Rhetoric - 2

We started out by looking at a number of linguistic rhetorical techniques that cannot in and of themselves be considered good or bad (or, more specifically, informative vs. manipulative), especially since they are nothing more than the cost of entrance to any political discussion, argument or debate. 

Whether you are entering the political process to change the world or line your pockets, if you cannot frame your points in an interesting and engaging way, you will never get the attention of friend or foe.  So just as the ability to write well is the first step to becoming a famed novelist (or even an unknown but good one), writing and speaking in a way that engages an audience is not a moral choice but a necessity.

But there are other rhetorical techniques that require their users to make ethical decisions, sometimes difficult ones, because of the persuasive power of these techniques (regardless of the quality or sincerity of the content they are used to present).  To illustrate what I’m talking about, I’m going to focus on a set of rhetorical devices that deal with how one acknowledges opponents and their arguments. 

One rather infrequently used technique, called dirimens copulatio, simply involves mentioning opposing facts in your own arguments, not to counter them but to demonstrate the speaker’s awareness that two sides of an issue exist.  An example of this might include “In international politics, there are rarely right and wrong answers or black and white situations.  Which is why there are many legitimate criticisms of the choices my administration has had to make.”

A far more frequently used technique is procatalepsis, which also acknowledges an opponent’s position but does so in order to anticipate and counter it in advance.  Statement such as “My opponent claims that I have been too eager to engage in war when peaceful alternatives were available.  To which I would respond, what alternatives are open to us when the nation is attacked?” or “Critics will call my spending plans wasteful and irresponsible.  But who is acting irresponsibly, someone trying to move the economy forward or someone saying “No” to every proposal to put people back to work?” are both examples of procatalepsis. 

The power of this rhetorical tool is that it allows you to define your opponent’s arguments in your own terms and to provide a rebuttal that your opponent must react to when he or she would have preferred an attack that put you on the defensive.  And even if that opponent manages to successfully reframe the point and respond successfully, he or she has lost the benefit of surprise and novelty inherent in being first to present a line of criticism. 

I haven’t found a name for a third (and extremely popular) technique of using the support of members of your opponent’s group (political, national or ethnic) to bolster your own cause.  I first encountered this in the 1980s in the form of a bumper sticker that read “Another Democrat for Reagan,” and since that time cross-overs from the opposing party taking center stage has become a standard feature at party conventions.

This technique sends out several powerful messages:

* That one’s opponent and his or her ideas are so far outside the mainstream that even his own party/group does not support them

* That you, while officially representing your own group or party, actually represent everyone (or mostly everyone)

* That your broad acceptability (and your opponent’s lack thereof) is so obvious that even people who should be your opponents are attracted to your banner

You can probably see right away how any of these techniques can be easily abused.  For example, if you are presenting an opponent’s position (either to acknowledge or anticipate and counter it), it’s all too easy to present a distorted, inaccurate or even parody of your opponent’s real positions (both to make their criticisms look ridiculous and give you an easier  - and self-serving - set of criticism to reply to).

And if you are making the case that people who would normally support your opponent really support you, this can’t be done (honestly, anyway) by inflating the importance or small numbers or trying to present an unrepresentative fringe as mainstream.  The example of such abuse that I’m most familiar with (and keep in mind my bias on this issue) is the critical role Jewish voices play in anti-Israel politics, all in an attempt to create the impression that hostility to the Jewish state (no matter how egregious and irrational) cannot be labeled as an example of hate directed towards a minority group since members of that minority participate and even lead such attacks. 

But if using these techniques dishonestly in a cinch, using them honestly presents serious challenges since an effective counter-strategy against procatalepsis (for example) is to declare that any interpretation an opponent puts on your positions is illegitimate (even if the user of this technique is characterizing an opponent’s arguments completely accurately while anticipating and preemptively rebutting them).  And, all too often, including opposition points of view in an argument represents nothing more than an attempt to appear to be even handed to a wider audience while simultaneously doing everything in one’s power to avoid actual legitimate debate.

