![]() ![]() He was an expert at the appeal to emotion. But, the thought is, we shouldn’t decide whether or not to believe things based on an emotional response emotions are a distraction, blocking hard-headed, rational analysis. It’s notoriously effective to play on people’s emotions to get them to go along with you, and that’s the technique identified here. The Latin name of this fallacy literally means “argument to the people,” where ‘the people’ is used in the pejorative sense of “the unwashed masses,” or “the fickle mob”-the hoi polloi. (Many of the fallacies have Latin names, because, as we noted, identifying the fallacies has been an occupation of logicians since ancient times, and because ancient and medieval work comes down to us in Latin, which was the language of scholarship in the West for centuries.) People who use these techniques with malicious intent are attempting to distract their audience from the central questions they’re supposed to be addressing, allowing them to appear to win an argument that they haven’t really engaged in.Īppeal to Emotion ( Argumentum ad Populum) These fallacies are often called “Fallacies of Relevance” because they involve arguments that are bad insofar as the reasons given are irrelevant to the issue at hand. What they all have in common is that they involve arguing in such a way that issue that’s supposed to be under discussion is somehow sidestepped, avoided, or ignored. We will discuss five informal fallacies under this heading. Appeal to Force (Argumentum ad Baculum).Appeal to Emotion (Argumentum ad Populum).
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