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. (shrink)

Douglas Walton has been right in calling us to attend to the pragmatics of argument. He has, however, also insisted that arguments should be understood and assessed by considering the functions they perform; and from this, I dissent. Argument has no determinable function in the sense Walton needs, and even if it did, that function would not ground norms for argumentative practice. As an alternative to a functional theory of argumentative pragmatics, I propose a design view, which draws attention to (...) the way participants strategically undertake and impose norms on themselves in order for their arguments to have force. (shrink)

I inquire into the issue of how to evaluate fear appeals. I propose modifications to Douglas Walton's position in Scare Tactics: Arguments that Appeal to Fear and Threats that will help improve assessment of fear appeals in complex argumentation such as political discourse. Walton has argued for attending to the underlying practical inference structure involved in fear appeals as well as the type of dialogue in which they occur. I propose, first, that theorists understand the practical reasoning not in terms (...) of an underlying inferential structure but rather as an account of how discourse strategies give fear appeals force; and, second, that theorists not deduce norms and standards from so-called dialogue types but rather explain how discourse strategies engage norms of argumentation that give fear appeals force. This approach generates a normative pragmatic theory of fear appeals that has more explanatory power than Walton's theory, because it explains how discourse strategies agents actually use engage norms of argumentation and are therefore compelling. I submit that compelling fear appeals are designed to show addressees risks to themselves of not carefully assessing the fearful circumstances and risks to the arguer of misjudging whether circumstances merit fear. (shrink)