This chapter looks at persuasion and deliberation in Classical Rhetoric. I am particularly taken with the principles of deliberative rhetoric detailed on page 36:

1. Deliberation provides responses to urgent situations. Knew that. (One would hope.)
2. Deliberation takes place at the limits of knowledge. I love this! How poetic and concise, all at the same time.
3. Deliberation aims at provisional consensus. Which doesn't always happen, but it's a nice idea.

#2 particularly does it for me, though. The authors explicate it in this fashion:

Deliberation begins with some form of doubt and uncertainty. It takes place because humans have only partial and incomplete knowledge. If they possessed perfect knowledge, there would be no need to deliberate - decisions would be self-evident or automatic, and the consequences of actions would be known in advance. Deliberation takes into account available knowledge, acknowledging all along the limits of what is known at the time.

I find this immensely comforting. Somehow, when I was writing my deliberative essay last spring, I got it in my head that what I had to do was exhaustively research both sides of an issue and then demonstrate my expertise. Which is sort of true - you do need to know everything. But what I didn't understand (and it was probably carefully explained, but sometimes Kristas just don't listen) is that it's OK to not know. It's only this past semester, with my introduction to grad school, that I've learned that it's not only quite alright not to know, but it's anticipated that you will not know. Otherwise, why on earth would you be a student? It's your job to not know, and to be bothered enough by this to deliberate - to go find out by talking about it with folks who are experts. It took me a long time to understand that this is an OK thing. Maybe I'm too accepting of it now - the other night in class, I said I didn't know something when I actually did. I overdo things sometimes.