A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation |
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Authors: | Beth Innocenti Manolescu |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Communication Studies, University of Kansas, Bailey Hall, Room 102 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA |
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Abstract: | Is appealing to emotions in argumentation ever legitimate and, if so, what is the best way to analyze and evaluate such appeals? After overviewing a normative pragmatic perspective on appealing to emotions in argumentation, I present answers to these questions from pragma-dialectical, informal logical, and rhetorical perspectives, and note positions shared and supplemented by a normative pragmatic perspective. A normative pragmatic perspective holds that appealing to emotions in argumentation may be relevant and non-manipulative; and that emotional appeals may be analyzed as strategies that create pragmatic reasons and assessed by the standard of formal propriety or reasonability under the circumstances. I illustrate the explanatory power of the perspective by analyzing and evaluating some argumentation from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” I conclude that a normative pragmatic perspective offers a more complete account of appealing to emotions in argumentation than a pragma-dialectial, informal logical, or rhetorical perspective alone, identifies a range of norms available to arguers, and explains why appealing to emotions may be legitimate in particular cases of argumentation. |
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Keywords: | normative pragmatics emotional appeal pragma-dialectics informal logic rhetoric Frederick Douglass |
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