This is a particularly important dilemma in our saturated media age when members of this wider audience may only hear or see snippets of a particular debate edited to fit the needs of a newscast or (more sinisterly) the TV commercials created by one of the campaigns.  And in a world of partisan blogs and web sites dedicated to spinning every word spoken by every candidate, how can a Presidential campaign ever involve genuine debate vs. the generation of quotes and catch phrases for the media maw?

There is no simple answer to these questions, but it is worth pointing out that political debate has always taken place with a wider audience in mind.  When Roman leaders verbally duked it out in the Senate a couple of millennia back, they understood that they were not just trying to win out over their immediate political debate partner, but to convince the Senators in the audience (and the public at large) regarding the rightness of their positions.

Today, mass media, editing software and spin machines complicate the relationship between debaters and audiences, but we can still hope that enough leaders (and follower) grasp the notion that the most powerful resource one can bring to debate is that unique form of integrity called ethos.  And while political power can be won through trickery and abuse of rhetoric, ethos can never be earned in such a manner.

Sorted

During the 2008 election, I ran into an interesting book while working on my Undecidedman blog, a book entitled The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.

The thesis of Bishop’s book, summed up in the title, is that America has sorted itself over the last 35 years into communities of the like minded where agreement on key political issues is assumed and thinking outside this consensus shunned.

Bishop’s evidence for this phenomenon is compelling. Looking at an electoral map from 1976, Bishop discovered that 26% of voters lived in so-called “Landslide Districts,” that is districts in which one candidate beat the other by a margin of over 20% of the vote. Fast forwarding to 2004, the writer discovered that that number had almost doubled to 48%, meaning half the voting population lives in districts where one political candidate (and, one assumes, one political disposition) reigns supreme.

I’ve not found any recent data that would show if this trend has continued, declined or leveled off,  but I think it’s safe to assume that the specific type of polarization many of us experienced in 2008 will likely be as intense this election cycle (if not more so).

Bishop theorized that much of this polarization derives from fact that most of the people taking part in discussion and debate over the election do so within environments where it is very unlikely they will ever hear an opinion that dissents from their own. Fold in narrow-casted cable TV and Internet sites that allow people to only receive news and opinion they already agree with and you’re left with half the nation (maybe even more today) living in a world where rarely is heard a political opinion outside the consensus shared by neighbors, friends, colleagues and relatives.

You can begin to see the challenges this type of mindset poses to anyone engaging in critical thinking about the upcoming presidential vote.  For thinking in a political context pre-supposes interaction with others, ideally in the form of dialog with interlocutors whose minds are open – at least a little bit – to considering options they might not naturally gravitate towards.  Keep in mind that the does not require people to ultimately accept those options (much less act on them), but just to try them on for size – if only for the sake of conversation.  

But if trying on different ideas that cut across your personal-political grain is already somewhat unnatural, how much more unnatural will such explorations be for those who have not only never thought this way in the past, but who have never interacted with someone who does not share their world view?  When we all agree with our family members, our friends and our neighbors (except, perhaps, for that odd uncle or person up the street, with whom we agree to disagree in silence), how can being asked to think about the most important decision we can make in a democratic society seem anything other than positively weird?

I’ve noted how imagination gives us a small opening to consider options we might not consider once a two-man race is truly on (if only because it allows us to imagine candidates even more like us than the ones we have to choose from).  But that window will close more and more tightly once election emotions begin to run high, leaving anyone contemplating the election through a less-than-predictable lens (such as the lens of critical thinking) looking more and more out of place.  You can anticipate blank stares or polite nods from people trying to figure out what you’re really up to. And if you’ve been a loyal partisan up until now, expect questioning as to why you don’t come right out and admit that you’ve actually switched sides (the only possible explanation for why someone would think outside the tribe).

How to explain to them that spending yet another election cycle interacting only with like-minded friends and colleagues means that they are effectively opting out of the political process altogether? 

To take the most obvious example, here in Massachusetts (the bluest of blue landslide states), our vote doesn’t even matter!  More specifically, no presidential candidate will campaign here because we, like most Americans, do not live in a “swing state,” meaning our state-level landslide status has already caused us to be taken for granted. Thus the very consensus my neighbors cling to make us completely irrelevant to this year’s vote. With luck, we’ll get some spillover commercials from a neighboring state of “swingers,” but for the most part we’ll spend this election wringing our hands over events that we have opted out of taking part in.

