Transcript for:
Understanding Rhetoric and Persuasion Techniques

[Music] hi and welcome back to critical thinking last class we were talking about cognitive bias today we're going to change gears and we're going to talk about rhetoric which is the art of persuasion as we do critical thinking very often it's important to distinguish proof and persuasion especially when we get into talking about logic and argumentation because we could define logic as a means well not necessarily a definition of logic but we could talk about logic as a means of trying to persuade somebody as to the truth of a claim okay but the type of proof or rather persuasion that we're talking about when we come to an argument is usually a rational type of persuasion okay so that means there are different types of persuasion and rhetoric is an art and a skill that is designed to try to persuade you using different techniques and it's not always a matter of logic and reason there are other things that are involved so let's go ahead and take a look at the art of persuasion i started the powerpoint with just a little cartoon that i came across the example of what we might call rhetorical device counselor kindly refer to it as murder not thinning out the herd you may not get the joke yet but you will by the end of the presentation because we're going to be talking about different rhetorical devices so this first section is going to cover clarity credibility and rhetoric what do we mean first by clarity clarity has to do with the ability to communicate meaning when we are clear in our communication then we get our meaning across to our audience and whether that's whether it's in writing you know written form or spoken form so clearly at the level of meaning is most often threatened by vagueness and ambiguity so the things that you want to avoid in communicating a message are vague and ambiguous terminology or vague and ambiguous construction of sentences there are different forms of vagueness and ambiguity so we're going to look at a few types so there are four main causes of confusion vagueness ambiguity generality and undefined terms so let's walk through each of these starting with just the idea of vagueness itself we'll say a claim is vague when its meaning is excessively inexact intrinsically vague words don't have borders around them right they're a little bit fuzzy the edges are a little bit hazy something can mean something maybe more than you intended it to right you might cross over into a different definitional area so we use words like bald rich fast heap you know they have some quantitative significance but they're not precisely defined right or delimited so when i say someone's bald you might have a picture in mind but you don't know exactly what you should be picturing right because there are different levels of baldness i mean is he completely bald is he missing most of his hair if somebody's rich what does exactly does that mean it tends to mean he has more money than other people that you would consider not rich but we don't know exactly what that means because you've got you know bill gates rich and then you've got somebody less than bill gates i was going to say donald trump but i wanted to avoid him to be successful you must do a good job that's a pretty vague statement we don't know what successful exactly means we don't know what exactly a good job is so a lot of times we need to choose some better language to choose some better terms to try to make that more precise or exact okay so some general rules that we can follow would be these some level of vagueness generally acceptable expected it's normal i mean we tend to talk in a particular way of course if you're trying to communicate a meaning to an audience then you want to try to refine things okay it's not always useful to have your common ordinary discussion if you're trying to communicate clearly right as a general rule we could say if a claim is not too vague to cafe appropriately useful information then the level of vagueness is acceptable if the vagueness makes it difficult or impossible to assess a claim then it's not acceptable the next term is ambiguity so what i mean by an ambiguous statement we'd say a claim is ambiguous if it could have more than one meaning without clues from the context about which meaning to assign you know it's fine if a word has more than one meaning we often get the exact meaning of a word from its context so if i was just going to throw out the word bat b-a-t and say picture a bat in your head you don't know exactly what to think about because that's a type of word that has more than one possible meaning for instance you might be picturing a baseball bat you might be picturing a winged mammal the context would give you more information so that it would reduce the ambiguity so if i was to say the person picked up the bat in order to swing at the ball then i think you would have an appropriately useful understanding it would be therefore acceptable moving further forward three types of ambiguity can be distinguished one is what we call semantic ambiguity one is syntactic ambiguity one we'll just call the grouping ambiguity so let's see what the difference are between or the differences are between them first intentional versus unintentional ambiguity a claim could be ambiguous due to an accident on the part of the writer or speaker it could be intentional on their part so an intentional ambiguity might be used to purposely mislead somebody it might be necessary because of the context so there may be times when i'm actually trying to be vague like