Ethos involves arete, phronesis and eunoia. And in this video, we're going to talk about phronesis. So phronesis is another useful, but pretty complicated notion. It's usually translated as practical wisdom. So this isn't like theoretical or pure wisdom which deals with abstractions, but it's practical wisdom. It's an ability to make the right decision in daily affairs, sort of wise decisiveness. Knowing enough about the situation and circumstance to apply the right concept or rules in a specific situation in just the right way. So the phronimos, which is a great term. That's just a person with phronesis. The phronimos is like physician or a navigator. They know the general rules of medicine or astronomy, the abstract knowledge. They've got that, but they can apply those rules well in less than perfect conditions. So, the skilled surgeon responds dynamically and appropriately based on what's happening with the patient in front of him. So practical wisdom allows for flexibility, for responsiveness to the situation and particularity. Now so like the novice surgeon might be less dynamic or less certain, or more likely to miss an important opportunity in actual surgery. So in terms of ethos, we trust people who we think have more experience and have learned well from that experience. Now, phronesis doesn't come cheap. It bought with the heart, currency, experience. So, let me give you an example. So, one of my roles at the university is to help train graduate teachers. So basically, helping them develop their teaching skills. So I'll often get beginning teachers who come to me with a particular student problem like plagiarism is a common one and they'll ask me, hey, what would you do? And I try to be as helpful as I can. But honestly, the answer is well, I wouldn't be in that situation, because I've been teaching for 20 years. I've had tens of thousands of students. And over that period of time, I've seen it dealt with quite a bit. And so, I've developed practices and procedures that prevent the very types of situations that these novice teachers find themselves in. These teachers aren't wrong. They know the basic principles of teaching. They know the university's code of conduct, but each particular case falls into its own unique gray area. Now the experienced teacher can apply the right policy in the right way to the best effect, usually, anyway. And even the most experienced teachers are going to make the most mistakes, but they're usually more aware about what went wrong, why I went wrong. And most importantly, how to prevent it from going wrong again and this gets us into the heart of ethos. We trust those that seem to know what they're about, those who seem to have good judgement about leadership. So as with other aspects of ethos, you should have phronesis. But here in the performance aspect of it, we're concerned with how you're performing that, so others know that you have experience. So, how do you perform experience and deep knowledge on a subject? That's a tough question. I think to start with, it's important to remember what experience buys you. It buys you more cases, more examples, more adaptations. So, you can do this in your performance include lots of examples. I think one of the best ways really good speakers demonstrate their phronesis is by running an idea through multiple examples and analogies. Short ones, long ones, whatever and even novices can do this. They just need to deliberately plan to talk about those examples. The experienced speaker usually comes up with these examples extemporaneously on the fly. The novices can sort out those examples, add them in and then just perform them in the talk. Someone with lots of practical wisdom and a deep bench of experience. You might very well have all that. But if the audience doesn't know about your knowledge, it's not really adding to your strength as a speaker in that moment. What else might you do? I think you should avoid jargon or at the very least, avoid relying on jargon. The true phronimos can explain concepts simply. That's sort of a hallmark right there. They have such a grasp of an idea that they can just describe it simply. Now Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning Physicist and a great Science Communicator, and a there is a story about Friedman. So someone comes up to him one day ad says, hey, they ask him to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. And if you don't understand the sentence, man, that's fine. That's kind of the point. It's a tall order to explain that simply and [INAUDIBLE] that up you know what? All prepare a lecture on it. So that was his goal, that was his level of communications. If he can explain it there in a freshman lecture, then he'd achieved a pretty good level of clarity. Anyway, so that's he tries to do. When it comes back a few days later and he said, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshmen level and then the next sentence is a key, he says that means we don't really understand it. So, he couldn't express it simply. So he says, we don't understand it well enough. He probably easily could have explained it in his academic physics jargon, but that cuts corners. That's really the function of jargon to save time and cut corners. And so if you have to use jargon to explain an idea, you might want to reevaluate. Can you express that concept more simply? So including examples, avoiding jargon, these are things you can do even without deep experience, but there are also a few things that people with deep experience can easily do. And when we hear them, remember, we're talking about ethos as a performance. When we hear them, you are performing your knowledge for us. We might be more likely to hear you as someone with phronesis on this subject. [MUSIC]
