FAITH and PROMISE

According to the church, revealed truth is an unchanging, unchangeable truth given by God to man.  This truth constitutes the dogma as expressed in the scripture and handed down by the church. Dogma contains mysteries; acceptance of this dogma defines faith [1] and characterizes believers. It is beyond the reach of human reason alone, and therefore beyond the reach of critics of reason.

Revealed truth can either be used as an argument, or disputed as a claim.

1. Revealed truths as arguments

Revealed truths as found in scripture and in dogmatic writings are basic argumentative resources for believers when it comes to justifying a vision of the world, a way of life, a course of action, and so on.

These arguments are themselves grounded in other creeds that belong to the same corpus of revealed beliefs: we follow the Divine Law because our God gave it to us; because He promised to reward His followers, those who obey His rule, those who do the good, and to punish the wicked who do the bad.

Appeals to religious belief can be dismissed as appeals to superstition, see Threat and promise.

2. Revealed truths as claims

The possible opposition between revealed truth and demonstated truth can motivate the total rejection of reason and argument. Thomas Aquinas (1225 –1274) discusses “whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?” and quotes St. Ambrose’s (~340 – 397) categorically negative answer: “Put aside argument where faith is sought” (ST, Part 1, Quest.1, Art. 8) [2].
For a believer, revealed truths take precedence over all other forms of truth; to try to prove a revealed truth would be to degrade it. It should be emphasized that, for a believer, renouncing argument does not mean submitting to the argument from authority, since he considers authority to be of human origin, while faith is of divine origin. Whether religious tradition is of human or divine origin is a matter of controversy among theologians.

But the primacy of faith does not negate the need for argument to strengthen the faith of the believer or to persuade the unfaithful to the faith. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes three types of situations, depending on whether one is addressing Christians, heretics, or unbelievers.

— When a religious speaker addresses a Christian audience, argument has two important uses. The first use is to connect two articles of faith, to show that one can be logically deduced from the other. For example, if you believe in the resurrection of Christ, then you must believe in the resurrection of the dead. In addition, arguments can be used to expand the realm of faith to include deeper truths, derived from the elementary ones.

— When arguing with heretics who agree on some point of the dogma, an argument is built on that point to show that they must also accept the validity of other related points.
The technique is basically the same as in the previous case. In both cases, the deductions are based on the systemic argument, which assumes that the sacred text has all the characteristics of a code.

— When confronting unbelievers, the argument is essentially ad hominem, showing that their beliefs are contradictory (after Trottman 1999, pp. 148-151). [3]

As can be seen, the Angelic Doctor does not exclude situations of deep disagreement from the field of argumentation.

3. Superstition

See Threat and promise.

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[1] Latin ad fidem argument, fides, “faith”.

[2] Quoted from Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica. Benziger Brothers, 1947. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP001.html#FPQ1OUTP1 (11-08-2017)

 [3] This was the situation in the 13th century. In the 16th century, the evangelization of the American Indians, after the Spanish conquest was quite different. See Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Los diálogos de 1524.Edición facsimilar, introducción, paleografía. Versión del nahuatl y notas de Miguel León-Portilla. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 1986.

 

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4. Values, Emotions and the Epidictic Genre

The Treatise maintains the positivist link between values and emotions. The following passage on emotions is perhaps the key to understanding the role of values in Perelman’s philosophy. In a clever dissociation, the New Rhetoric pushes « passions » out of the picture in favor of values:

Note that passions, as obstacles, are not to be confused with passions that serve as support for positive argumentation, and which will usually be qualified with a less pejorative term, such as value, for example. (Ibid., p. 630; emphasis added)

See also the quote above (§2.4): the role of values is to « move » the audience. But, on the other hand, if values are opposed to facts (§2.2), and emotions are facts, then values should be opposed to them.

The notion of value refers to issues of subjectivity, emotion, and, semantically, to all the orientations (or biases) constitutive of ordinary language. The words that express values are words that carry argumentative orientations, constituted in antonymic pairs.

4.1 Does the epidictic genre have a special status in relation to values?

According to the TA, values and truth are acquired through different processes, group values ​​are acquired through education and language. In this sense, the epidictic genre specifically deals with values; it does not allow contradiction. Its specific social function is to strengthen the adherence of the group to its common founding values, “without which the discourses aimed at action could not find leverage to move and rouse their listeners” (1977, p. 33).
Constantly reconstructed in epidictic encounters, where they are subject to a quasi-axiomatic treatment, values find their application in the two argumentative genres properly called, the deliberative and the judicial.
The deliberative and judicial genres are argumentative genres, aimed at collective decision making in situations of conflicting positions. According to Perelman, the epidictic genre has a very different status, it does not admit contradiction; its object is the reinforcement of adherence to group values in order to trigger action, V. Emotion:

Without [values] discourses aimed at action could not find leverage to move and stir their listeners (1977, p. 33).

