I Love Burke!! :)

Terministic Screen, “a screen composed of terms through which humans perceive the world, and that direct attention away from some interpretations and toward others.” Words convey a particular meaning, conjuring images and ideas that induce support toward beliefs or opinions. Receivers of the words interpret the intended message through a metaphorical screen of their own vocabulary and perspective to the world. Everyone has their own way of interpreting things based on their terministic screens. "Not only does the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather than another."(46) You and i both may be listening to the same speech, but it triggers something totally different in me than it does in you.

I remember reading about Burke in my Rhetoric class. Burke offers the metaphor to explain why people interpret messages differently, based on the construction of symbols, meanings, and, therefore, reality.Burke incorporates animals, symbols and a scientific approach into his explanation, and throws me off a little. Now I am really confused. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, that is, of the manipulation of thought. It thereby takes, implicitly, all the communicative acts people make as its domain. In practice, rhetoric has focused, reasonably, on linguistic communication, speech, writing and even signing. Now to try to tie someones view of rhetoric with Burke’s definition might not be that hard but I can give it a try. Although Burke was extremely confusing, I feel like he just had so much to say, and every time he thought of something, it just connected him to something else to think about, which made it an everlasting circle of rhetorical concepts. I wish I had a clear example, but he just says so much.  He believes that Rhetoric is “The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents” which basically means in my opinion “persuasion”. He might mean that the way you word something, the particular words that you used, are all used to motivate people to act and think in certain ways. Rhetoric to Burke equals persuasion plus identification. 

Basically I think he means that we identify with those with whom we share traits with which pretty much makes a lot of sense, like why I would be persuaded by someone who I cannot identify with in some way shape or form. My example would be to imagine a Caucasian man giving the “I Have a Dream” speech. How would he identify with the black community? Would they even be persuaded and motivated by his speech just as much as they were by MLK? But because MLK was able to identify with his audience he was able to verbally express that in his speech. Burke believed that you persuade a man only in so far as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, etc. I hope I explained that correctly. In his excerpts he also talked about animals, and he described the characteristics of humans distinct from animals, he said something about language being the primarily a species of action. 

With this portion I did have a few questions, like how is this used in Rhetoric? How can the comparison with animals be utilized to persuade someone? What is the rhetorical stand point behind Burkes Messages? Overall Burke is a confusing man. Burke was just a man trying understand life just like everyone else.

Burke, Kenneth. “Terministic Screens.” In Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and 
Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. 44-57.