Reality, Part II: “Objective” Reality

Okay, so what does all this have to do with speechwriting, you might ask?

Stay with me but a little longer, Dear Reader.

Someone once commented to me that “Objective Reality is about as meaningful as someone hitting .400 in spring training.” While I do think that objective reality has a sort of final significance, I also think that the term is problematic. Most people agree that material reality, from sense perception, also known as “common sense”, provides wide basis for agreement, commonly known as “evidence”.
A related issue concerning “objective reality” is the “descriptive” vs. the “predictive”.

Description of various things, whether events, objects, or whatever, can, to a degree, generate at least some agreement, based on the weighing of “evidence”. However, utilizing a description of the past in order to predict the future is “dicey”. David Hume, the greatest of British philosophers questioned whether we could expect a physical “law”, such as gravity, or the sun shining somewhere, to continually be true in the future, even though the occurrence has always played itself out in the past. He concluded that while we could, as a result of observation of past events, have a reasonable expectation of natural phenomena occurring the same way each and every time, we could not guarantee, in the manner of a “law”, that it WOULD CONTINUE to automatically occur.

What does all this have to do with speech?

Well, the art and arc of persuasion depend on compelling listeners to accept the subjective offered by the speaker. While the speaker may offer “evidence” in the common meaning of that term, he or she selects the evidence. As a result, the “values” of the speaker rely as much on the choices of his or her selection, as much if not more so than on the evidence presented.

So, the consistency of the evidence is a product of someone’s subjectivity, a combination of the objective (“evidence”) and the subjective (“choices” or “values”).

While the combination of “choice/value” and “evidence” may have moved each audience sufficiently to persuade them to agree with a speaker, the same speaker cannot guarantee that the same combination will “wow” a future audience.

Research your audience ahead of time, be flexible, and keep your expectations reasonable based on what you have observed in similar cases in the past.

Stay tuned.