4.2 The Epidictic Discourse on Values is Not Unanimous

While insisting on the irreducible contradictions that prevail in the field of values, Perelman thus removes values from actual social contradiction by making the epidictic genre inherently unanimous.
The epidictic genre can be made to exclude blame and limit itself to praise, through literary and social conventions that align homage to living and dead men and women with the hagiography of saints. These conventions are no different from those that require a group to erect statues to its heroes and saints and not to its villains and demons.
In the case of the epidictic genre, it is the social framework of the discourses of homage and veneration that, if anything, precludes counterdiscourse, not the nature of eulogy with its perfect counterpart, blame. The devil’s advocate always has a role to play, even in cases of canonization. If the eulogy of the deceased is unanimous, it is not because there are no opponents or because the opponents have nothing to say, but because the convention of mourning they keep them silent; the new generation can be trusted to turn the great men and values of older generations into villains.
The epidictic praise of virtue ceases to be unanimous as soon as it is given a precise content.

Apart from the specific conventional practice of mourning, the epidictic genre is defined by the two antagonistic acts of language, praise and blame. These acts define not so much a genre as a position (footing) that can be taken in both political and legal discourse.

VALUE (1) as the founding concept of THE NEW RHETORIC

1. Value as a Unified Field

According to the philosophical tradition, questions about

the good, the ends, the right, obligation, virtue, moral judgment, aesthetic judgment, the beautiful, truth, and validity (Frankena 1967, p. 229),

belong to different domains: morality, law, aesthetics, logic, economics, politics, epistemology.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, these questions have been taken up globally, within the framework of a general theory of values, of distant Platonic ancestry. This “wide-ranging discussion in terms of ‘value’, ‘values’, and ‘valuation’ [then] spread to psychology, the social sciences, the humanities and even to ordinary language” (ibid.).

The concept of value was introduced into the contemporary field of argumentation by Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric [1958], in the philosophical line of Dupréel (1939) (Dominicy n. d.). It constitutes its permanent foundation, as the introductory chapter of Perelman’s « Legal Logic » [Logique juridique] (1979) entitled « The New Rhetoric and Values » shows.

Perelman’s research on value is a perfect example of what a « general theory of values » can be.
The status of value and the role of values in the New Rhetoric are extensively discussed and illustrated in detail Guerrini 2019, 2022. [1]

2. Perelman’s Research Program on the Logic of Values

1.1 Critique of Positivism

Perelman presents his discovery of argumentation theory as a step beyond a research program on the “logic of value judgments” (Perelman 1979, §50, p. 101; 1980, p. 457). This latter research led him to the following conclusions:

• « There is no logic of value judgments » (ibid.) that would allow their rational organization. This conclusion that is said to be « unexpected » (ibid.).
• Contrary to the project of classical philosophy, it is impossible to construct an ontology that would allow a “calculus of values” that would regulate their hierarchy.
• Logical positivism’s treatment of values leads to a dead end. It maintains a gap between the values and the facts from which they cannot be derived. The consequence of this separation is that any recourse to values is rejected as irrational.
  Perelman argues that the view that value-based action is irrational is self-defeating, because it implies that practical reasoning and the entire field of law, both of which are based on values, should be considered irrational, which is absurd because unacceptable.

Perelman’s conclusion is that, because science and logic deal with judgments of truth, they cannot provide the rules for practical reason, which deals with judgments of value. This is the basis of Perelman’s claim, which reasserts the gap between the rational and the reasonable, between “the two cultures”, science and the humanities, see demonstration; proof.
Continuing his research program on values, Perelman, in search of other methods capable of accounting for the rational aspect of the use of values, sought other perspectives better suited to this particular subject. He found them in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Topics, which provide techniques for the empirical study of how individuals justify their reasonable choices. Perelman was then able to redefine his theoretical goal from logic to a New Rhetoric (ibid.). The argumentative-rhetorical method ​​seems to be the solution to the failure of the logical and philosophical treatments of values. Perelman consistently rejects the project of classical philosophy to develop a calculus of values, since it is not possible to derive a hierarchy of values ​​from an ontology of values. In particular, Perelman disagrees with Bentham on the possibility of a calculus of pleasures and pains.

1.2 The  Fact/Value Opposition

The New Rhetoric is thus structured around two questions about values.  The first one has a logical origin. It concerns value judgments, made about a being or a concrete situation. The second one has a philosophical origin. It concerns substantial values such as the true, the beautiful and the good, which are the most general of all values.
In the TA, values are defined by the following distinctions and operations, which actually retain much of their positivist origin.

– Facts are necessary and compel the mind, whereas values ​​require a commitment [French adhérence of the mind), see argumentation 1.

– In practice, however, value judgments and reality judgments are difficult to distinguish. Contextual considerations may be necessary to characterize a judgment as a value judgment: « This is a car » may be a factual judgment or a value judgment; « This is a real car » is only a value judgment (see Dominicy, n. d., pp. 14-17).

– In science, if two truth judgments about a reality are contradictory, one of them is necessarily false (principle of the excluded middle), while two contradictory value judgments about the same object, “This is beautiful! vs. This is ugly!”, can both be justified by value-based arguments, developed independently of any appeal to reality.

