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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    Perspectives
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Poetry and rhetoric belong to the beautiful sciences (belles lettres) rather than the fine arts.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Poetry achieves its aesthetic effects through the sonic and rhythmic qualities of language, which are natural (non-arbitrary) sensory phenomena.
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    • 2.When signs produce pleasure through their material form rather than their conventional meaning, they function as natural signs for the purposes of aesthetic classification.
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    • 3.Therefore, poetry's medium is not purely conventional, and the fine arts / beautiful sciences distinction does not cleanly exclude it from the former category.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Lessing's Laocoon (1766) demonstrates that poetry uniquely represents temporal sequences of action, a capacity grounded in the natural structure of human cognition, not convention.
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    • 2.If a medium's representational power is grounded in universal cognitive structure rather than social agreement, that medium employs something functionally equivalent to natural signs.
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    • 3.Classifying poetry under 'beautiful sciences' solely on the basis of linguistic arbitrariness conflates the arbitrariness of the lexical sign with the non-arbitrary cognitive effects of poetic form.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.The fine arts employ natural signs; the beautiful sciences employ arbitrary or conventional signs.
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    • 2.Poetry and rhetoric convey their content by artificial (arbitrary/conventional) signs.
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    • 3.Arbitrary signs have nothing in common by nature with the designated subject matter but are assumed as signs by convention.
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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.