Perhaps the least subtle of the fallacies is the appeal to force, in which you attempt to convince your interlocutor to believe something by threatening him. (In Latin, ‘baculus’ refers to a stick or a club, which you could clobber someone with, presumably) That’s why the appeal to emotion is a Fallacy of Distraction: the goal is to divert your attention from the dispassionate evaluation of premises and the degree to which they support their conclusion, to get you thinking with your heart instead of your brain. You’re trying to get them feeling sorry for your client, in the hopes that those emotions will cause them to bring in the verdict you want. Instead, you’re trying to distract the jury from the real issue by playing to their emotions. But you’re not addressing those (probably because you can’t). The details don’t matter, but there are specific conditions that have to be met-proved beyond a reasonable doubt-in order for the jury to find Wal-Mart guilty. The conclusion you have to convince them of, presumably, is that Wal-Mart was negligent and hence legally liable in the matter of the grape on the floor. The people you’re trying to convince are the jurors. When you’re summing up your case before the jury, you spend most of your time talking about the horrible suffering your client has undergone since the incident in the produce aisle: the hospital stays, the grueling physical therapy, the addiction to pain medications, etc., etc.Īll of this is a classic fallacious appeal to emotion-specifically, in this case, pity. You tell her to periodically emit moans of pain. So on the day of the trial, what do you do? How do you coach your client? Tell her to wear her nicest outfit, to look her best? Of course not! You wheel her into the courtroom in a wheelchair (whether she needs it or not) you put one of those foam neck braces on her, maybe give her an eye patch for good measure. Your eyes turn into dollar signs and a cha-ching noise goes off in your brain: Wal-Mart has deep pockets. You’ve got a client who was grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, and in the produce aisle she slipped on a grape that had fallen on the floor and injured herself. One more example: suppose you’re one of those sleazy personal injury lawyers-an “ambulance chaser”. We’ve all known it’s a fallacy since we were little kids, the first time we did something wrong because all of our friends were doing it, too, and our moms asked us, “If all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?” The advertisement assures us that a certain television show is #1 in the ratings-with the tacit conclusion being that we should be watching, too. The ads are trying to engage your emotions to get you thinking positively about their product.Īn extremely common technique, especially for advertisers, is to appeal to people’s underlying desire to fit in, to be hip to what everybody else is doing, not to miss out. What does sexiness have to do with how good a beer tastes? Nothing. Think of all the ads with sexy models schilling for cars or beers or whatever. This is a fallacious appeal to emotion.Īdvertisers do it, too. Political ads inevitably try to suggest to voters that one’s opponent will take away medical care or leave us vulnerable to terrorists, or some other scary outcome-usually without a whole lot in the way of substantive proof that these fears are at all reasonable. Fear is perhaps the most commonly exploited emotion for politicians. There are as many different versions of the appeal to emotion as there are human emotions. He stoked these emotions with explicit denunciations of Jews and non-Germans, promises of the return of glory for the Fatherland-but also using the sorts of techniques we canvassed above, with awesome settings and hyper-sensational speechifying. He played on Germans’ fears and prejudices, their economic anxieties, their sense of patriotism and nationalistic pride. He was an expert at the appeal to emotion. But, the thought is, we shouldn’t decide whether or not to believe things based on an emotional response emotions are a distraction, blocking hard-headed, rational analysis. It’s notoriously effective to play on people’s emotions to get them to go along with you, and that’s the technique identified here. The Latin name of this fallacy literally means “argument to the people,” where ‘the people’ is used in the pejorative sense of “the unwashed masses,” or “the fickle mob”-the hoi polloi. (Many of the fallacies have Latin names, because, as we noted, identifying the fallacies has been an occupation of logicians since ancient times, and because ancient and medieval work comes down to us in Latin, which was the language of scholarship in the West for centuries.) \)Īppeal to Emotion ( Argumentum ad Populum)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |