 Persuasive techniques, according to Stevenson, play a vital role in attempts to modify the standards of a society or group. At the center of such reform is the use of what Stevenson calls “persuasive definition,” or attempts to give “a new conceptual meaning to a familiar word without substantially changing its emotive meaning, and which is used with the conscious or unconscious purpose of changing, by this means, the direction of people’s interests” (1938b, 32; 1944, chapter IX). Suppose Smith recognizes that Jones has had little formal education and uses grammatically incorrect sentences and obvious literary references and, on this basis, claims that Jones is simply not a person of “culture.” Rodriguez agrees that Jones has such qualities but claims that Jones is a person of culture notwithstanding, for “in the true and full sense of the term, ‘culture’ means imaginative sensitivity and originality,” and these qualities Jones has in abundance: