Sorting Through Sophistries:
Pathetic Appeals
(That Are Bad)
By Gabriel Blanchard
Here we offer the "mugshots" of some common sophistical appeals to emotion. Take note of their traits; next time you see them, they probably won't be labeled.
Last week, we discussed why appeals to emotion are not always fallacious, but generally can be (and even why false detachment is, in its own way, a fallacy that relies on emotion). Today, we’re going to run through several important forms of sophistically tugging on the heart-strings, highlighting some of their common contexts, so readers can know to be on the lookout for them.
Appeal to Pity
Also known under its Latin alias, ad misericordiam. Compassion is of course a good thing, of which probably no one has too much, but some people do have more compassion than wisdom, which is not good. The trait to watch out for in the fallacious ad misericordiam is when pity is invoked as an alternative to determining which of two contradictory ideas is logically sound, or which of two incompatible causes is morally justified. Also, be on the lookout for bizarre scenarios—for example, the suggestion that the rich deserve pity in a conflict with the poor. Now, reality is bizarre sometimes, so these scenarios are not decisive by themselves; but they’re what you might call a “red flag.”
Appeal to Wishing
In Latin, this might be called the sophistical appeal ad desiderio. This covers all pseudo-arguments that are essentially forms of wishful thinking. This is not uncommon in philosophy; many of us, no doubt, have heard a person say something similar to I don’t believe Y because I don’t want to live in that kind of world; but of course, whether we wish to live in a Y sort of world makes no difference at all to whether we do live in that kind of world.
In a sense, flattery is a form of this fallacy too—it invites us to believe something about ourselves not because it is true, but because it is appealing. Such a belief by definition gives pleasure, which makes believing the flatterer more generally appealing, and we have just established a precedent for adopting such beliefs.
Appeal to Bandwagoning
This is the present author’s rendering of the name of the ad populum fallacy. In a word, this is the fallacy of peer pressure. Everybody accepts such-and-such an idea; how do you have the temerity to deny it? One reason this sophism tends to be hard to resist is that, when an opinion is held by a large number of people, there usually are good reasons for it; but of course there are good reasons for believing virtually any bad idea, given circumstances that happen to obscure the truth. We also find it hard to resist ad populum fallacies because we are social creatures, hard-wired to care what other people think, and especially to care what they think and feel about ourselves. That is attuned to a kind of truth (the kind useful for survival), but not, as a rule, the kind of truth relevant to debates.
Appeal to Appetite
This is not the same as the above appeal to wishful thinking. Its Latin alias might be ad cupiditatem (or something similar), and the appetite it refers to does not need to be the appetite of hunger. Anything that could be plausibly described as a craving is the kind of thing this fallacy can appeal to. Both literal hunger and sexual desire are exceedingly common sources of ad cupiditatem fallacies in advertisements (sometimes even when the connection between the thing being advertised and the appetite being appealed to is obviously ridiculous). A less obvious sophism of this type appeals to human greed—what our ancestors used to call the appetite for “filthy lucre,”* no doubt following the resonant prose of the King James.
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
Appeal to Humor
This aligns, in part, with the traditional ad ridiculum fallacy: treating an idea as discredited without proof, merely because it sounds silly. Unluckily, and as with the details of the appeal to pity above, sometimes the facts themselves are silly and there’s simply nothing to be done for it.
However, we may also here take note of ways in which the use of humor can draw close to certain other fallacies. The ad populum often appears in the guise of humor, since not many people like looking or feeling like a killjoy. It is also known to keep company with the obvious and common-sense fallacies, threatening ridicule in the defense of the obvious and common-sensical. (Which, when you come to think of it, is strange behavior in the first place: why would authentic examples of those things need to be defended?)
Appeal to Anger
In Latin this would presumably be called ad iram, or perhaps in odium, the latter strictly meaning hatred rather than mere anger. There are important differences between those two feelings, but the benefits they offer a sophist are much the same with either one: both are urgent feelings, directed to action rather than thought; both tend to cloud our perceptions of reality; and both reward us (psychologically speaking) for rationalizing and outright justifying aggressive, unfair, and irrational words, ideas, and behaviors. And this appeal is closely related to another …
Appeal to Fear
Traditionally this is known as the ad baculum or in terrorem fallacy. Fear may be the only human emotion that is often stronger than anger, and it is equally apt to urge decision while short-circuiting analysis. Fear is equally able to blur and distort our perceptions as well; it is specially worthy of note that, when we feel ourselves on the defensive, we may not only perceive things that are non-hostile as threats, but even take things that are irrelevant to us as attacks. (Most of us probably have a story about using a word or phrase we meant to be innocuous, but which was interpreted as hostile by a frightened or angry person.)**
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This is by no means an exhaustive list; there are as many sophistical appeals to emotion as there are kinds of emotion. All the more reason they ought to teach logic in these schools.
*Though the noun is archaic if not obsolete at this point, the adjective derived from it is still current, namely lucrative.
**These of course would be trivial examples. A much graver and more tragic example would be the leadership of the Nazi Party. Reading selections of their rhetoric (both what they produced as propaganda and how they explained their ideas privately, to themselves and one another) reveals a group of people not only contemptuous and hateful of the Jews, but also and at the same time terrified of them; some of them may have believed, sincerely in a sense, that their actions against the Jews were defensive. To quote C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, “Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs … do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. … But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.”
Gabriel Blanchard is a justifiably and rationally proud uncle to seven nephews, and has worked for CLT since 2019, where he serves as its editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you can hear more from CLT by tuning in to our podcast, Anchored. You might also enjoy our posts on the great ideas of Western civilization; we have posts on topics pertinent to this post and others like it, such as authority, dialectic, induction, memory, opinion, prudence, and truth, as well as profiles of major thinkers on these topics like Plato, St. Augustine, Héloïse du Paraclet, Averroës, Voltaire, David Hume, and Albert Camus. Thank you for reading—have a great day.
Published on 1st August, 2024.