apophasis

Apophasis (Late Latin, from Greek apophanai, "to say no" ^[1]) refers, in general, to "mentioning by not mentioning". Apophasis covers a wide variety of figures of speech.

Apophasis

Apophasis was originally and more broadly a method of logical reasoning or argument by denial - a way of telling what something is by telling what it is not, or a process-of-elimination way of talking about something by talking about what it is not.

A useful inductive technique when given a limited universe of possibilities, the exclusion of all but the one remaining is affirmation through negation. The familiar guessing-game of Twenty Questions is an example of apophatic inquiry.

This sense has generally fallen into disuse and is frequently overlooked, although it is still current in certain contexts, such as mysticism and negative theology. An apophatic theology sees God as ineffable and attempts to describe God in terms of what God is not. Apophatic statements refer to transcendence in this context, as opposed to cataphasis referring to immanence.

Paralipsis

Look up paralipsis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Paralipsis, also known as praeteritio, preterition, cataphasis, antiphrasis, or parasiopesis, is a rhetorical figure of speech wherein the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be invoked. As such, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony. Paralipsis is usually employed to make a subversive ad hominem attack.

The device is typically used to distance the speaker from unfair claims, while still bringing them up. For instance, a politician might say, "I don't even want to talk about the allegations that my opponent is a drunk."

The most common English construction is the phrase "not to mention," as in "She is talented, not to mention rich." This construction is so common that it has lost much, if not all, of the device's rhetorical power. "Not to mention" no longer serves here as a device to separate the speaker from the claim of richness, but is just another way of saying "and." Another is the clause "if I don't say so myself" which is mistaken from the affirmative "if I do say so myself," meant to show the speaker's modesty.

Proslepsis is an extreme kind of paralipsis that gives the full details of the acts one is claiming to pass over; for example, "I will not stoop to mentioning the occasion last winter when our esteemed opponent was found asleep in an alleyway with an empty bottle of vodka still pressed to his lips."^[2]

Paralipsis was often used by Cicero in his orations, such as "I will not even mention the fact that you betrayed us in the Roman people by aiding Catiline."

Example:

"It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war."

—Charles Francis Adams, U.S. Ambassador to Britain: dispatch to Earl Russell, 5 September 1863, concerning Britain's relations with the Confederacy.

Proslepsis

In logic, proslepsis, as described briefly by Aristotle and in detail by Theophrastus, is a type of proposition in which the middle term of a syllogism is implied. Such a syllogism is then described as a prosleptic syllogism, of which Theophrastus defined three kinds or figures.

See also

• problem of induction

Occultatio

Occultatio, although sometimes used as a synonym for paralipsis, is more often a literary figure most often seen in plays, where a character describes a scene or object by not describing it. For example, in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, act 4, scene 1, the character Grumio describes the eventful coming of his master and new wife to a young servant by saying,

Hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how her horse fell and she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard in how miry a place, how she was bemoiled,[...]with many things of worthy memory, which now shall die in oblivion and thou return unexperienced to thy grave.

In this speech, Grumio, angry at the servant's interruptions, "refuses" to describe what happened, and in so doing, describes it fully.

H. P. Lovecraft frequently used occultatio to add an element of mystery to his stories, as his unfortunate protagonists met things too horrible or too alien to describe.

References

• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 680. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. 

External links

• Figures of rhetoric: Apophasis
• A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices: Apophasis
• Wordsmith: Paralipsis