My rambling thoughts on terministic screens, rhetoric, and Kenneth Burke

The modern world is full of debates, arguments, discourse, nuance, and disagreements. And if you don’t agree with me…well, I have news for you.

For those looking to be a more thoughtful conversationalist or productive debater, rhetoric has a lot of tools and context that can help us understand what language does and why. One of the most helpful concepts is Kenneth Burke’s idea of terministic screens.

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality (Language as Symbolic Action 1295).

Basically, the terms and words we use when speaking and discussing and arguing are not, themselves, reality. After all, if you say the word “chair,” that’s not actually a chair, right? Maybe you’ll picture a chair in your head, sure, but your friend is probably picturing a completely different chair. Say it to someone who speaks no English, and they probably won’t picture anything. The point is: terminology, or words, are reflections of reality.

When you explain it like that, it seems obvious. But the second part is where it gets hard to digest: the nature of language is that it is not reality, so, any “reality” it contains is only a section. That is to say, only part of reality. And to take it a step further, that also means that it is a deflection of reality.

So what?

So, whenever a message is given, or language is used, there’s always something being left out.

Isn’t that scary? And it also means that these terministic screens influence how people perceive the world, receive messages, and think about events. Take a particularly polarizing subject: abortion. Have you ever heard someone say that abortion is “killing babies?” What does this message leave out, or deflect? Even just those two terms — killing and babies — might mean different things to different people, and together they cause quite a reaction. “Killing” implies purposeful murder, evil, and loss of life, but its connotation is violent while the reality of abortion is not. And “baby” implies a full human child, where “fetus” would be an accurate term. Or maybe, clump of cells. Regardless of your beliefs on the subject, terministic screens can cause broad generalizations that can make our debates really ineffective really fast.

Of course, even if we try to make our language more inclusive and accurate, Burke states that ANY terminology is a selection of reality, not just some of it. But that’s the nature of rhetoric. Rhetoric doesn’t deal with truth; that’s the job of dialectic (aka, dealing with certaintly). Aristotle, the father of modern rhetoric, restricted rhetoric to concerning only probable: those matters that allow for multiple legitimate arguments.

Understanding these ideas about language being imperfect, selective, and deflective help us understand the fallbacks of language. But language is human, and symbols and terminology (things that stand for other things, like words or pictures) are uniquely humans. We are lucky to have it as a form of communication…even when it makes us disagree.