Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

From [a theoretical] point of view, invention
becomes the study of all possible means by which
arguments or proofs can be discovered and developed.
Rhetoricians develop theories of invention when they
focus on questions about how people may be persuaded
to accept something worthy of belief. […]
And so theories of rhetorical invention must
also be articulated with current thinking about how
people change their minds or make discoveries – that
is, with some currently accepted theory of knowledge.
(2)
And this question of “how people change their minds or make
discoveries” which is so critical to invention but also
classical rhetoric as a whole is indicative, for Crowley, of the
perspective upon “knowledge,” upon “reality” and “Truth,” that
was essential to classical rhetoric. Unlike how it was
portrayed by Knoblauch and Brannon, for classical rhetoricians,
knowledge was not simply waiting out in the aether to be
discovered - “fixed and stable, the possession of a master who
passes it on to students” – but was something that was made. It
was something that was made through the encounter and conflict
and discourse. Of this, Crowley writes:
In classical epistemology, wise persons were those
who had thought long and hard about the cultural
assumptions that influenced their lives and those of
other persons. In turn, their shared wisdom became
part of communal knowledge. Knowledge itself was
always changing its shape, depending on who was doing
the knowing. Every act of knowing influenced the
body of knowledge itself. (162)
And upon this rooting of rhetoric in such an epistemology that
is anything but “fixed and immutable,” Crowley explains:
People need rhetoric precisely because they disagree;
people disagree because their circumstances differ.
Rhetoric functions where difference is assumed.
Differences exist between rhetors and their audiences
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