Knowledge production
Does rhetoric have anything to do with knowledge? The Platonic (Plato's) and a recent-modern view is that it doesn't, that it's merely how you dress knowledge for communication to the unwashed masses who can't or won't absorb the dry logic of a research paper in its naked form, say. Rhetoric is a game of flattery. Despite valuing rhetoric highly, Cicero agreed with this view: rhetoric has nothing to do with the search for knowledge or truth.
A different view, the sophistic view, is that knowledge is produced by rhetoric, and even that knowledge itself is rhetorical. The original sophistry provided both epistemology and ontology: man is the measure of everything and knowledge is utterly dependent on the individual.
I guess the resurging popularity of the sophist viewpoint is related to those postmodern currents in philosophy/epistemology that want to claim that truth itself can be subjective (interpretivism, critical theory, …). These currents set off alarm bells in my head because they're exactly what a creationist would latch on to in order to excuse never changing their mind, or what an useless university department would use to justify its continued funding, or to go darker… violent cults can abuse it as anti-epistemology.
However, there's validity to the idea. Gender is an example of knowledge created by us. It doesn't exist until the word is created. Even objects like people and rocks aren't really delineated from the environment, once you go down to the molecular level.
I guess maps always simplify the territory, and sometimes we start to talk about aspects of the map as if they were aspects of the territory, because between humans, that can really become the case. A belief shared by two or more people is in some sense a real Thing "out there", because of its actual, practical effects on what we do.
Sir Karl Popper saw the sophists as early proponents of an open society, because they emphasised the importance of discussion for decisionmaking.
From a societal perspective, making any kind of improvement, at any scale above literally one-man jobs, depends on both correctness and persuasiveness. […] And you can’t just figure out the right plan first and figure out how to “sell” it later—the process of figuring out the right plan usually requires collaboration along the way. Speaking up about what should be done is an unavoidable element of actually doing it, in most cases. I’m not sure it’s the right move to treat the “steak” and the “sizzle” as totally separate.
See: Lindqvist Ch 2.