Ethos and its Constitutive Role in Organizational Rhetoric

Baumlin, James S.; Scisco, Peter L.

doi:10.1002/9781119265771.ch14

Cited by 16 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…That is, when we do not understand the matters at hand, we must base our actions on other people's advice. Ethos, or character, can trump logos, as we do not necessarily have access to valid logical arguments or adhere these, while we have to either trust or not trust the communicator (Baumlin and Scisco, 2018). As the literature will attest to, we might react positively to a message due to the a number of different reasons, but "the source factors with the most immediate (if complex) effects on persuasive outcomes are credibility and liking" (O'Keefe, 2016, p. 155).…”

Section: Consequences For Content Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Rhetorical Situations to Examine and Improve Vaccination Communication

2021

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Opinion polls have documented a considerable public skepticism towards a COVID-19 vaccine. Seeking to address the vaccine skepticism challenge this essay surveys the research on vaccine hesitancy and trust building through the lens of the rhetorical situation and points towards five broad principles for a content strategy for public health communicators in regards to vaccination: 1) vaccine hesitancy is not irrational per se; 2) messages should be tailored to the various hesitancy drivers; 3) what is perceived as trustworthy is situational and constantly negotiated; 4) in areas of uncertainty where no exact knowledge exists, the character of the speaker becomes more important; and 5) the trustworthiness of the speaker can be strengthened through finding some common ground—such as shared feelings or accepted premises—with the audience. Such common insights are on offer in the literature on rhetoric and persuasion and linked here with the research on vaccine communication and trust focusing specifically on the latter and character.

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Section: Consequences For Content Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Rhetorical Situations to Examine and Improve Vaccination Communication

2021

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“…ethos), which becomes all-important when dealing with contingent matters where knowledge has to be established and opinions settled. When the subject matter is complex and contested, the twin issues of trust and credibility become dominant ( Baumlin and Scisco, 2018 ). When different opinions on what is happening and what needs to be done are presented, citizens are not only persuaded by arguments tied to the issue, but also by the communicators’ credibility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expert ethos and the strength of networks: negotiations of credibility in mediated debate on COVID-19

Kjeldsen

Ihlen

Just

et al. 2021

Health Promotion International

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Summary For public health promotion to succeed, popular support is necessary and the chosen policies and measures have to be perceived as legitimate by the public. In other words, health authorities need to build on and sustain established trust when they recommend a certain policy. When the policy is criticized, this trust is challenged, and the authorities enter into a negotiation of credibility (ethos). In this article, we research a particular instance of such negotiation, drawing lessons for health promotion and for COVID-19 communication. We study a Norwegian television debate in which an MD presented harsh criticism of the health authorities’ chosen crisis response in the early phase of the pandemic. Unpacking the rhetorical constitution of the expert ethos of the MD and of the health authorities, respectively, we find that representatives of the authorities are more open to participation and better at connecting to everyday experiences than the MD, who primarily builds her expert ethos on mastery of scientific language and methods, combined with alarmist rhetoric. Further, we identify main tenets of the public’s reception of the debate through an analysis of 1961 tweets that commented on the program. The analysis indicates that public health authorities might maintain high levels of trust by rhetorically cultivating their positions within institutional and (social) media networks of expertise.

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“…Our methodology will be applied to study ethos on the assumption of its indispensable and ubiquitous role in persuasive communication recognised by rhetoric (Baumlin and Scisco 2018). Some advances in argumentation theory either point to the need of a systematic study of ethotic arguments (Brinton 1986;Walton 1999;Tindale 2011) or emphasise the role of trust (Liao 2021) and distrust (Jackson 2015) as ways through which ethos is employed in communication.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Theory of Rhetoric to the Practice of Language Use: The Case of Appeals to Ethos Elements

et al. 2022

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In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.

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Ethos and its Constitutive Role in Organizational Rhetoric

Cited by 16 publications

References 19 publications

Using Rhetorical Situations to Examine and Improve Vaccination Communication

Using Rhetorical Situations to Examine and Improve Vaccination Communication

Expert ethos and the strength of networks: negotiations of credibility in mediated debate on COVID-19

From Theory of Rhetoric to the Practice of Language Use: The Case of Appeals to Ethos Elements

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