Critical Voter

While most people can spot when a speaker is delivering a logical or emotional argument, ethos is a more complex and subtle thing to determine. The term can be translated as “authority,” although this does not necessarily mean the authority a speaker brings to the subject due to his or her level of expertise or experience.

While such authority can be a component of ethos, an appeal to authority (including one’s own) can also be considered a fallacy, especially if the person claiming authority has not earned this right (or is trying to use his or her authority on one subject to establish credibility in another subject outside their domain of expertise).

If we think of ethos as unit of credibility or character, a speaker can establish credibility by speaking exceedingly well and convincingly. And (as discussed in the podcast), if someone presents an argument based on sound logic, appeals to good vs. bad emotion, and strikes the right balance between logos and pathos, they are well on their way to being awarded ethos by the audience.

But another critical component of ethos is the connection one makes to that audience, whether or not such a connection is directly related to a subject being debated. If a speaker can demonstrate that they are sympathetic with the audience and its concerns, by using language the audience can relate to or establishing some other form of “kinship,” that can be an important (sometimes the most important) means of generating ethos.

When Aristotle was formulating the three modes of persuasion, political speech was primarily that: speech, given before live audiences in popular assemblies or the courts. But in our modern world, we don’t tend to get so much face time with the people who are trying to convince us to vote for them.

Rather, we are forced to create a composite of a candidate based on inputs and information coming from different sources (the news media, breakdowns of a candidate’s personal and political history, campaign ads created by them as well as directed against them). In fact, even when we have celebrated a particular candidate’s rhetoric skill (as we did President Obama during the 2008 election), our evaluation was based more on his ability to enthuse extremely large audiences rather than an understanding of the logos, pathos and ethos behind any one of his speeches.

Ethos is tricky with regard to partisan politics since most of us tend to reward it automatically to the person we were planning on voting for anyway (and similarly denying it to his opponents) regardless of what either candidate says and does.

But this understandable partisan tendency can lead us to misjudgments and surprise, especially if we fail to understand the ethos appeal a candidate might have to people with whom we might disagree.

Earlier, we talked about the Principle of Charity and how it can be used to help us overcome biases that make us vulnerable to errors and narrow thinking. And being a bit more generous in how we reward ethos might be the best starting point to living by this principle.

As appealing as it might be to base all of our decisions on cold, hard logos, logic alone suffers from two significant shortcomings.

First, the structure of logic works, regardless of the “facts” it is applied to. For example, IF all unicorns are magical creatures AND Gerry is a unicorn, then the statement “Gerry is a magical creature” is logically true, even if unicorns, magical creatures (or Gerry, for that matter) do not exist.

More significant for those looking for practical ways to apply critical thinking to important problems (such as choosing a President) logic cannot necessarily break a tie between two arguments of equal logical strength. Building on a simple example from the last blog post, there might be a perfectly valid and logical argument why a school band should spend its money on new uniforms (because they will provide benefit for many years) and an equally sound argument why that same money should be spent to play at the Rose Bowl (since it raises the profile of the band and will help recruit new members).

Given that most of the political debates we have (or should have) are based on choosing between equally valid (and often equally good or bad) choices, something other than logic must be used to help us make a choice. Enter human emotion.

Now arguments based on emotion (i.e., pathos) tend to make us uneasy since emotion is seen as non-rational and those who try to argue with it can come off as manipulative. And there is no question that pathos can and has been used to manipulate people throughout history.

But the criticism of pathos being destructive assumes that all emotions are equal, which they clearly are not. Appealing to fear, greed, hate, envy and guilt for example, represent an appeal to bad emotions (or, as I like to think of them, “emotions of the gut”) while an appeal to courage, generosity, love and sympathy appeal to good emotions (or “emotions of the heart”).

So one way to determine if pathos is being used cynically or constructively is to analyze whether the emotions we are being asked to take into account when evaluating an argument (such as a campaign speech) are reaching to our gut vs. our heart.

The other factor to keep in mind is that strong arguments that leverage emotion (good or bad) should not rely exclusively on emotional appeals. In fact, one sure sign of demagoguery is the demagogue’s exclusive or over-reliance on pathos vs. finding just the right combination of logos and pathos to drive the argument forward.

Given that every political debate has an emotional component, we should not become cynical if a political speaker makes use of powerful pathos-based rhetorical techniques. And we should be particularly careful not to fall into the trap of deciding that the emotional content of speeches made by candidates we support are inspiring while those made by their opponents are creepy and manipulative.

Rather, we should judge political speech (made at a campaign stop or TV ad) based on whether the speaker is appealing to the gut vs. the heart, and how well they get the balance right between logos and pathos. And if they get this tricky combination right, they will be rewarded with the highly valuable third component of rhetoric: ethos, the subject of the next posting.

This week’s podcast talked about Aristotle’s three modest of persuasion, which includes:

Logos – An appeal to logic

Pathos – The appeal to emotion

Ethos – A somewhat more complex concept relating to the authority and credibility of the speaker

Today, we’ll take a look at logos and see how it can be use by political candidates trying to get our attention and persuade us to do this or that, and by voters to determine the quality of those political arguments.

Despite the fact that classical logic is not automatically part of everyone’s high school or college education any longer, logic is still an enormously popular and ingrained subject in scientific and technical areas. Anyone performing computer programming (from kids playing Scratch to skilled developers working with advanced programming languages) are essentially wrestling with logical problems built on the premise that thought and action can be boiled down to symbols that can be manipulated and tested for accuracy.

In political discourse, our innate passion for consistency can be seen as our natural desire to reject any argument that boils down to the simple logical statement: “A equals NOT A” (a contradiction that automatically disqualifies an argument as having insufficient logos).

Now when we deal with complex issues (such as budget priorities, national defense, social issues and the like), it can sometimes seem like these matters are far too complicated to transform into simple IF-THEN statements. In fact, one of the great frustrations of technically minded men and women (such as scientists and engineers) with politics is that political discourse seems to defy the type of neat categorization they see in their professional life.

But all arguments – even the most complex – can be translated into smaller units, each of which can be tested for logical soundness. For example, a particular spending program (whether designed to help the poor or defend the nation) implies premises (that there exists a category of people needing a certain service or a threat that needs countering by a specific weapon system), which can be identified and analyzed. And once those premises have been studied, we can review the chain of logic between those premises and the conclusions drawn from them.

These logical chains can go in more than one direction. For example, there may be a compelling logic that a spending program will be effective, but an equally compelling logic that demonstrates it will not be cost-effective (which would imply the need to search for other alternatives).

In fact, the greatest problem associated with basing our political discourse and analysis on logos has nothing to do with the inability of logic to help us separate good from bad policies. Rather, it is the fact that logic does not provide us with enough information to decide between competing goods.

Even if we look at a simple, localized political issue (such as whether or not to buy school band uniforms this year vs. use that money to pay for a trip to perform in the Rose Bowl), we are likely to end up with equally compelling arguments on either side of equivalent logical soundness. In fact, most (if not all) of the political arguments worth having are not between the bad and illogical vs. the good and logical, but between two equally good and equally logical alternatives.

For those decisions, we need some additional information (or persuasion) to make a decision. And one of the things we can turn to are our emotions. So tune in next time for a discussion of pathos.