A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation
Issue Date
2006Author
Innocenti, Beth
Publisher
Springer Verlag
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Published Version
http://www.springerlink.com/content/2084412314945872/fulltext.pdfMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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.
Description
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
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Citation
Manolescu, Beth Innocenti. "A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation." Argumentation 20 (2006): 327-43.
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