight, goes on a diet, but then breaks down and eats chocolate again. Eating chocolate is more important to him than losing weight. Someone wanted a promotion, worked hard, but someone else got promoted. We can say working hard was important to him, but not getting the promotion. Remember: "important" is when the goal is achieved; everything else doesn't count. Based on this definition, let's look at how you should treat the things you call important…
(The trainer then gives 20 minutes of productivity advice based on this definition.)
You probably agree that achieving goals correlates with their importance - but do you agree that this alone defines the term? Maybe in a short written example this ruse is easy to spot, but I assure you most people in that room didn't notice it. The trainer had authority and a smooth delivery. The manipulation worked to switch their brains to write mode.
Another Example: Logotherapy
A second example I recently encountered is logotherapy. Here is a brief description of this psychological approach. Can you spot the technique here?
According to Viktor Frankl, in addressing the unique tasks and responsibilities posed by life, a person is driven by the will to meaning. This is the striving to discover and carry out a specific responsible act that one's conscience intuitively recognizes as the "right answer" to life situations. Meaning therefore exists in every situation. Conscience helps intuitively sense potential meaning that may be realized through creative action, profound experience, or an attitude we choose toward unavoidable suffering. When the search for meaning is frustrated or ignored, a person may experience an existential vacuum or develop noogenic neuroses stemming from a loss of purpose rather than biological or psychological conflict.
Frankl defines meaning as "the specific responsible act that conscience intuitively recognizes as the 'right answer' to a situation." This is definitely not how I would define "the meaning of the moment" for a person! Two books I read on logotherapy mentioned this nuance briefly, and one didn't mention it at all. I'm sure not all practicing logotherapists highlight this to their clients.
People who feel their life lacks meaning visit specialists in "the psychology of meaning." Those specialists explain how to find that meaning. That field contains many good recommendations. It's entirely possible the client will genuinely find emotional relief. But it's not the meaning they were originally looking for.
Most likely not even all logotherapists remember how Frankl defines meaning. And this is hardly unique. How many modern communsts remember the labor theory of value underlying Marx's works? How many ever knew it? When a text is long enough, even a motivated learner may fail to dig down to the foundational premises.
Engine for Humanities Progress?
…which may not be a bad thing. As shown above, this technique isn't used solely for self serving purposes. I'd classify that business trainer's behavior as benevolent manipulation. Had he started with advice right away, people might have absorbed five percent of it. His trick helped them absorb much more.
The logotherapy example is even more interesting, because it represents an entire school of psychology.
Words like "important," "meaning," and "art" are too complex to load fully into one's mind at once. It's hard even to enumerate all shades and nuances of such concepts for oneself. But even if we could, would that actually help?
Take art, for example. A common piece of wisdom is to make decisions "holistically", based on all aspects of the relevant concept. Maybe that helps when forming an opinion about a particular painting. But if your task is to critique it adequately, you inevitably drop to the level of specific aspects: "I like the color combination, but the composition is weak". Yes, you also need to see how colors and composition interact in the whole - but that feels more like rapid switching between particular–general–particular–general. This is even more true when learning to create art. Art students don't finish their education at "just draw beautifully according to your holistic vision". They take composition classes, anatomy classes, and so on.
Perhaps this approach is even more valid when creating fundamentally new knowledge in a field. If you load your mind with all existing knowledge, it's hard to squeeze out something original. Different ideas pull in different directions. Concepts try to be all encompassing, and collapse under their own weight. Original conclusions arise when you shake the system of knowledge - but random shaking doesn't help either. Focusing a foundational concept around something usually considered secondary can be a promising starting point.
If you seriously explore an idea like "actually, art is the communication of emotions and impressions from one person to another", you may reach interesting conclusions. If instead you explore "actually, art is a rhythm of forms satisfying aesthetic needs" you may reach different but equally interesting conclusions. If you write a few books on the subject, your followers may forget that your new theory began by narrowing a holistic concept. And does it matter if this narrowing sparked new discoveries?
One might even go further: if the books become influential and their conclusions resonate with people's lived experience, the once peripheral aspect of the foundational concept can "move toward the center" and no longer feel like a substitution. The development of the humanities as a whole can be seen as a distributed set of sprints into various aspects of concepts. And once one such deep dive succeeds and a new school of thought contributes to public consciousness, people wonder how such an "obvious" idea became the foundation of an entire school.
Practical Applications
Is there any practical use in this - assuming you don't plan to found a new school of thought in the humanities?
It seems the same substitution technique can work at a smaller scale for practical ideas. Method described above echoes the method of provocative creative thinking by challenging assumptions. Edward de Bono in Serious Creativity argues that it's hard to create just something new. If you sit in front of a blank page and try to invent something original, it will be difficult. You should impose constraints, latch onto specific qualities of objects. Choose one quality of an object you want to improve, imagine it ten times bigger - or dimish it to zero. Or - in our case - switch it to something fitting but unexpected.
For example, if you write science fiction books, films, or games, you can design intelligent species this way. Shift the emphasis in cultural concepts ("fatherhood," "purity," "freedom") toward some secondary aspect, then carefully reason out the consequences. This can produce cultures that are both strange and fascinating, yet still recognizable and relatable.
This also serves as a reminder of how different the meanings behind the same words can be for different people. Food for thought on how we manage to convey any abstract information at all.
And finally, if someone presents you with a strange theory, take the time to dig into the premises they start from. Take it apart piece by piece. Perhaps the root of disagreement (or an intentional rhetorical feint) lies in the fact that you begin with different basic definitions. Though admittedly, this idea is not new.
Rhetorical Attack by Substitution and Buffer Overflow
Recently, I've seen following rhetorical technique used in several places:
All the while, the speaker relies on the definition they themselves postulated, but continues to use the connotations and emotional weight of the original concept.