– Values and facts exist in separate worlds. Value judgments cannot be derived from nor can they be opposed to factual judgments. Group values ​​are acquired through education and language, and they are specifically reinforced in the epidictic genre.
See Perelman, value and the epidictic genre.

– Values are currently in conflict. Legitimate contradictions between value judgments cannot be resolved by eliminating one of the conflicting values, as one eliminates a false proposition. One can only rank the values (ibid., p. 107).

– Value in the epidictic genre,

1.3 Agreement: beyond the opposition Fact/Value

 For Perelman, the functioning as arguments of value claims, and truth and reality claims presupposes the agreement of the participants. The totality of these « preliminary agreements » to the argumentation itself creates an atmosphere of « communion » (p. 74) that allows the harmonious development of the argumentative-rhetorical situation itself.

We will ask which objects of agreement play a different role in the argumentative process. We think it will be useful, from this point of view, to group these objects into two categories, one relative to the real, which would include facts, truths and presumptions, the other relative to the preferable, which would contain values, hierarchies and places of the preferable (Id., p. 88; emphasis in the text).

The Treatise goes on to say that

The notion of « fact » is characterized only by the idea that one has of a certain kind of agreement about certain data, those which refer to an objective reality. (Id. p. 89)

It seems that the opposition fact / value is now revived as an opposition between two kinds of agreement. That is, the argumentative process blurs the distinction between values and facts, i.e. it is possible to agree/disagree about facts as well as agree/disagree about values.
Indeed, both facts and values can be the focus of a stasis, and both facts and values can be as fixed as facts are supposed to be, and as questionable as values are supposed to be Values and facts are equivalent, when they are defined as unquestioned realities. From « truth is not questioned » we don’t move to « what is not questioned is true », but to « what is unquestioned has the same value as truth ».

In sum, « the opposition between value judgments and factual judgments can be maintained only as the result of « precarious agreements » (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca [1958], p. 513), and for special debates.
This is undoubtedly an  accurate observation. « Precarious » suggests a deplorable condition attached to the agreement, which is not the case. Agreements on facts or on value, or on any other possible distinction of this kind can be revoked, depending on the conventions of the group and the justifications given. The occurrence of disagreement is not to be deplored in human groups.

Let’s note that the distinction between two objects of agreement, relating respectively to the real and the preferable, seems to reintroduce the distinction that has just been absorbed by the notion of agreement.  The fact/value, real/preferable dichotomies are the source of the gap between two Perelmanian concepts, « the reasonable » which governs current mundane argumentative practices including law, and « the rational » governing logic and science, see demonstration; proof.
We won’t try to discuss further these issues, which seem to be more related to the ontology of our world, than to the concrete facts envisaged by argumentation studies.

The following section focuses on the « places of the preferable » and their relation to argumentation schemes.

3. Do Argument Schemes Apply Specifically to Facts, and Loci to Values?

According to the Treatise, the opposition of values and facts corresponds to the opposition of the argumentative principles that govern them. Values are governed by loci (places, topoi):

When it is a question of founding values or hierarchies or reinforcing the intensity of the adhesion they arouse, we can link them to other values or other hierarchies to consolidate them, but we can also have recourse to premises of a very general order, which we’ll call loci, the [tópoi] from which the Topics, or treatises devoted to dialectical reasoning, derive (p. 112)

The Treatise is formal on this point:

We will call places [Fr. lieux] only premises of a general order allowing to found values and hierarchies, and which Aristotle studies among the places of the accident (p. 113)

An Unnecessary Distinction

Given this definition, of the word « place », we understand that the principles that found, i.e. justify, the factual conclusions are not called places (loci, tópoi).
This is what we actually see in the 3rd part of the Treatise. This part, which is the main part of the work, is called « argumentative techniques« , and these techniques are also called « argumentative schemes«  (p. 251).

But it is obvious that the schemes, the techniques of association, correspond closely to what the tradition calls « places »; and, incidentally the Treatise ratifies this label:

these schemes [can also be considered] as places of argumentation (p. 255).

We therefore give up reserving the name of “place” exclusively for the rules of values. It remains to be seen what the consequences of this terminological reorientation has for the conceptual opposition fact/value. In every day argument, just as agreement can be reached about facts and values, the same kind of argumentative rules apply to facts and values.

The following loci are considered to be the « most common » loci (ibid., p. 95):

• Quantity: « one thing is better than another for quantitative reasons” (id., 85/115): “the more, the better ».
• Quality is used to challenge quantity, that is « the strength of numbers » (id., p. 89/119): « the rarer it is, the more valuable it is ».
• Order: « The loci of order affirm the superiority of the earlier over the later » (id., p. 93/125).
• Existence: « The loci relating to the existent affirm the superiority of that which exists, of the real, over the possible, the contingent, or the impossible » (id., p. 94/126).
• Essence ascribes « a higher value to individuals to the extent that they embody [the] essence” (id., p. 95/126), which materializes as a topos “the closer it is to the origin, to life, to the prototype, the better it is ».

These so-called loci of value correspond to the topoi of the accident in Aristotle’s Topics (ibid., p. 113). Since the category of accident is not particularly value-bound, we can assume that the topoi of accident are value-bound either.
The places of the accident, by definition, operate on facts and objects as well as on the field of values. Thus, in keeping with tradition the terms, loci (topoi, place) and argument scheme can be safely interchanged.