if i want to respond to somebody in a way that doesn't necessarily offend them i could maybe phrase my response in an ambiguous way where they could take it as a positive and not necessarily as a negative if i have some kind of unintentional and big ambiguity we should try to usually avoid that if we realize that we're being ambiguous you can go back and clarify things and that could be avoided usually just with care and patience so understanding the difference between the three types of ambiguity can help you identify ambiguity and what others are writing help you avoid adding an intentional ambiguity in your own work and that's really important too so you want to you know be able to distinguish it on both sides as a speaker and as a audience so first semantic ambiguity we also call this equivocation this is when a word can be used in more than one way the word has multiple meanings so for example our mothers bore us the word bore can be understood in more than one way i mean are our mothers so dull that they're putting us to sleep or are we talking about the fact that our mothers gave us birth so the word bore right there could probably pick a better term to communicate or give more context so that the audience knows what's being stated so that would be an example of equivocation and sometimes ambiguity leads to some interesting humor if you're familiar with some very famous comedy routines a lot of comedy routines and uh jokes and stuff rely on ambiguity famous one that comes to mind all the time when i teach this course is the famous having costello routine who's on first where they're using particular words that could mean one thing or you know he's using in the context of a nickname i'm not going to go through the skit i would really butcher it and i'm not going to show you guys the clip but if you had a chance you know look up evan costello who's on first routine and you're going to see a great example of semantic ambiguity in action next we have syntactic ambiguity this is also called amphibology when we get to informal fallacies later on we're going to talk about you know some of these types of things specifically amphibology now when the meaning is ambiguous due to its grammatical construction so here you're going to need an entire claim or sentence in order to commit some kind of syntactical ambiguity for example and this is another very famous and old joke this morning i shot an elephant in my pajamas how he got in my pajamas i'll never know that's the punch line if you weren't familiar i think that's a marx brothers joke groucho marx probably a little earlier than evan costello have come to think of it but who's wearing the pajamas is not really clear by the way this sentence is constructed you know if you were to say this morning i shot an elephant while i was wearing my pajamas then it's pretty clear what's going on but phrased as it is it's ambiguous so we're talking about syntactic problems meaning we could arrange the sentence in a way to avoid this kind of ambiguity it's word order that comes into play and grammar so if you are poor in your grammar skills then you're more likely to commit some kind of syntactical ambiguity of course if you're really skilled in grammar you might be able to masterfully create a syntactically ambiguous statement on purpose if you're trying to be intentional grouping what we mean by grouping as related to a fallacy we'll study later called the composition fallacy and ambiguity of this sort results from confusion of whether a term is used collectively or distributively when we say a term is used distributively we mean that it's applying to a member of a group the part of a whole and not to the whole group whereas a collective use of a term applies to the group in its entirety so i'll give you an example this might make this more clear when i say americans are willing to drop nuclear weapons the question is about the word americans are we talking about there being individual members of the group we call americans there are certain americans that are willing to drop nuclear weapons are we talking about americans as a country as a nation that's a different thing okay and there'd be a different truth value to that claim you know based on individuals if you're talking about individuals i'm sure they're individuals that are willing to do all kinds of horrible things as a nation it's more likely that that statement would be false because the fact is most americans don't want anything to do with nuclear warfare so there's an example of grouping fallacy there's also another ambiguity here the word drop what do we mean by drop right so that's a semantic ambiguity do we mean actually drop the bomb okay that's the way i interpret it when i was first talking about composition fallacy but it could also mean drop the topic right you know kind of lay it aside and not deal with it so you could fix it in various ways just to make it more clear perhaps you want to say the american people are willing to utilize nuclear weapons that's pretty clear i think sufficiently clear and acceptable what are some of these statements i mean i'm not going to actually unpack these but i want to give you some other examples of ambiguity some of these might actually be humorous and i took these from various uh newspaper headings and things like that so it's always fun to look at newspaper headings because newspapers the headings usually done in such a way that are really open to ambiguity very often which makes them really funny to look at fine for littering technically this one is not necessarily from a