Rhetorica:
The Rhetorical Appeals
By Gabriel Blanchard
As time gives rhetoric its three species (judicial, ceremonial, and political), we have also three rhetorical appeals to discuss:
ēthos, logos, and pathos.
It’s Greek for Thee
We have now to discuss the rhetorical appeals. These are the three kinds of communication and persuasion at our disposal, whatever time-orientation our rhetoric may possess. The rhetorical appeals are conventionally spoken of in Greek, with names chosen by Aristotle, to distinguish them as specifically rhetorical ideas and avoid confusion with other things their translated names might imply. The appeals are:
I. Ēthos (ἦθος), meaning “character, quality; habit”;
II. Logos (λόγος—a term readers may recognize from other contexts), here meaning “reason, calculation, logic; explanation, account”; and
III. Pathos (πάθος), meaning “experience; suffering, pain; passion, feeling.”1
It is thus basically correct to describe ēthos, logos, and pathos as appeals to credibility (or personal authority, as it were), intelligence, and fellow-feeling. Let’s unpack each appeal a little further.
Ἦθος
At root, this word meant something like “habitual tendency” or “what one is accustomed to.” From this ideal of usual behavior, it came to suggest the inner qualities that prompt behavior. (Ēthos thus fits in very naturally with Aristotelian ethics, also known as “virtue ethics”—the idea that good behavior is good because it originates in, exhibits, and strengthens certain qualities of the human personality which we call the virtues.2) This appeal can be of two subtypes, what we might call the intellectual and the moral varieties of ēthos.
The intellectual variety of this appeal invokes the credibility of expertise. This may be formal, like the authority of an academic degree or of legal or professional qualifications; they can also be informal, referring to years of experience in a field, or a demonstrable talent for understanding detailed facts or resolving problems in it. (The 1992 film My Cousin Vinny includes a fantastic example of a character establishing this type of ēthos during a cross-examination—exhibiting such encyclopedic knowledge of a particular subject that she is able to confidently and correctly prove her cross-examiner was attempting to undermine her credibility with a nonsense question.) More often than not, it is this—whether a person ought to be believed in the sense of knowing what they are talking about—that assertions and disputations of ēthos are concerned with.
But there is also the moral variety; and the circumstances which attend its use tend to be graver. Anybody can argue who knows a subject better than whom, even if it is a matter rife with risks of the Dunning-Kruger type. Making a bad call in that respect primarily renders us well-informed versus badly-informed. A different kind of risk attends the people we accept as moral exemplars and influences; making a bad call in that respect can render us a better or a worse human being. Appealing to ēthos in the moral sense is an appeal to personal, rather than intellectual, authority; it primarily attempts to answer questions like, Is this person telling the truth? Will this person do what is right to the best of their ability? Is this someone I can trust?
Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong;
Was Every thing by starts, and Nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving Moon,
Was Chymist, Fidler, States-man, and Buffoon:
... Railing and Praising were his usual Theams;
And both (to shew his Judgment) in Extreams:
So over Violent, or over Civil,
That every Man, with him, was God or Devil.
Λόγος
Next, we come to the appeal to logos. This is the appeal made by explicit argument: What are the facts? What are the relations and proportions between the facts? What are the implications of all that? To some degree, we have covered this in our previous pair of series on fallacies and deductive logic, Sorting Through Sophistries and The Brain, a User’s Manual.
However, we did leave out one department of logic, which will be more properly discussed in this series: induction. This is the type of reasoning proper to the sciences. Deductive logic establishes valid or invalid conclusions, based on universal principles seen by intuition; inductive logic, on the other hand, establishes strong or weak conclusions, based on masses of particular facts discovered by observation. (Since deduction thus deals with the intrinsically possible, and induction with what possibilities are actual, inductive logic is the kind we need to use most of the time, regardless of what topic we are discussing.) We will therefore set aside an arc of Rhetorica to discuss the process of induction and how to do it well.
Πάθος
And finally, the appeal to pathos. Appealing to emotion can be fallacious, when it replaces reasoning; it can be a mark against a person’s ēthos for the same reason. But emotion can be an appropriate reaction to certain facts or situations, almost a necessary one. The reading of great literature, especially great poetry, is especially useful in developing the power to both receive and make the appeal to pathos.
Poetry aims at producing something more like vision than it is like action. But vision, in this sense, includes passions. Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all. When we try to rouse someone’s hate of toothache in order to persuade him to ring up the dentist, this is rhetoric; but … even if we only wanted to convey the reality of toothache for some speculative purpose or for its own sake, we should still have failed if the idea produced in our friend’s mind did not include the hatefulness of toothache. Toothache, with that left out, is an abstraction. … Very roughly, we might almost say that in Rhetoric imagination is present for the sake of passion (and, therefore, in the long run for the sake of action), while in poetry passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore … for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health—the rightness and richness of a man’s total response to the world.3
Total mastery of pathos would require being conversant with all of the emotions human beings can feel. What are those? Unfortunately, there is no generally recognized list! As least four feelings—fear, grief, joy, and wrath—appear on basically every proposed list and seem to be common to every culture; these four plus awe, boredom, disgust, pity, pride, scorn, and surprise seem to cover most of the emotions rhetoric requires for its service, but unsystematically, and without inquiry into things like overlap or degree; is awe an emotion unto itself or a hybrid of fear and joy, for instance? and if it is a hybrid, does understanding fear and joy enable us to grasp awe as well, or do all or some hybrids have their own rules?
This, too, we shall return to. For now, we have outlined the three rhetorical appeals: the ethical, the logical, and the pathetic.4
1This use of pathos is related to the use of the same word in discussing the arts, or even human temperaments (e.g. “she tends to see pathos in things”). However, note that in artistic contexts, pathos more or less exclusively means sorrow, tragedy, or the pitiable; this limitation does not apply to rhetorical pathos, which is equally capable of denoting appeals to anger, fear, joy, or any other emotion.
2This stands in contrast with two, or arguably three, other major ethical theories familiar in the West: utilitarianism and deontology, and divine command theory (if this is considered separate from deontology). Utilitarianism finds its standard of good behavior in what promotes the highest degree of happiness for the largest number of people; deontology avers that some things simply are duties, and that it is neither necessary nor enlightening to ask why. (Divine command theory says much the same as deontology, but with one additional layer of explanation, that being “because God says so.”)
3C. S. Lewis, A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” Ch. VIII: Defense of This Style (pp. 53-54 of the Oxford University Press 1961 paperback edition).
4Yes, really; and yes, it is funny that it’s called that.
An alumnus of the University of Maryland, College Park, with a bachelor’s in Classics, Gabriel Blanchard serves as CLT’s editor at large. He is a proud uncle of seven nephews, and lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy reading about some of the expert rhetors from the CLT Author Bank, like Aristotle, Seneca the Younger, William Shakespeare, John Donne, or Susan B. Anthony; or, if you’d like a general introduction to “the Great Conversation” for which the skill of rhetoric is both the listening ear and the living tongue, this post may slake your thirst (as well as indexing the many topics of that Conversation). And be sure to tune in to our podcast, Anchored, hosted by CLT’s founder, Jeremy Tate.
Published on 3rd April, 2025. Page image of a depiction of the Trinity in a 13th-century manuscript of the Roman de la Rose, now housed in the National Library of Wales.