The accident is a kind of predication about an object. Such gradual links can be represented on correlated argumentative scales, see scale; topos in semantics.

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Argument of REFLEXIVITY

Consider a proposition of the form: « N 1 — Verb — N2 ». The relation denoted by the verb is reflexive if it connects N1 to itself, that is, if « N1 — Verb — N1″ makes sense.

“Is contemporary with ” is a reflexive relation; A is contemporary with all the people who live at the same time as he, and in particular he is strictly contemporary with himself.

The causal relation is not reflexive; no being is its own cause. Only God is causa sui, his own cause – though it is possible to be a son of one’s own works.

Reflexivity can be exploited in ad hominem argumentation. The principle “charity begins at home” forces the reflexivity of the relationship « to do charity to ». Similarly, love of others can be used to promote a certain love of self:

If you want to help the whole world, you’d do well to start by helping yourself a little!

A consultant’s competence can be challenged by encouraging him to use his talents  reflectively:

You give me advice and you act the old way, start by giving yourself advice!

You fight for women’s liberation, and (= but) at home you never do the dishes.

Doctor, heal yourself!

You claim to teach others how to argue, but you are incapable of arguing yourself!

Or again:

Among the ragged people, there are some who wear long robes,
and boast that they are masters in the art of transmuting metals.
Why don’t these people make a little gold for themselves?
Because their whole art is to sell a little clear water to gullible people.
The Alchemists. Six Chinese Short Stories. [1885] / 1999 [1]

PATHOS 2: FROM PROOF TO FALLACY

The standard theory of fallacies considers emotions to be the main pollutant of rational discourse; to be valid, the argumentative discourse should be an-emotional. Pathos, the essential component of rhetorical argumentation, is therefore the typical target of this criticism. The “passions” are grouped into a family of ad passiones fallacies, and these are to be eliminated.
This is an essential point of articulation and opposition between rhetorical and logical-epistemic argumentation. Emotions, with their ability to subvert the mind and bypass rational reflection, are considered to be the most powerful of rhetorical tools and, for the same reason, they are forbidden within critical argumentation.

1. Ad passiones arguments

The standard theory of fallacies holds that wherever emotion is allowed to flourish in discourse, reason is in danger of being overshadowed:

I add finally, when an Argument is borrowed from any Topic which are suited to engage the Inclinations and Passions of the Hearers on the side of the Speaker, rather than to convince the Judgment, this is Argumentum ad passiones, an Address to the Passions: or, if it be made publicly, ’tis called an Appeal to the People. (Watts, Logick, 1725, quoted in Hamblin 1970, p. 164; capitalized in the text).

In an argumentative situation, emotions, like fallacies, tend to be the emotions of the other, the opponent: “I’m trying to stay cool and rational, why are you so upset?”. This is a common strategy in controversies over both scientific and political issues (Doury 2000). It can be seen as a typical case of the ad fallaciam argument, see evaluation.

The sophisms of passion are not included in the original Aristotelian list, see Fallacy (2). The label “ad + Latin name” has been widely used in modern times to refer to “fallacies of passion”, and traces of this use can still be found. The herbarium of ad passiones  is well stocked, as Hamblin’s list of ad fallacious arguments shows. The labels that make a clear and direct reference to the affects have been underlined.

The argumentum ad hominem, the argumentum ad verecundiam, the argumentum ad misericordiam, and the argumenta ad ignorantiam, populum, baculum, passiones, superstitionem, imaginationem, invidiam (envy), crumenam (purse), quietem (repose, conservatism), metum (fear), fidem (faith), socordiam (weak-mindedness), superbiam (pride), odium (hatred), amicitiam (friendship), ludicrum (dramatics), captandum vulgus (playing for the gallery), fulmen [thunderbolt], vertiginem (dizziness)) and a carcere (from prison). We feel like adding: ad nauseam but even this has been suggested before. (Hamblin, 1970, p. 41)

This list does not include only emotional arguments: for example, the appeal to ignorance (ad ignorantiam) is an epistemic, not an emotional argument. Others denot various forms of appeal to subjectivity, but the majority of the labels mentioned refer to personal interests and have a clear emotional content. Note that the concept of emotional language and the analytical method behind the diagnosis of these ad passiones fallacious appeals remain unclear.

The literature on fallacies mentions a dozen fallacies involving emotions, mostly under the label « fallacy in ad + Latin name« . As the generic label « ad passiones fallacies” allows, this list can be extended to include all emotions.

– fear, designated either directly (ad metum) or metonymically through the instrument of threat, ad baculum, a carcere, ad fulmen, ad crumenam
– respectful fear, ad reverentiam
– affection, love, friendship, ad amicitiam
– joy, happiness, laughter: ad captandum vulgus; ad ludicrum; ad ridiculum
– pride, vanity, ad superbiam
– calm, laziness, tranquility, ad quietem
– envy, ad invidiam
– popular sentiment, ad populum
– indignation, anger, hatred: ad odium; ad personam
– humility: ad verecundiam
– pity: ad misericordiam.