newspaper you could picture it on a sign posted somewhere to let somebody know you know maybe the result of littering usually it would interpret this as you know you're gonna get a find if you litter here of course it could also mean you're perfectly free to litter as you please you get the joke arson suspect is held in massachusetts fire i probably won't pause after every one of them but think about it for a second and you'll see hopefully both ways you could read it blind bishop appointed to see that might be a little bit more difficult if you don't know what the sea is as far as catholic offices body search reveals 4 000 and crack british left waffles on falcon islands deaf college opens doors to hearing farmer bill dies in house fund set up for beating victims kin kids make nutritious snacks never withhold herpes infection from loved one prostitutes appeal to pope um as you can see all of these are jokes and some of them could be hopefully not too offensive but you get the picture moving on from there to generality generality is a characteristic of being too broad and not providing enough information generalities related to both vagueness and ambiguity the less detail a claim has the more generally we say it is a term that's too general picks out too many objects the addition of further information of course can reduce generality make things a little bit more precise and specific so here's our example the advertisement read no animals allowed so the apartment remains vacant to this day now no animals allowed is being interpreted as a pretty general statement and the joke in this little claim is that appointment or apartment rather is vacant because you know human beings are animals too of course it's only a joke most people wouldn't fall for that we could say if there's a sign that says no animals allowed i would think it's sufficiently clear to communicate the meaning that's intended but there might be a loophole here a lot of times if you're not precise you know speaking of loopholes we think of you know court cases where you've got laws that are on the books sometimes it's interesting the way somebody might interpret a law to try to find a way around uh particular things those are the kind of cases where you want to be as precise as possible when you're laying down legislation of course sometimes it could be intentionally vague perhaps lawmakers want to be vague enough so that you can interpret it a little bit more broadly and apply it to different types of situations so maybe i spoke a little too soon anyways the joke in this is actually a play on the term animal like i said so let's talk now about how to avoid ambiguity vagueness generality through the use of definition so let's talk about how we can define terms in different ways that we can define terms one way to avoid vagueness and ambiguity is by dividing terms four purposes for definition number one to tell us what a word means second to assign meaning in a particular context third to reduce vagueness generality or ambiguity and the fourth is to persuade there are specific types of definitions designed for that reason we'll see what they are in a second so let's first talk about the types of definitions that are relative to purpose a lexical definition is one that simply tells us the ordinary meaning of a word this we could say is our dictionary definition you've got an explanatory definition which illustrates the implications of an already known but difficult concept i'll give you examples for some of these every use of the word beauty implies some suitability to a purpose okay that's one way to try to explain beauty as you're defining beauty you know suitability to a purpose is not necessarily a dick a lexical definition or a dictionary definition but it does add something to that definition explanatory value next we have the stipulative definition which assigns a meaning in other words it's it's picking a meaning for a particular context for example we will call those data that help predict the economy's future leading indicators in other words that's how we are going to be using the term you also find that in many classes that you might take uh instructors will do this i do this myself in certain classes they'll say well in this class we're going to use the word legend in this particular way i think i just did that my mythology class just the other day okay so we can stipulate definition so that our audience will know how we are going to be using it specifically might not be the normal way that it's used but we're free to do this we're still clear when we do this as long as we lay down the boundaries of the definition up front so there's no confusion with the audience we're speaking to the next would be a precising definition this type of definition will narrow down the meaning of an unclear term to reduce ambiguity right we make it more precise so for example by walking we specifically mean moving under one's own power while keeping at least one foot on the ground that's going to make it more precise this might be useful with you know children in school we see you know breaking the school rules by running in the halls right running usually involves feet coming off the floor even slightly whereas walking generally does not so we might want to be a little bit clear what we mean by walking next is the rhetorical definition this is where we're trying to persuade and this is not necessarily a real definition at all we can call it a pseudo definition because we're trying to work on somebody's feelings right and influence another person's opinions perhaps so