Talk:Apophasis

Apophasis/Paralipsis/Proslepsis

I see three nearly identical rhetorical devices:

• Apophasis
• Paralipsis
• Proslepsis

Are these really the same? What are the subtle differences between them that we can bring out? I am linking the pages together in the see alsos and putting references to this talk page in hopes that one of us has more clue than me. Gary 18:55, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

They seem like exactly the same thing to me, so I propose we merge them. Apophasis beats out the other two in a Google test, even including alternate transliterations (paralipsis/paralepsis/paraleipsis), so let's merge the other two into this one. —Keenan Pepper 00:56, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually Silva Rhetoricae gives a quite different definition of apophasis, which makes a lot more sense to me. I think I'll change this page to agree with Silva Rhetoricae and put a dablink at the top to Paralipsis. Any objections? —Keenan Pepper 03:51, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I tried to merge them together in a way that acknowledges the variety of meanings. Ashibaka tock 01:28, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I'm still not sure which of these terms refer to the same thing, and I want to do some more research, but for now this looks like an improvement. —Keenan Pepper 01:54, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Preterition

I'm slightly puzzled as to what preterition has to do with apophasis; can someone explain what it's doing in there? Wooster (talk) 10:44, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Aren't they the same? 68.163.249.49 15:20, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

My original merge brought together a lot of related terms. Perhaps this article should be disambiguated into Paralipsis and Expeditio. Ashibaka tock 15:22, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Cataphasis is not synonymous with apophasis

Apophasis from the greek roots is saying-away, literally to negate. Cataphasis from the greek roots is saying-with, literally to affirm.

It is very unlikely that "cataphasis ... is a rhetorical figure of speech wherein the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be invoked." This could be a meaning of apophasis. Apophasis and cataphasis are opposites, as seen in the Liddell-Scott Greek lexicon entry. I would guess that cataphasis should have its own page and not redirect here.

With regards to religion, apophasis is a statement about God by negation, by saying what He is not, used when speaking of the transcendence of God. Cataphasis is a positive statement about God, by saying what He is, used when speaking of the imminence of God.

Epte 13:57, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

My reading of cataphasis is quite different from yours. What I see in the definition of cataphasis is that it is explicitly mentioning the negative aspects of the subject through paralipsis. That is, paralipsis is saying something by talking about how you aren't going to say it. Cataphasis is a subset of paralipsis wherein only the negative aspects are mentioned. Aezell (talk) 17:32, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Praeteritio

Praeteritio links here but there isn't a section on it, and while the device is proximal to these others it still differs in its use--especially historically. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.174.176.4 (talk) 02:38, 5 December 2006 (UTC).

Similarities and Differences

One of the original points in this article, which I have (imprefectly) restored, was the fact that apophasis has fallen into disuse. Part of the reason for that is the failure to differentiate other related rhetorical devices. I think it was a mistake to merge these distinct if related terms. Having done so, however, it is important to discuss the relationships and the distinctions, which has not been done by those who advocated and made the merge. Edits since my last visit implicitly assert that aphophisis has no independent meaning other than as a superordinate for these other concepts. That's simply incorrect. It also has done harm to the understanding of the supposedly subordinate ideas. Economy1 14:10, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Copyvio?

I think the Occultatio section is lifted right from here: http://www.reference.com/search?q=Occultatio. Would anyone like to clarify? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.42.95.154 (talk) 00:45, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

See http://www.reference.com/help/about.html —Tamfang (talk) 06:43, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Deleted section

Here is a section I deleted today. I removed it because it is not readily understandable, and the rest of the article seem to explain the subject "Apophasis" well enough on its own. --Spannerjam 17:19, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Apophasis (Late Latin, from Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι—apophemi, "to say no") is defined as the rejection of several reasons why a thing should or should not be done and affirming a single one, considered most valid. It refers, in general to when a contriver pretends to hide or leave out what he in fact is saying. Apophasis covers a wide variety of figures of speech. According to William Franke, apophasis is essential because it lies at the root of [the Greeks'] common concern with elucidating how religion is vitally relevant to our self-understanding in a postmodern age. Religion is always deeply concerned with what cannot be adequately said, and any discourse that attempts to speak for or out of it and its concerns cannot but falter, unless it acknowledges and embraces a dimension of unsayability at its core.