In this list, the basic emotions are mixed with vices (pride, envy, hatred, sloth) and virtues (compassion, modesty, friendship), both of which are valued emotional states.

The list of emotions constituting pathos and the list of emotions stigmatized as fallacies, overlap to a large extent. The pathemic proofs of rhetoric have become the sophisms ad passiones in the modern standard fallacy theory.

2. Four “emotional fallacies”:
ad hominem, ad baculum, ad populum, ad ignoratiam

All emotions can intervene in ordinary argumentative speech, but not all of these emotions have received equal attention, the focus is on the emotional and subjective character of the following four fallacies (Walton 1992).

— For arguments that attack the opponent, and other manifestations of contempt, see personal attack; dismissal. The ad hominem fallacy involves epistemic subjectivity, not emotion.

— The appeal to popular feelings in populist argumentation corresponds to a complex range of positive or negative emotional movements: the audience is amused, enthusiastic, pleased, ashamed; the speech plays on their pride, vanity, incites hatred, etc., see ad populum; laughter, irony.

— Ad baculum argumentation relies on various forms of threat or intimidation. Fear, possibly respectful, is contrasted with the positive emotion of hope, created by the promise of a reward, see threat.

— The appeal to pity, ad misericordiam, can serve as a basic example of the role of emotion in argumentation. First, the speaker S must justify his appeal to pity, in order to create a movement of pity. in the listener L, see emotion.

Rhetoric and argumentation can be contrasted on the basis of their relation to affects. If there is a concept of argumentation defined within rhetoric (inventio), there is also a concept of argumentation defined against rhetoric. Rhetoric is concerned with the production of discourse , while argumentation is concerned with the critical production and reception of discourse. Confronted with proactive, aggressive, rhetorical attitudes, critical argumentation is defensive.

3. Emotion, rationality and action

The field of argumentation is built on the rejection of what rhetoric considers the strongest evidence, ethotic and pathemic evidence. This an-emotional vision of argumentation corresponds to a classical and popular view of the functioning of the human mind, which contrasts reason, understanding, and contemplation with emotion, will and action. The following passage is a synthesis of this account:

Hitherto we have dealt with the proofs of truth, which compel the human understanding when it knows them, and for this  purpose, they are effective in persuading men accustomed to follow reason. But they are incapable of compelling the will to follow them, since, like Medea, according to Ovid, “I see and approve the best; I follow the worst.” This results from the misuse of the passions of the soul, and therefore we must deal with them in so far as they produce persuasion, and this in the popular manner, and not with all the subtlety that is possible when one treats them philosophically. (Mayans and Siscar 1786, p. 144)

The “passions” are assigned two functions: they change the perception of reality, put knowledge in brackets and thus give a decisive impulse to action.
This vision or emotion as a stimulus to action seems to be based on an etymological argument. The word emotion comes from the Latin emovere, e- (ex-) “from” and movere, “to move”; an emotion is something that « sets people in motion ». In any case, passions are the almighty manipulative instrument of the action-oriented discourse favored by rhetoric, and the main enemy of the truth-oriented discourse favored by logicians.

In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologists Fraisse & Piaget argued that emotion is not an organized response, but a disorder of behavior that leads to “a decrease in the level of performance” (1968, p. 98):

People get angry when they substitute violent words and gestures for efforts to find a solution to the difficulties they experience (resolving a conflict, overcoming an obstacle). […] [Anger] is also a response to the situation (hitting an object or a person who resists you), but the level of this response is lower than it should be, given the standards of a given culture. (Ibid.)

According to this vision, emotion would trigger low-quality behavior, and therefore poor reasoning. In interaction, it would necessarily be manipulative: the candidate cries in an effort to distract the examiner from his shortcomings, magically transforming the exam situation into a more interpersonal, private, relationship.

This leads to a kind of paradox: for rhetoricians, emotions lead to action while psychologists believe that emotions make action worse.

Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca share this vision of emotions as “obstacles” to reason, and thus consider emotions to be incompatible with sound argumentation. However, they retain the motivational quality of emotion in order to explain the relevance of argumentative discourse to action. The solution lies in a dissociation that contrasts emotions with values:

We should point out that the passions as obstacles must not be confused with the passions that provide a support for a positive argument. The latter will generally be designated by a less pejorative term, such as value, for instance. (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca [1958], p. 475 ; my emphasis)

By this clever operation, emotions are disposed of, and these remain pejoratively marked as obstacles to reason, while their dynamic potential is transferred to values. In this way, the effect of argumentation can be extended beyond the mere production of mental persuasion to become the determinant of action,  (id., p. 45); see persuasion

5. Alexithymia and Everyday Rationality

If emotions are seen as the ideal manipulative tool, the equation “emotion = fallacy” seems more than justified, so that, extending the example of scientific language to ordinary linguistic practices, a solution can be found in the pure and simple elimination of emotions. But the price of eliminating the emotions from ordinary discourse is high: in everyday circumstances, the use of an-emotional discourse is actually considered to be the symptom of a mental disorder, alexithymia.
The word alexithymia is composed of three lexemes a-lexis-thymos, “lack – of words – for emotion”; alexithymic language is defined as a language from which all expression of feelings and emotions is banished:

Alexithymia: term proposed by Sifneos to describe patients predisposed to psychosomatic disorders and characterized by: 1) the inability to verbally express the affects; 2) the poverty of the imaginative life; (3) the tendency to resort to action; and (4) the tendency to focus on the material and objective aspects of events, situations and relationships. (Cosnier 1994, p. 160)

Such an emotionless discourse is reduced to the expression of operational thinking, mirroring, “a mental mode of functioning organized around the purely factual aspects of everyday life. Operational discourse is characterized by objectivity and ignores any fantasy, emotional expression or subjective evaluation” (id., p. 141).

Similarly, the repression of affect by the neurotic personality can lead to the same result.

From a neurobiological perspective, Damasio has shown that a theory of purely logical reasoning, leaving aside the emotions, cannot account for the way people actually deal with everyday problems:

The ‘high-reason’ view, which is nothing more than the common­- sense view, assumes that when we are at our decision-making best, we are the pride and joy of Plato, Descartes and Kant. Formal logic will, by itself, lead us to the best available solution for any problem. An important aspect of the rationalist view is that to get the best results, emotions must be kept out. Rational processing must be unencumbered by passion. (1994, p. 171)

Pure reasoning about everyday matters can indeed be observed in certain types of patients:

Experience with patients suggests is that the cool-headed strategy advocated by Kant, and others, has far more to do with the way patients with prefrontal damage make decisions than with how normals usually operate. (Id., p. 172)

The exclusion of subjectivity and emotions risks turning argumentation into an operational alexithymic practice. Insofar as argumentation studies are interested in the treatment of everyday problems in common language, they cannot take  the discourse of neurotic, alexithymic or brain-damaged individuals as a model discourse. The question of how emotions develop in argumentative discourse requires much more than simple a priori censorship, see emotions

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[1] The Complete Poems of Tibullus: An En Face Edition. Translated by R. G. Dennis and M. C. J. Putnam. With an introduction by J. H. Gaisser. Berkeley, etc: University of California Press, 2013.

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PROOF BY FACT,
BELIEFS AGAINST FACT

A statement about a concrete fact is refuted by the observation that it is contradicted by reality: “Pierre (is French, so he) has red hair ” is refuted as soon as you observe that Pierre has brown hair. The affirmation of a general fact “all Syldavians have red hair” is falsified by a simple counterexample, “this Syldavian has brown hair”.
But the effect of facts on beliefs is much less clear than these examples suggest. The “web of beliefs » and the “web of facts » function as parallel networks. An embarrassing fact can be dealt with by declaring the fact to be marginal or misobserved. It can also be admitted and marginalized as an imperfection in the web’s meshes.

1. Falsifying a Statement of an Empirical Fact
by Showing that its Opposite is True

A statement of fact can be made as a report of directly observable evidence or as the conclusion of an argument: « You are very flushed, you feel tired, you probably have a fever. » Every argument contains such statements all of which can be contradicted and refuted.
In philosophy, « an atomic fact is the simplest kind of fact, and consists in the possession of a quality by some specific, individual thing » (SEP, Logical Atomism). An elementary proposition reports such an elementary fact.
In natural language we can assume that the elementary proposition ascribes to a being a property that is empirically evident and therefore empirically refutable.

The assertion of a concrete fact is refuted by the observation that it is contradicted by reality: “You say this, but I observe that”. This is an application of the principle of non-contradiction; the rule of opposites states that two terms that are opposites cannot both be true of the same subject.

Statement: Pierre has brown hair
Observation: Pierre has red hair
Application of the Rule of Opposites: “black” and “red” are opposites; they can be simultaneously false, but they cannot be simultaneously true. The statement Pierre has black hair is disproved.

The alleged fact and the established fact must belong to the same class of opposites: one does not disprove “Mary has a cat” by stating, on the basis of an observation, that “Mary has a rabbit”.

The same procedure works for other forms of opposition:
— Contradictory statements. In the sexual regime of  the19^th century one refutes « Marie is a woman » by observing that Marie is a man. The opposition is refuted by establishing that the contradictory proposition is true.
— Terms in the relationship of possession/deprivation. I am accused of tearing off someone’s ear in anger. I ask him to come to court to show that he actually has both ears.

The verified presence of an opposite makes it possible to eliminate all the other concepts of the family of opposites to which it belongs. This argument has immense scope, it constitutes the standard refutation system for false statements concerning  judgments of elementary facts.

The assertion of a generic concrete fact, “all Syldavians have red hair” is refuted by the counterexample, by finding a Syldavian with black hair. This generic refutation is in principle much easier than refuting a claim about a singular case: any black-haired Syldave will do in the first case, while the singular claim requires concrete knowledge of the being mentioned.

Resistance to refutation by facts — Resistance to factual refutation by facts is first achieved first by maintaining the original factual assertion, « to me he has red hair. »  Then it is accepted that there is a blurred area between brown and red.

