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A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation
Innocenti, Beth
Innocenti, Beth
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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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This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
Date
2006
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Springer Verlag
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Keywords
Normative Pragmatics, Emotional Appeal, Pragma-dialectics, Informal Logic, Rhetoric, Douglass, Frederick
Citation
Manolescu, Beth Innocenti. "A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation." Argumentation 20 (2006): 327-43.