References

Suggestion - delete section "With proper names"

This section introduces an entirely different concept. Apophasis involves mentioning a subject even as you say you're going to avoid it. Using some kind of euphemism or circumlocution to refer to somebody is something else entirely. Thoughts? - Eponymous-Archon (talk) 14:45, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. There might be something in referring to a person as "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Talked-About", but that isn't what this section is saying. --McGeddon (talk) 11:11, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Thirded and removed. Pdxuser (talk) 11:38, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Primary sourced examples, and Trump

Does the article benefit from a plain "person X said Y" quotefarm, particularly when a lot of this is plucked directly from WP:PRIMARY sources? Earlier today I merged the Trump examples into a single contextual paragraph of "Huffington Post explicitly identified Trump as using apophasis" (although one of the quotes is still from a primary source) but User:Pdxuser split it back out, preferring the section as a flat list of quotes under a "Donald Trump" subheading.

I appreciate that examples can help to explain a subject like this, but MOS:QUOTE recommends to "intersperse quotations with original prose that comments on those quotations", rather than presenting them without context (is the Adams quote famous? Was he obliquely declaring war, reacting to a tacit declaration of it, or something else?) or a secondary source for the reader to look into. --McGeddon (talk) 14:20, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for this reasonable debate, I appreciate it. I know that excessive examples can be a problem. I understand MOS:QUOTE and WP:QUOTEFARM to refer to a situation such as copying lengthy excerpts from books and articles that explain apophasis, rather than explaining apophasis ourselves and citing the books and articles as references. I think one-sentence examples, though, are the sort of concise references that are recommended as an alternative. And for this rather specialist subject of rhetorical devices, where we're actually discussing ways of speaking, I think it's uniquely informative to quote short examples of such speech so we can see what we're talking about.

As for original sources, the political examples are all now sourced to news articles and a parliamentary archive, rather than, say, a Donald Trump press release. The examples from fiction do both cite the book they are from, but I'm not sure if there's a way around that without an additional party examining these seemingly obvious and uncontroversial examples and confirming that they are indeed apophasis, the way The Huffington Post likely read this Wikipedia page and aggregated its examples into an article that Wikipedia now links to. These literary examples are the only ones we have of apophasis arguably being used diplomatically or to discuss a taboo in a context other than attacking someone. Pdxuser (talk) 15:41, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

"I will never say this, but she screams and drives me crazy" was sourced to a news article that quoted Trump saying it, without the source identifying it as apophasis or anything like that. It's WP:OR to dig up our own examples, and it can be a problem if we're wrong. (I don't know the context, but Trump may have been intending this to mean "I would never say this to her during a debate".)

Examples from fiction are safer to use because they don't have BLP issues, but they should still be presented in context - the Umberto Eco character quote in the "Usage" section is a useful illustration of apophasis as politeness, but the contextless Alexander McCall Smith detective quote is vague and doesn't make much sense to me (it reads like a character awkwardly failing to avoid a subject rather than deliberately bringing it up). Even the Reagan quote is a bit opaque without context.

If these quotes are illustrating points, we should explain what those points are. WP:QUOTEFARM discourages stand-alone quote sections and quotes whose "relevance is not explained". --McGeddon (talk) 10:25, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I think the Charles Francis Adams quote may also be a poor example of apophasis. He seems to be saying that that the fact should not need to be explicitly stated (because both parties are already aware of it), rather than that it should not be brought up. In that case, the meaning is equivalent to something like "I shouldn't have to remind you that this is war." Stuntddude (talk) 14:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Can we please keep the political nonsense off this page. All mention of candidates should be removed and there is no need for pseudo debates about WP:OR and so forth—such commentary is just a smokescreen for the actual issue which is encyclopedic value, aka WP:DUE. Johnuniq (talk) 10:50, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Please WP:AGF, I'm not deliberately holding a "pseudo debate" as a "smokescreen" here and I assume User:Pdxuser isn't either. A full Trump section seemed WP:UNDUE, which is why I merged it into "Politics", but the Trump examples seem usefully illustrative - much moreso than the Reagan quote. --McGeddon (talk) 11:38, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

A heated election campaign is not the time to use comments by candidates to illustrate articles. Even if the the text is golden (and the reference is certainly good), it should not have been added during the election period. Johnuniq (talk) 22:09, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Cicero quote

The wording around the Cicero quote could lead some people to believe that Clodia was the prosecutor, but I don't think that's the case (not even possible in the Roman legal system). AnonMoos (talk) 02:27, 16 March 2024 (UTC)