We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation.
- Authors
Manolescu, Beth Innocenti
- 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.
- Subjects
PATHOS; RHETORIC &; psychology; MANIPULATIVE behavior; PRAGMATICS; DIALECTIC; LOGIC; DOUGLASS, Frederick, 1818-1895
- Publication
Argumentation, 2006, Vol 20, Issue 3, p327
- ISSN
0920-427X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10503-006-9016-9