For this trick to work it's highly preferable to have authority, charisma, and a degree of trust from the audience on your side. Otherwise, there's a high chance you'll be caught early and not allowed to get deep enough in step two.
It works better when delivered orally. In writing, you need more text to "bury" the conceptual substitution. This technique works worse on people with technical backgrounds (who tend to check each logical step and definition), and better on those in the humanities (who often evaluate the overall persuasiveness of the text).
This resembles a well known verbal reframing trick familiar to any specialist in rhetorical devices shielded by a thick layer of fluff. Proofs by intimidation and by avoidance may be abound but not necessary. Every step after the first one may might actually be correct.
Two effects underlying this rhetorical technique are very simple:
So if the speaker's text is sufficiently large and branchy…
by the time they reach the end of their talk, audience may remember their argumentation like this:
Listeners end up debating the final layer of theory or nitpicking memorable statements from the middle layer. The issue lies in the very first premise - but everyone has already forgotten it.
An Example
How does this "substitution with secondary aspect" look in practice? Here's an example from a business training session I attended a year ago:
You probably agree that achieving goals correlates with their importance - but do you agree that this alone defines the term? Maybe in a short written example this ruse is easy to spot, but I assure you most people in that room didn't notice it. The trainer had authority and a smooth delivery. The manipulation worked to switch their brains to write mode.
Another Example: Logotherapy
A second example I recently encountered is logotherapy. Here is a brief description of this psychological approach. Can you spot the technique here?
Frankl defines meaning as "the specific responsible act that conscience intuitively recognizes as the 'right answer' to a situation." This is definitely not how I would define "the meaning of the moment" for a person! Two books I read on logotherapy mentioned this nuance briefly, and one didn't mention it at all. I'm sure not all practicing logotherapists highlight this to their clients.
People who feel their life lacks meaning visit specialists in "the psychology of meaning." Those specialists explain how to find that meaning. That field contains many good recommendations. It's entirely possible the client will genuinely find emotional relief. But it's not the meaning they were originally looking for.
Most likely not even all logotherapists remember how Frankl defines meaning. And this is hardly unique. How many modern communsts remember the labor theory of value underlying Marx's works? How many ever knew it? When a text is long enough, even a motivated learner may fail to dig down to the foundational premises.
Engine for Humanities Progress?
…which may not be a bad thing. As shown above, this technique isn't used solely for self serving purposes. I'd classify that business trainer's behavior as benevolent manipulation. Had he started with advice right away, people might have absorbed five percent of it. His trick helped them absorb much more.
The logotherapy example is even more interesting, because it represents an entire school of psychology.
Words like "important," "meaning," and "art" are too complex to load fully into one's mind at once. It's hard even to enumerate all shades and nuances of such concepts for oneself. But even if we could, would that actually help?
Take art, for example. A common piece of wisdom is to make decisions "holistically", based on all aspects of the relevant concept. Maybe that helps when forming an opinion about a particular painting. But if your task is to critique it adequately, you inevitably drop to the level of specific aspects: "I like the color combination, but the composition is weak". Yes, you also need to see how colors and composition interact in the whole - but that feels more like rapid switching between particular–general–particular–general. This is even more true when learning to create art. Art students don't finish their education at "just draw beautifully according to your holistic vision". They take composition classes, anatomy classes, and so on.
Perhaps this approach is even more valid when creating fundamentally new knowledge in a field. If you load your mind with all existing knowledge, it's hard to squeeze out something original. Different ideas pull in different directions. Concepts try to be all encompassing, and collapse under their own weight. Original conclusions arise when you shake the system of knowledge - but random shaking doesn't help either. Focusing a foundational concept around something usually considered secondary can be a promising starting point.
If you seriously explore an idea like "actually, art is the communication of emotions and impressions from one person to another", you may reach interesting conclusions. If instead you explore "actually, art is a rhythm of forms satisfying aesthetic needs" you may reach different but equally interesting conclusions. If you write a few books on the subject, your followers may forget that your new theory began by narrowing a holistic concept. And does it matter if this narrowing sparked new discoveries?
One might even go further: if the books become influential and their conclusions resonate with people's lived experience, the once peripheral aspect of the foundational concept can "move toward the center" and no longer feel like a substitution. The development of the humanities as a whole can be seen as a distributed set of sprints into various aspects of concepts. And once one such deep dive succeeds and a new school of thought contributes to public consciousness, people wonder how such an "obvious" idea became the foundation of an entire school.
Practical Applications
Is there any practical use in this - assuming you don't plan to found a new school of thought in the humanities?
It seems the same substitution technique can work at a smaller scale for practical ideas. Method described above echoes the method of provocative creative thinking by challenging assumptions. Edward de Bono in Serious Creativity argues that it's hard to create just something new. If you sit in front of a blank page and try to invent something original, it will be difficult. You should impose constraints, latch onto specific qualities of objects. Choose one quality of an object you want to improve, imagine it ten times bigger - or dimish it to zero. Or - in our case - switch it to something fitting but unexpected.
For example, if you write science fiction books, films, or games, you can design intelligent species this way. Shift the emphasis in cultural concepts ("fatherhood," "purity," "freedom") toward some secondary aspect, then carefully reason out the consequences. This can produce cultures that are both strange and fascinating, yet still recognizable and relatable.
This also serves as a reminder of how different the meanings behind the same words can be for different people. Food for thought on how we manage to convey any abstract information at all.
And finally, if someone presents you with a strange theory, take the time to dig into the premises they start from. Take it apart piece by piece. Perhaps the root of disagreement (or an intentional rhetorical feint) lies in the fact that you begin with different basic definitions. Though admittedly, this idea is not new.