here's an example of a rhetorical definition it's also called the connotative meaning right when we say a connotative versus the denotative we say the denotative meaning might be closer to the lexical definition a connotative meaning we mean it's a meaning based on a person's experience right it will bring along with it certain emotional associations and stuff like that so here's the example that word casualties refers to our sons and daughters killed in battle right it's trying to bring about kind of a vivid idea of what we mean by talking about casualties right kind of a the type of definition that's going to influence you to think twice about backing a motion to go to war with another country or something like that okay so that would be called rhetorical definition and it's a type of persuasive device obviously general kinds of definitions relative to the manner let's take a look at some of these analytical and analytical definitions this is going to specify the features that a thing has to possess in order for the term to apply to it again here's the denotative meaning this like i said is closer to the lexical meaning it's the meaning that expresses the attributes or properties that an object have so if i was going to try to describe a dog you know i would add certain characteristics to try to get at what exactly i'm speaking about four-legged mammal kind of gets us there doesn't quite capture everything because it's a little too broad it could apply to a cat just as equally as it could to a dog but again we're specifying certain features that the thing often has it's an analytical situation the whole idea of conceptual analysis relies on distinguishing sufficient and necessary conditions in order to specify more clearly terms and their exact referent okay next we have the definition by example or the extensive definition this is merely pointing at something right naming something identifying an example right so instead of saying dog's four-legged mammal i might say dog and i point over there as scooby-doo okay that's what i mean by dog i'm pointing or giving an example it doesn't really tell you what it is we're talking about it's not analytical in any way but it's helpful and that's usually how you start to learn a language a lot of good approaches to language learning for instance are going to use pictures and visuals it's kind of how we naturally learn a language as a child we'll be told you know this is an apple and you kind of point to it and the child will start to identify the object with the thing and only later do they develop the ability to try to analyze what it is we're talking about as an apple that it's a fruit that it grows on trees that has this or that characteristic and so on okay we also have definition by synonym where we just give a different word that usually is interchangeable so instead of saying dog i could use the word canine may not be as common but it's still perfectly acceptable and most people are going to understand it i just want to give you a few tips for writing argument of essays because in a class like this you will probably be asked to write some responses reflection papers essays and such perhaps even arguments later on that are specifically structured as arguments and i know in various other courses throughout your college career you're going to be doing the same type of thing so here's just some basic tips that i think are worth sharing and they're very general as well steps and components of good argumentative essays first of all you want to state the issue i mean last time i believe it was last lecture or perhaps one before that we talked a little bit about what an issue is so if you recall an issue is where we can raise a question as to whether or not such and such is true okay so you want to state the issue up front you're going to state your position on the issue then you want to work by giving support for that position it's not just a matter to make claims and assertions about it you want to give supporting claims that are going to help you hopefully persuade somebody as to your opinion and you also want to in some way refute contrary positions or predict responses that you might face that opponents might present to try to undercut your position and deal with those and the more authentic and realistic those contrary positions are presented and the more you actually tackle those things in a realistic way the stronger your case is actually going to be it's one thing to raise your position and support your position and then give you know kind of weak objections to it those are easy to respond to and the weaker the objection the less convincing your argument is ultimately going to be you want to give the best possible objection to your point of view and if you could deal with that then your point of view is going to come across as that much stronger for example i'm going to give you the method that thomas aquinas used he was a philosopher from the middle ages and one of the greatest philosophers in the aristotelian tradition and if you ever read any of his work i'm going to assume that most of you won't he had a very specific way of arguing very rigorous and orderly his chosen procedure was this he would put certain questions out that were under consideration he would give you the issue then he would cite objections right up front you know contrary positions and those that would be presented very often by other philosophers then he would give a short rebuttal based on citations from certain authorities he thought were competent authorities responding again to those objections