Think about that the next time you think the election is so clear cut there is no point in thinking about it any further.

Faith - 2

Continuing from where we left off, the first thing we need to recognize is that any debate that posits religion and science (or, more particularly, faith and reason) as irreconcilable rivals (or, at least, inhabiting totally different spheres) would make almost no sense to some of the greatest philosophers, theologians and – yes – scientists of the ages.

When Socrates went on trial for (among other things) blasphemy, he did not defend himself by declaring his monumental intellect to have superseded the might of the Gods.  Rather, he pronounced himself a pious man, even if his form of piety was as eccentric as every other aspect of his life and belief. 

While many have an image of the Middle Ages as a period of stifling religious orthodoxy which snuffed out the merest hint of an inquiring mind with accusations of heresy and the stake, in fact the world did not stop thinking for a thousand years between the fall of Rome and the birth of Galileo.  In fact, the embrace of Plato by first Millennium Christians and the rediscovery of Aristotle by second Millennium Christians and Jews led to some of the most rigorous logical proofs for (among other things) the existence of God.   And these proofs demonstrated the power of reason to the religious and not-so-religious, a process eventually leading to Enlightenment.

Even great scientists (although not necessarily the religiously ambiguous Charles Darwin) did not set out to prove that gospel was filled with fairy tales or that belief in God was an evolutionary quirk.  Rather, these were believing men whose brand of faith (sometimes referred to as “Natural Philosophy”) felt that since God had created a universe ruled by unbreakable laws, that it was their duty to discover those laws and, in the process, glimpse slightly more of the divine.

Now it is true that faith in such “Natural" science rubbed more-conservative believers the wrong way, implying as it did that God might not have flooded the entire world or stopped the sun in the sky (or, at least, that we should live by a science that ignores the possibility that such divine intervention could happen again at any time).  But those disputes, like most historic arguments over faith vs. reason, managed to produce at least a little light. 

Would that we could say the same thing about discussions of this topic today. 

Is it only me, or do most of our debates over religion in the public square or the role of church and state in contemporary American society seem to be about something else?  Now I’m in favor of a rigorous, even tumultuous debate on this subject in particular.  But are we really on the verge of becoming a woman-enslaving theocracy or wiping out all trace of religion in a frenzy of secular revolution?  Certainly such religious (and secular) excesses can happen and have happened, particularly over the last 100 years.  But are paranoid fantasies that such terrors are being repeated today in America really our most burning issues of faith vs. reason? Or have we reduced discussion of this important topic to something resembling a different medieval tradition: that of bear baiting (or, perhaps, elephant and donkey baiting)?

Most supporters of faith tend to fall back on claims of religion as a transmission belt for moral virtues, or claim that long-held traditions (while mysterious) might contain forgotten wisdom that even the most enlightened among us might not know enough to decode.

That last notion was raised in one of many important essays written on this topic by my favorite political philosopher Lee Harris.  In addition to helping us look at hot-button religious topics such as tradition and evolution (written largely to reconcile believers and non-believers), Harris also points out in this essay that in our debates over faith we might be making a fundamental mistake by confusing scientific reason for reason itself.

For example, can reason tell us if one religion is “better” than another?  Scientific reason certainly can’t, since in terms of science, any faith-based belief system is equally unprovable and thus equally invalid (or equally valid, if a scientifically minded judge is feeling generous).  But what if you had two faiths that were exactly the same in all respects except that believers in Religion A were content to live alongside unbelieving men and women of  reason (and even be ruled by them) while Religion B believed that all men and women of reason should be killed immediately?

Ancient thinkers would have no problem answering this question (and thus avoid what Harris calls “The Suicide of Reason”) for, to them, reason could be applied to any subject, including (or should I say especially) questions regarding the relationship between man and God(s).

That’s all I’ll say (for now) on the subject, but as the Presidential candidates take to the pulpit (figuratively and literally) over the coming months, it might be best if we find a way to discuss the relationship between them, us and the divine that goes beyond sneers, suspicion and selective outrage.

Faith – 1

In addition to the confessions I made earlier with regard to biases you should be aware before reading through the material on this site, I also have one more admission that will be relevant as we get into specific issues related to the upcoming Presidential election: I believe in God.