3. The Impact of Facts on Theories and Beliefs

Facts can be deconstructed and reconstructed to fit theories, and conversely, theories can be revised to fit facts.

3.1 Saving the theory

But, at least in the field of the human sciences, the opposite observation that the opposite is actually true, is less conclusive than it seems. The theory asserts, directly or indirectly, that P. However, common sense and linguistic intuition are more likely to notice Q, which contradicts P. There are several ways out of the dilemma.

— Reject the theory, but this is a costly and painful solution.

— Downplay the inconvenient fact, by contrasting it with the mass of facts that confirm the theory, or that the theory satisfactorily explains or coordinates.

— Put the inconvenient fact on hold until it can be integrated into the theory.

— Allow for exceptions, and move from universality to generality. In classical logic, you cannot argue that “all swans are white” and concede that this particular swan is black. The quantifier all indicates that the proposition is universal, and the existence of a black swan conclusively disproves the universality of the proposition; you must then abandon universality for generality, which allows for exceptions, see reasoning by default.

— Reform intuition, and decide that the theory is brilliant, precisely because it makes us see things “differently”, in a richer and deeper way, and that in fact P is a kind of deep structure of the elementary intuition expressed by Q. In other words, one can resist refutation by choosing to reform the internal hypotheses (the theory) or the external hypotheses (what counts as a fact).

3.2 Belief Resists the Facts Against it

Predictive discourse is in principle subject to the control of facts: someone predicts that a certain event will, or must, take place, but when the time comes, everyone can see that nothing happens. The end of the world is predicted for next Wednesday, but Wednesday comes, the world goes on, and the prophet postpones the fulfillment of his prophecy.

“Facts do not penetrate the world in which our beliefs live”

The “worship” that Mr. Vinteuil devotes to his daughter despite her scandalous behavior inspires the following lesson in Proust.

Facts do not penetrate the world in which our beliefs live; they did not give rise to these beliefs, nor do they destroy them; they can inflict the most constant denials on them without weakening them, and an avalanche of misfortunes or illnesses following one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor. But when Mr. Vinteuil thought of his daughter or himself from the point of view of the world, from the point of view of their reputation, when he tried to place himself in the rank they occupied in the general esteem, then he made this judgment of a social nature exactly as the inhabitant of Combray who was most hostile to him would have done, he saw himself with his daughter in the lowest depths. (Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, 1913[1])

The first sentence of this passage is the most often quoted. It is followed by a but that suggests passage suggests that things go beyond than simple repression or suppression. “The facts” do not change Vinteuil’s love for his daughter, but he « sees himself with his daughter in the lowest depths. » The facts remain there, under the ‘I know, but still’ rule.

Persuasion can resist the basic facts that oppose to it.

If the claim put forward corresponds to an experimental result, it is refuted by repeating the experiment, only to find that what actually happens has nothing to do with what was said, or that the experiment, as described, does not work.

But it is not enough that it works irrefutably in order to be accepted, as the case of Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), “the inventor of handwashing” proves.

In the 19th century, women often died of childbed fever. The Central Hospital of Vienna had two maternity wards, and it was found that women died much more in one than in the other, 11.4% for Ward #1 compared to 2.7% for Ward #2, for the year 1846. This difference was explained by the hypothesis of a psychological shock suffered by the women in Ward #1; the priests who attended to the women at the time of their death had to cross the entire ward, where the mortality rate was particularly high, whereas in the other ward, they could go directly to the bedside of the dying women, without being noticed. Semmelweis, a pysician at this hospital, tested this hypothesis by asking the priests to stop going through that ward to get to the bedside of the dying; the mortality differential remained the same.

He observed that Ward #1 was used for the training of medical students, who performed dissections in the morning before caring for women in the maternity ward. Ward #2 was used for the training of midwives, who did not participate in the dissection sessions. Semmelweis noticed that his fingers had a strange odor after these dissections; so, he washed his hands in a solution that we would call disinfectant, and asked each of the students to do the same. Results: In April 1847, in Ward #1, 20% of the women died of childbed fever. Beginning in May, after handwashing was introduced, the mortality rate in the same ward dropped to about 1%.

This fact has a persuasive power that one might think is irresistible. But facts are one thing and beliefs are another. How can we accept that the hands of doctors who bring life can also bring death? Twenty years later, some of Semmelweis’s colleagues still attributed the mortality of women after childbirth to a psychological shock due to their special sensitivity.

Powerless proof: The wolf and the lamb

La Fontaine’s fable The Wolf and the Lamb (Fables, i, X) illustrates is about the persuasive power of facts, and argues that proof is powerless when vital needs are at stake.

The reason of the strongest is always the best:
We will show you right now.

Situation:

A lamb was quenching its thirst
in the course of a pure brook.
A wolf came along, hungry and looking for adventure,
attracted by the hunger in those places.

The interaction begins with a violent reproach, as humans usually do to their future victims:

“Who makes you so bold as to disturb my drink?”
Says the animal full of rage:
“You will be punished for your temerity.”