and then he would present the body of his argument right the reasons for his position and this would be the the meat of the matter right pretty uh lengthy defense of his position and then at the end he would then reply to each of the initial objectives in a detailed way from his own argumentation okay it's a very thorough way of doing and i'll give you an example just a link here in the powerpoint you can copy this down since you probably won't be able to hit the screen that you're watching but this is from sumathil logica question 90. just an example um from the sacred text website which has a lot his material for free easily accessible wherever you are okay moving forward judging the credibility of a claim there are few things we need to consider when we're trying to judge a claim that's presented to us two basic grounds for suspicion first of all the claim itself needs to be evaluated and also the source of that claim let's start by assessing the claim how do we decide whether or not to believe a claim so even if there are any arguments provided for the claim it's generally reasonable to accept a claim if it doesn't conflict first of all with our background information and if it comes from a reliable source so that's going to deal with the claim itself and the source of the claim so we're talking about what we might call initial plausibility kind of how credible it seems on the surface when we're first presented with it so it's a measure of how well the claim squares with the background information direct observation and so on because we've got both of those things to play with number one let's take a look at an example and we'll unpack what we mean by background information and direct experience you know direct experience is actually part of our background information if you think about it this claim which i took from one of the textbooks says you know your kids will grow faster if they have two ginseng supplements each day all right there's a claim that we would immediately respond to by belief or non-belief based purely on its initial plausibility so to assess that we want to measure it against observations that we have background information that we presented with that might have to do with children growth rates supplement information you know scientific facts and such and how plausible is that claim well it doesn't seem to be that plausible because we tend to observe that children grow at a pretty uniform rate across the board you know some people might grow a little bit quicker than others but you are not going to see children usually shoot up through you know diet alone so it tends to have i would say a low initial plausibility another claim vomiting is your body's way of getting rid of something harmful now if we think about this one on the surface it might appear a little bit more plausible we do know about food poisoning we have seen um things like like that you may have even gotten sick yourself by eating something that was spoiled or rotten and had the unfortunate response of vomiting later that evening you're even getting you know a little bit of a fever and other agony along with it but we don't always vomit just from you know poisonous substances and bad foods sometimes we vomit due to motion sickness you know perhaps you get off of a roller coaster and you find yourself nauseous and vomit so those types of things happen as well i mean morning sickness when somebody's pregnant very often they'll go through this phenomenon of morning sickness it doesn't mean that there's something harmful that they've ingested that's your background information with claim two let's look at another claim all right your gas gauge says e you have two gallons left in the tank if you're a experienced driver and actually drive your car until the gas light comes on and sometimes i am very thankful that the manufacturers of automobiles put in a gas light that tells you when you're on empty to draw your attention to it you'll probably notice that you can still drive a little while while that light is on of course in the past they didn't used to have those lights i remember back when i was in high school riding around with my cousin and his jeep i think several times we just totally ran out of gas because we weren't paying attention to the little gas gauge there wasn't the warning light the way there is today but um generally we we know from experience that when the light comes on and the gauge is on empty you still have enough fuel to go a certain number of miles sometimes the cars actually have a little meter that will tell you you still can get about 30 more miles on what's left in the tank so yeah that would have a higher level of initial plausibility again based on our background information and based on our experience so we'd say it's strong initial plausibility when it comes to assessing the source we want to see you know where that information is coming from right is this a person who has credibility and there are different types of things we would base that opinion on so we would say their credibility could be based on factors like the individual's knowledge the truthfulness or reputation for truthfulness that the person has the accuracy that the person usually has and the objectivity of the person okay so knowledge truthfulness accuracy and objectivity one thing we want to question is whether or not the party is an interested party that could bring up red flags this would be something related to what we talked about last time with bias is the person biased in the issue okay they're going to present certain things to