Now to some people (notably skeptics or critics of religion), such belief comes pre-loaded with all kinds of assumptions about the world, from acceptance that this God created the universe in six days (starting on October 23rd,4004 BC) to a willingness to believe that this deity can perform miracles at any time which turn the laws of physics on their head (implying that a belief in God must necessarily trump belief in science). 

Even if not taken to these extremes, there is a general sense among much of the public that any type of religious faith implies a willingness to suspend reason (which would have big implications for how you should treat a site allegedly dedicated to the teaching of critical thinking).

Perhaps such skepticism is warranted, given that most religious traditions take for granted that the answers to some unknowable questions lie in the supernatural.  But in my particular case, I’ve never experienced the need to make some sort of final choice between faith and reason.

This may be because my faith (at least to some) could be considered superficial.  I didn’t grow up in a Church (or in my case, a Synagogue).   My parents did not expose me to a religious education, nor was religion much of a topic of discussion when I was growing up (although our family did talk about many things).  My familiarity with sacred texts is embarrassingly limited, even if I have a certain grasp of religious history (at least with regard to Western faiths).

In fact, it only dawned on me that I believe in God when I and my wife (now in our own parenting years) chose to join a local synagogue and enroll our children in religious school.  While this might imply increased religiosity, it was really more of an example of “generation skipping” with regard to giving our kids a Jewish education (even through many peers in my temple are very open about their atheism). 

But as part of a synagogue, one invariably finds oneself attending services (even if it’s only a few times a year).  And during Jewish services (as with most other faiths), there comes a moment in the proceedings where everyone is asked to spend a few moments in silent prayer.  And when I was first asked to do this, I found myself praying with absolute sincerity.  This may hearken back to the one other time I took solace in silent prayer (in Junior High School, after a family tragedy).  Although perhaps I’ve simply always been a believer, and only recently started thinking about what this means. 

Anyway, the real question is whether or not faith (mine or anyone else’s) is relevant to either critical thinking or the US elections.  And in the case of the latter (the election) the answer is clearly yes.  Being a church-goer is as much a requirement for a Presidential candidate as being a family man (or woman).  While we may have once accepted the notion of a bachelor President, I can’t imagine a devout atheist gaining much traction in even the bluest Primary state (much less the general election).

Our fascination with the religious belief of our Presidential candidates (which applies not just to Christians – witness the interest in Joe Leiberman’s Orthodox Judaism when he was a VP candidate in 2002) will only be more acute this year, given that we are likely to have not one but two candidates whose religious affiliation have or will be the source of much speculation and controversy.

But in the context of what we’re doing at this site, the question we should ask is whether critical thinking can play any role in evaluating matters that intersect with faith.  And after taking a look at these questions (and, hopefully, providing some answers) you should be in a position to evaluate whether or not someone who may subscribe to such beliefs is capable of thinking critically about them.

Continued...

Fallacies – 3

Well the primary race starts today, as does the countdown to when we’ll be applying some of the critical thinking tools we’ve been reviewing to real, live candidates.  But while we still have the luxury to work with abstractions, let’s finish up this discussion of fallacies with a review of best practices regarding how to avoid falling for them.

All three of the major categories of fallacies that were highlighted as likely to come at us over the coming months (including fallacious Argumentsfrom Authority, Emotion or Moderation) have something in common: they all take advantage of our better natures which would normally be respectful of authority, open to moving appeals to the heart, and ready to avoid extremes.  Fortunately, this points to an effective way to avoid falling into rhetorical traps: by letting our better natures prevail.

Take Arguments from Authority, for example.  In a sense, the best way to avoid falling for this type of fallacious argument is to follow the advice on that old bumper sticker to “Question Authority.”  But by this I don’t mean we should be mindlessly skeptical of all authority figures.  Rather, we should be respectful of people with high levels of intelligence and expertise, but not defer to them in all situations.

For starters, if someone is giving advice outside their field of study, they should be respected no less (and certainly no more) than any other smart person talking outside of their discipline.  It is only if they demand to be taken seriously as an authority on a subject about which they have no special knowledge (even if they are held as extremely prominent within that other field) that we should smell a potential rat. 

