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 DouglassÕs ''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 pragmadialectial, 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.
Shame appeals may be both relevant to and make possible argumentation with reluctant addressees. I propose a normative pragmatic model of practical reasoning involved in shame appeals and show that its explanatory power exceeds that of a more traditional account of an underlying practical inference structure. I also illustrate that analyzing the formal propriety of shame appeals offers a more complete explanation of their normative pragmatic force than an application of rules for dialogue types.
A mid-eighteenth-century debate among three Anglican clerics on the nature and end of eloquence indicates that their views of eloquence share a significant similarity: functionalism. I summarize each participant's position; note relevant aspects of their contexts, including purposes, institutional position, and broader cultural conditions; and explore the social and political implications of their views on the nature and ends of eloquence. By doing so, I show that eloquence serves as a site of struggle for power and prestige; and that when people use the term "eloquence" they may have significantly different views of what it means.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.