persuade you as to their perspective bias is something to be aware of but it's not something that's necessarily going to force uh you into rejecting a claim hopefully a person who stands to gain from a belief we'd say as an interested party if there's some benefit that they can get a person with nothing at stake in our belief we'll call a disinterested party so the interested party should be viewed with a little bit more suspicion naturally right the question of truthfulness comes to play if they have something to gain by telling a lie we could be suspicious as to whether or not they are telling the truth same thing with objectivity so going back to the idea of knowledge let's say expertise is relevant right knowledge makes a person a little bit more credible thus expert knowledge makes somebody the most credible of sources of character doesn't mean and again we always have to clarify and qualify these things because it doesn't mean that an expert in a field can't be wrong or that you shouldn't question what experts say because very often there are other experts that might have contrary opinions different information lots of fields there are disagreements among the experts debates among the experts and it's always wise not to just take something at face value based on expert opinion there's a fallacy we'll study later called the appeal to authority and that's where this becomes relevant but in general i'm saying expert knowledge should be taken over an amateur's knowledge okay in general experts have the education the training the experience to possess certain knowledge on a subject that other people generally don't have therefore they're more believable now whether or not a matter concerns direct observation the expert's claims should be accepted over the non-experts if it's something that has to do with direct observation then if you are capable of having the same observation as the expert then you don't need to rely on the expert you can rely on the direct observations the idea some general rules are going to be these it's reasonable to be suspicious of a source if a claim either lacks credibility inherently or comes from a source that lacks credibility rhetoric and persuasion uh the art of persuasion according to aristotle is defined this way this is actually a quote from his rhetoric 1.2 and i'm just going to read the highlighted portions he says the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject so here he's tying it into persuasion the art of persuasion is what like i said we defined it before and aristotle actually talks about different modes of persuasion which is what i was hitting at in the beginning there's the ethos the pathos and the logos so when i was talking about persuading you through reason that would be the logos aspect of rhetoric but i said rhetoric goes beyond just that we could talk about the ethos pathos and logo so let's talk about what we mean by the influence of character the emotional appeal and the use of reasoning very briefly here's another quote from aristotle from the same passage in the rhetoric now again just read the highlighted portions of the modes of persuasion there are three kinds first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind and the third i'm proof going down when we stir the emotions we provide a truth and persuasive arguments character that's the first one people that have a certain reputation are going to generally be more persuasive than people that have suspicious reputation somebody that is very dignified is often viewed as somebody more trustworthy and we can believe what they say again that's not always the case and then putting the audience in a certain frame of mind would have to be how you phrase your words or craft your speech what kind of emotions are you trying to elicit as you speak to move the audience in a way that's not relying purely on the argument or reasoning involved and then when he talks about proof that's where we're talking about the reason the premises for an argument the supporting claims that are going to hopefully persuade as to the truth of the matter okay so the ethos of the pathos and the logos logic versus rhetoric again that's exactly what we've been talking about and we're going to study logic more formally later in the semester but logic and rhetoric have been the twin anchors in western education since the days of aristotle those used to be standard courses of study as a matter of fact logic used to be taught in middle schools it's usually not even taught in high schools at this point and even in college you can sometimes get through without taking a course in logic though i wouldn't recommend it logic is used to demonstrate the truth of a claim in order to prove something whereas rhetoric we already said is used to win somebody to your point of view or persuade them remember proof and persuasion are not the same things rhetoric is psychologically effective but doesn't necessarily establish anything for sure rhetoric doesn't prove it persuades whereas logic is supposed to give you not psychological reasons but logical reasons it's kind of redundant to say that so rhetoric gives psychological reasons you know when i use the word there i'm using the word reason sort of loosely argument or deductive argument of course tries to prove however it might fail to persuade i can present you with a really valid even a sound logical deductive argument that proves exactly what i wanted to prove but you can come away unpersuaded if you don't follow the argument that's very often the case of course if it is an argument that truly