And even people speaking within their field should never be given an absolutely free ride.  If an expert is at odds with the consensus of his or her profession, they could either be a far-seeing sage or a quack.  In either case, additional evidence is required by them, as is additional analysis by us. 

In fact, any evidence we receive from experts should not be taken as received wisdom, at least not by those who want to be take critical thinking seriously.  Yes, there are some subjects (such as quantum mechanics) where most of us are forced to take an expert’s word that certain non-intuitive and unobservable phenomena can be explained only by complex theories that take years to understand.  But how many political issues that we face during an election cycle are so complex that we cannot bring our own ability to research, learn and think to an evaluation that can include learning from (without unquestioningly deferring to) multiple experts on different sides of the same political issue?

There are similar common sense solutions to the other two fallacies on the table. As was already discussed, Arguments from Emotion are on shaky ground if they appeal to things like fear, greed and hate and if they appeal to emotion only (rather than finding the right balance of logos and pathos to earn ethos on behalf of the speaker).  And if the extremes someone is trying to position themselves between to convince us that they are sane and moderate bear no resemblance to actual, practical political options, chances are someone is trying to manipulate you.

The most difficult part of all these reasonable solutions is that they must be applied across the board: to candidates we support as much as those we oppose.  Otherwise, we end up looking like the Internet debaters I remember from the old Wild West days of Usenet who periodically published (OK, cut and pasted) long lists of fallacies, only to apply them solely to the arguments of their opponents (never to themselves).

The use of a critical thinking vocabulary as a political weapon can itself be considered a fallacy (perhaps a “Fallacy Fallacy” if applied to my Usenet example), one in which the tools of critical thinking are simply used to give a partisan argument unearned weight.  As we get closer to Election Day and passions begin to boil, it will become increasingly difficult to pass judgment on our preferred candidate when they appeal fallaciously to authority, emotion or moderation (or utilize some other rhetorical trick that we know to be problematical).  But being honest with ourselves is how we can keep our preferred candidates honest with us as well. 

Most importantly, such honesty is the only way we can keep our own minds truly independent and ourselves truly free.

Fallacies – 2

Of the dozens of fallacies one can bring into an argument, Appeals to Authority, Emotion and Moderation are three we should be on the lookout for during this (or any) campaign season, given how important they have become to modern, media-driven political discourse.

We’ve already talked about when an Appeal to Authority becomes fallacious, either in a Formal or Informal sense, and to a large extent we covered Appeals to Emotion in a previous discussion of logos, pathos and ethos. 

As I highlighted in the discussion of pathos, appealing to the emotions of an audience you are trying to persuade is not necessarily manipulative or illegitimate (i.e., fallacious).  Given the extent to which humans are emotional animals, and given that not all challenging questions can be resolved through reason alone, emotion can be a useful resource to draw on to navigate difficult choices.

But if you look at the list of Appeals to Emotion that are categorized as fallacies, they include Appeals to emotions such as fear, ridicule and spite, i.e., those “bad emotions” that should cause us to recoil whenever we feel them welling up in ourselves.  So someone trying to stir up these bad emotions in an audience (particularly as part of a political argument) should be looked upon as using the tools of rhetoric inappropriately.

While an Appeal to Moderation seems like a favorite of contemporary Presidential candidates aiming for the center in a national election campaign, the desire for moderation among a democratic electorate goes back quite far.

“Nothing in Excess” was written above the Oracle at Delphi with moderation being seen as an ideal by the founders of democracy in ancient Athens.  It’s no accident that Aristotle defined virtue as “Finding the mean between the extremes” (specifically with regard to action or emotion), since casting oneself as a moderate standing between extremist politician alternatives was as popular a campaign theme 2500 years ago as it is today.

Appeals to Moderation stray into the territory of fallacy when it comes time to define what constitute the extremes one is locating oneself between. 

To take an uncontroversial, non-political example, if I were to try to define what constitutes a moderate temperature, I might choose a temperature we can all agree is uncomfortably cold (say zero degrees Fahrenheit) and another one most people would agree is uncomfortably hot (say 100 F) and average the two, defining “moderate” as a cool but comfortable 50 degrees (at least for we New Englanders). 