The offense is presupposed (you disturb my drink). The request for an explanation of the motives ([what is it] that makes you so bold?) seems to leave the lamb a possibility of justification, but it is immediately followed by the condemnation (you will be punished for your temerity). This speech is mysterious: why does the wolf speak? He could simply take advantage of the food he was seeking and which he finally found; he could eat the lamb just as the lamb drinks the water. The lamb responds with an observation of obvious fact :

« Sire, replies the lamb, may Your Majesty
not be angry;
But rather that she consider
That I am quenching my thirst
In the stream,
More than twenty paces below Her,
And that consequently, in no way,
Can I disturb Her drink. »

The conclusion is rigorous, since the laws of physics say that the stream never returns to its source. But “conclusive” does not mean “impossible to contradict. The wolf repeats his first accusation and adds a second:

« You disturb it, said the cruel beast,
And I know that you spoke ill of me last year. »

The lamb denied this second accusation, then a third, still more conclusively:

« How could I have done so if I had not been born?
I still suckle my mother, replies the lamb. »
« If it is not you, then it is your brother. »
« I have no brother. »

But the final attack is irrefutable, leaving the defense no room to respond:

« Then it must be one of your own kind:
For you hardly spare me,
You, your shepherds, and your dogs.
I’ve been told so: I must have my revenge. »

And we conclude that good reasons do not determine the course of history:

Thereupon, deep in the forests
The wolf carries him off, and eats him,
Without further ado.

Truth and Power

The previous examples may seem depressing. Truth has enemies and needs interpreters.

[1] Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, T. 1. Paris, France Loisirs, p. 226.

STRENGTH

The words strength and force are used with three different meanings:

— Argument from or by force, argument from strength, see threat -promise
— Force or strength of circumstances, see weight of circumstances
— Force or strength of an argument, this entry.

The graded concept of strength of an argument contrasts with the binary notion of valid or invalid argumentation. An argument is strong (or weak) either by itself or in relation to another argument.
This strength is evaluated according to several criteria.

Strength as validity
In a scientific field, to be strong an argument must first of all be valid. That is, it must be developed according to a method that is accepted in this field.
However, an argument can be valid and not so strong, but really relevant and interesting for the discussion a hypothesis.

In philosophy
From a philosophical point of view, one might consider that some argument schemes are inherently stronger than others. The strength of an argument is thus determined on the basis of ontology. An adept of moral realism will think that an argument based on the nature and definition of things is stronger than a pragmatic argument; a practical mind will think the opposite.
The New Rhetoric defines the strength of the argument according to the quality and universality of the audiences that accept it, see persuade – convince.

Strength as effectiveness
With respect to a goal such as persuasion, the strongest argument will be the most efficient, the argument that most quickly achieves the arguer’s goal, whether it is selling a product or electing a president. A degree of strength can be assigned to an argument based on a study on the target audience, see persuasion.

Subjective attribution of relative strength
In linguistic, wo arguments that lead to the same conclusion belong to the same argumentative class. Both provide some support for that conclusion; they share the same orientation. Within the same argumentative class, the strength of an argument may be determined by some objective gradation, such as the temperature scale, or it may simply be assigned to the argument by the speaker, who values such an argument over another. This hierarchization is marked by the means of argumentative morphemes (e.g., even) and realizing or de-realizing modifiers.
The resulting arrangements of the arguments on an argumentative scale are governed by the laws of discourse.

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CORRELATIVE TERMS

Correlative terms are also called relative or reciprocal terms, and can be thought of as opposite terms. Mother and child are correlative terms, that is, they are related by immediate inference:

If A is the mother of B, then B is the child of A.

Correlative terms are defined by reference to each other; mother is defined as « woman with children »; child is defined as « son or daughter of a woman ». The following are correlative terms:

cause / effect; double / half; master / slave
action / passion; sell / buy

Generally speaking, two predicates R1 and R2 are in a correlative relation if

A_R1_B <=> B_R2_A
A_Mother_B <=> B_Child_A

« By definition, correlatives are opposites »; they are « ontologically simultaneous » (Hamelin [1905], p. 133). The theme of the correlative is #3 on Aristotle’s list:

Another line of proof is based on correlative ideas (Rhet, II, 23, 3; RR, p. 357).

The topos is illustrated by the enthymemes:

Where it is right to command obedience, it must have been right to obey the command.

If it is no shame for you to sell it, it is no shame for us to buy it (ibid.).

.These conclusions have limits:

If it is legal/tolerated to buy 2 grams of marijuana, then one may sell 2 grams of marijuana.

But what about « possession » and « purchase »?

If it is legal/tolerated to possess 2 grams of marijuana,
then it is legal/tolerated to buy 2g,
then it is legal/tolerated to sell it.

Since the only way for me to get marijuana is to buy it. But the law can distinguish between two kinds of « possession »: possession for personal use is not a crime, but possession for trafficking is.

The following case deals with two pairs of correlatives, knowing/learning and ordering / obeying, articulated by the topos of opposites:

If you want to command, you must first learn to obey (see supra).
The executive, on his way up, had to learn to obey in order to know how to command (quoted in Linguee).