proves its conclusion and you're a rational reasonable person who understands the argument then you should be persuaded by it and would be foolish to reject the conclusion after that so we'll call that a logical reason so we'll distinguish between psychological reasons and logical reasons for believing something critical thinkers have to distinguish the two argument from rhetoric or the logical from the psychological it's important to recognize the use of non-argumentative persuasion so a fair assessment of a claim can be made very briefly i'll just include the five cannons of rhetoric i don't want to test you guys on this but just so you know the guide to composing a persuasive message in addition to the tips that i gave you before would be invention right the process of developing your arguments then arranging or organizing the argument for its best effect coming up with a style so that you can present the argument in a certain way the memorization of the argument or speech that's going to help you present it in a more effective way and then the delivery even involving body language if this is delivered in front of an audience right the way you pronounce your words the tone the pace of your presentation all has an effect on the rhetorical power of the case that you're trying to make we could also talk about rhetorical devices now there are different tests for assessing information rhetorical devices are methods for using emotionally loaded language frames that attempt to persuade us in some way so they attempt to influence our beliefs thoughts attitudes feelings and behaviors and actions um so let's just look at a few of these words or expressions often carry emotive meaning they already said this is what we mean by rhetorical force the power to elicit a psychological and emotional response from a hearer and i'm going to go through a few rhetorical devices euphemisms and dysphemisms wheelers down players stereotypes innuendo loaded questions ridicule sarcasm hyperbole rhetorical definitions explanations rhetorical analogies and comparisons and proof surrogates as well as repetition and we can group these into different categories as well the first group we'll call the slanters okay there are different tasks that some of these might have so one to make things sound better than they are to make things down worse than they are to avoid criticism or to make something more or less important so this is where euphemisms are going to fall in we can replace one expression with another that carries respectively more positive or negative associations so i'll give you a few examples but i won't slow down very much here escort that could be a euphemism for a bodyguard okay it could also be a euphemism for a prostitute you could also have a dysphemism for a bodyguard which would be like calling them a thug all right one sounds more positive one sounds more negative that's what we mean by euphemism and dysphemism a weasler would be a way of kind of qualifying things in order to avoid criticism or to get out of something right to shield the claim so an example that might be using the word perhaps or possibly when you make a claim as far as i know or within reasonable limits okay so you've got a way out if you say as far as i know blah blah blah you know if it turns out that that's false you've at least said as far as i know you have a down player as a rhetorical device used to see make something seem less important than it actually is you could attach a thing like the word merely or mere or so-called right this so-called expert on climate change i think that's the example i gave you no all right bill borrowed his father's credit card you know put words in scare quotes like that is also going to you know downplay something so it's you know it didn't steal it he simply borrowed it then you get the second group where you rely on unwarranted assumptions an assumption is an idea that you hold to as background information it's usually not stated overtly but the issue does rest a little bit on the assumptions that we have hidden in the background and all reasoning does require assumptions that phrase that you know happens when you assume i'm not going to go on with the phrase but the fact is you have to make assumptions in order to reason at all the problem is sometimes your assumptions are unwarranted or are poor assumptions and we need to try to point out or figure out where we are relying on an unjustified or false assumption we don't want questionable assumptions because they can undercut the argument so stereotypes would fall under this category stereotypes of generalization or an assumption about all the members of a group based on some image that is circulating about that group right stereotypes are often negative they're not always that way sometimes they're positive here's an example like asians are smart women are irrational religious people are bigots you know asians are smart might be fairly positive the other one's pretty negative but again these are stereotypes these are over generalizations and again they are basically false when they really apply to individuals innuendo is where we apply something without saying it overtly a great example would be you know far be it for me to call my opponents liars right so i'm not calling them a liar but just the fact that i mention it in that way again called significant mention already gets you thinking of my opponent in that in that manner that you're considering that they are a liar even though i didn't accuse them that of that officially loaded questions this is where the answer to a