But what if used this same formula but defined cold as Absolute Zero (approximately -459 F) and hot as the temperature on the surface of the sun (which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 F).  That would create a “moderate” temperature of 5260 degrees F, something that most of us (outside of certain astronomers and physicists) would agree as a ridiculous definition of “moderate.”

In the same way, Appeals to Moderation in politics can only be considered legitimate when the extremes are realistic, genuine and not self serving. 

For example, most Presidential candidates try to demonstrate they are willing to stand up to the extremes within their own political party, as well as the party of their opponents.  But a debate over taxes in which a liberal candidate claims he is standing against his political comrades who want to return to a 90% tax rate for the rich and rivals who want to eliminate taxes entirely to support a call for a 45% tax rate (the mid-point between the 90% and 0% extremes) is acting disingenuously since (in today’s political environment, at least) calls for both massive taxation and no taxation are not considered as mainstream, realistic positions.  Rather, this politician needs to find realistic “extremes” to center his or her proposals between, or find other arguments to justify tax rates at the 45% level.

Similarly, a candidate claiming that a proposal to criminalize the performance of an abortion by doctors is “moderate” because it stands between throwing pregnant women who want this procedure behind bars and giving abortions for free at every CVS is also creating false (or at least wildly exaggerated) definitions of the extremes in the abortion debate.  This represents another fallacious real-world example of an Appeal to Moderation.

What Appeals to Authority, Emotion and Moderation have in common is that they all try to leverage elements of the human makeup that can be used for good or ill. We need and would like to trust expert opinion, especially in the complex age we live in.  And emotion (at least good emotion like love, generosity and courage) and moderation are all virtues that should inform our decision making.

Fortunately, we have ways of determining when these appeals are legitimate or fallacious, all of which boil down to thinking for ourselves.

Next Up – Thinking Through Fallacies

Fallacies - 1

Fallacies are one of those critical thinking topics that could easily be discussed on this blog from now until Election Day.

Partly this is because there are so many different kinds of fallacies and, as mentioned previously, fallacies are one of the most fun topics to discuss in any class on logic, rhetoric or general critical thinking since they let you create all kinds of entertaining examples, from Groucho Marx wondering how an Elephant got into his pajamas, to Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Junior’s complicated doublespeak that led to my very favorite “If-by-Whiskey” fallacy.

There are a number of sites that exhaustively document these and other fallacies, and if you’re an audio-learner, I recommend the short audio lessons available here and here (which are a bit robotic in their delivery, but get the job done). 

But for purposes of preparing ourselves for the political argumentation that will be coming at us shortly from all directions, I’d like to focus on just a few specific fallacies that are commonplace during campaign season.

Before listing them, keep in mind that fallacies can be broken into two general categories, the first being Formal Fallacies that represent an error in the form of an argument (usually some sort of faulty logic) which can be flagged as fallacious regardless of content.  For example, the argument “All mermaids are female.  Gwen is a female.  Therefore Gwen is a mermaid.” is fallacious, regardless of whether mermaids exist.

A second category of informal fallacies actually cares about the content of the argument, not just its structure.  For example, the argument “Atoms are extremely small.  The universe is made of atoms.  Therefore the universe is extremely small.” is an informal Fallacy of Composition, assuming as it does that the qualities of a part of the whole (atoms) can be applied to the whole (the universe).

Typical fallacies you hear in political speech are Appeals to Authority, Appeals to Emotion, and Argument to Moderation.

Starting from the top, not all appeals to authority are fallacious.  For example, we prefer a surgeon take out our inflamed appendix and an auto mechanic fix our faulty brakes and would have a problem if those two specialists decided to trade jobs for the day.  And given the complexity of issues we have to deal with in an election cycle in areas such as the economy or war and peace, it’s appropriate that we look to professional economists, political scientists and historians to provide us information that would be hard to discover on our own.

But as we have seen in the past, every political candidate has their team of able economists (for example) ready to explain why their economic theories are correct (despite the fact that their opponent has an equally able economics team ready to support an opposite set of ideas).  Clearly, all of these experts cannot be right, which means we cannot rely solely on their authority to inform our choices over which economic vision to support.

So far, we have not identified the fallacious use of authority but simply pointed out that even the wisest and most talented group of experts cannot and should not be taken as the final word on any subject.

Appeals to authority reach the level of an informal fallacy when we are required to take the word of such authorities on faith (with politicians asking us to substitute their expertise for our own judgment or empirical evidence).   And they reach the level of a formal fallacy when the expert providing his or her opinion is speaking outside of his or her area of expertise, or in extreme opposition to a consensus in their field.

For example, a leader claiming that his or her team of PhDs in history and diplomacy provides them with enough expertise to make key decision on war and peace without further input would be committing an informal fallacy since there is every chance that this team, no matter how well informed, could be wrong.

But if a mathematics professor or linguist (no matter how brilliant in their field) starts making statements regarding international affairs, those opinions should be given no more (and certainly no less) weight than any other non-expert in the field, unless you want to be found guilty of committing a formal fallacious Appeal to Authority.  For people brilliant enough to see the world in ways we cannot are also brilliant enough to see the world in ways that are not true (an erect powerful defenses around why we should accept a picture of reality that we instinctively know isn’t right).

In our complicated world, we need experts and specialists to help us understand complex situations and inform and even make decisions we as individuals are not equipped to make on our own.  But that does not mean that levels of expertise alone should be used to sway our opinions on important matters. 

Next Up – Appeals to Emotion and Appeals to Moderation

Ethos

Aristotle, in his usual fashion, systematized the modes of persuasion we are already seeing in the run-up to the Presidential campaign into the categories of logos (logic), pathos (emotion) and ethos (the topic for today).

While most people can spot when a speaker is delivering a logical or emotional argument, ethos is a more complex and subtle thing to determine. The Greek term translates to “character,” so in one sense ethos is the character of the person delivering a persuasive (political) speech.

But what do we mean by character? Is it the authority a speaker brings to the subject due to his or her level of expertise or experience? While such authority can be a component of ethos, an appeal to authority (including one’s own) can also be considered a fallacy, especially if the person claiming authority has not earned this right (or is trying to use his or her authority on one subject to establish credibility in another subject outside their domain of expertise).

A speaker can also establish credibility by speaking exceedingly well and convincingly. But if such skill is used to cover up a lack of actual knowledge (or obscure a poor argument), then rhetoric is not being used to clarify but to confuse or even deceive.

It helps if we think of ethos as an award given by an audience to a speaker which derives from a number of variables. Aristotle felt that ethos can only be awarded to someone based on what they say, not on any authority or moral character they have established outside of the arguments they are presenting. But he was living in an era when political campaigning consisted almost entirely of speeches given in person before live groups such as political assemblies or the courts.

In our modern world, we are forced to create a composite of a candidate based on inputs and information coming from all directions (the news media, breakdowns of a candidate’s personal and political history, campaign ads created by them as well as directed against them). In fact, even when we have celebrated a particular candidate’s rhetoric skill (as we did with the current President during the last election), our evaluation was based more on his ability to speak before and move extremely large audiences than it was on the particular contents of any given speech.

So how can we determine the ethos of a candidate, other than taking the easy way out and rewarding it automatically to the person we were planning on voting for anyway (and similarly denying it to his opponents) regardless of what either of them says?

Certainly (appropriate) authority and general rhetorical talent can be part of the equation. But a more important test was alluded to in the recent posting on pathos. There I noted that emotionally based arguments cannot be dismissed out of hand as manipulative and irrational, but they should be subject to scrutiny to ensure they are not being used inappropriately.

Within this context, pathos can be tested both quantitatively (is the speaker too dependent on emotional argument, sacrificing logos in the process?) and qualitatively (is he or she appealing to good emotion such as courage and generosity, or bad emotion such as fear and selfishness?).

If a speaker gets this combination right (regardless of whether they are speaking before one person or many, in person or over the airwaves), then we should be more inclined to award them that powerful intangible gift of ethos.

And if they don’t (or if no candidate does), we’ll need to live with the fact that we might be electing a President with high qualifications, great gifts or strong experience, who unfortunately lacks components of character required to earn the reward of ethos, a lack that will likely come back to bite him (and us) during his or her term in office.