question that you're you phrase a question rather in such a way that whatever answer you give is going to respond to some other assumption built into the question so no matter how it's answered the assumptions being asserted the famous example here is have you stopped beating your wife right that's a loaded question we're going to look at more of those later in the semester if you say no if you say yes it really doesn't matter because you've already admitted that you're beating your wife or have been beating your wife in the past a third group would be the slanters these use humor and exaggeration to try to move the audience and these are really really effective but they really don't have any use in actually making a proof so let me give you some examples of types like the use of ridicule the horse laugh or sarcasm which is basically the idea of just laughing at your opponent's position mocking it using ridicule if you ever watch good debates or at least persuasive debates a lot of good debaters by the way will use laughter when they're presented with something that they don't know how to respond to with an argument they'll just mock it and say that that idea is so foolish it's not worth responding to that's a type of ridicule hyperbole would be exaggeration where we're using exaggeration again for its emotional effect again these are all about moving the emotions right describing conservatives as fascists that's hyperbole it's also a dysphemism describing liberals as communists same type of thing using exaggeration it brings with it certain emotional responses she's dumber than a rock okay not literally but again this is hyperbole ridicule comparison as well and then you've got definition by comparison uh which is ordered again to influence somebody mislead the audience perhaps going on to some examples um explanations and comparisons are very effective at doing this so we can talk about rhetorical definition and rhetorical explanation where we use loaded language to try to and we already talked about this earlier so i don't really need to go through this again right now but the example you know animals are a fellow conscious beings that's supposed to you know have more com lead you to have more compassion on animals liberal is somebody who feels generous when they're giving away another person's money kind of a joke but also rhetorical definition and we can do the same thing when we make explanations right she smiled at you so she'd have an edge when you hand out raises it makes you question as to you know whether or not she's being sincere in her you know reaction to you rhetorical language and misleading comparisons are out there rhetorical comparison and analogy we'll talk a lot about analogy specifically when we get to inductive reasoning and scientific reasoning later this semester so i don't want to really unpack what we mean by analogy other than that it's a type of comparison right he had a laugh like an old car trying to start that's what's called a simile he's a fire plug that's a metaphor those are types of comparisons we use these again to elicit emotional responses now when considering comparisons we could ask several questions these are important to do number one is important information missing and is the same standard of comparison being used because if we don't have the same standard of comparison being used there can be problems we also have proof surrogates these are things that stand in place of actual proof could be something as small as the attachment of an adverb into a sentence so obviously tackled onto or tacked onto a sentence could be a proof surrogate okay so i haven't actually given you the reasons i'm just saying obviously it's the case so you assume that there are reasons and it should be obvious to you okay that is in place of proof phrases like reliable sources say or everybody knows this will stand in for proof as well also the constant repetition of something is a rhetorical device that's going to get you to believe something this is what's been used by masters of propaganda when you hear something over and over and over again you tend to believe that it's true okay so if you could be bold and confident in your lies perhaps you're going to be successful last thing i want to point out before we finish up is just how images are used in order to persuade we will deal with this with our next lecture in more depth because we're going to be looking at advertising and advertising techniques but i want you to be aware right now that images and pictures are never true or false okay they're not claims they're not propositions they cannot be true or false but they will elicit some kind of response and they can be deceptive and you have to remember in today's day and age images can be doctored very easily digitally manipulated and crafted so as to create in your mind a proposition that's false so this picture here condoleezza rice and osama bin laden this is not osama bin laden his face has actually been placed on the actual person in his photograph but you know if you know who those individuals are who those individuals are supposed to be you come away with a particular idea in mind so this picture is not true it's not false but it can be emotionally persuasive okay it could be an example of a rhetorical technique okay that is unfortunately very much used and utilized in advertising we are a visual group we respond well to visual imagery that is everything that i wanted to present i apologize that i sped things up a little bit near the end but um i had to do that for a particular reason anyways i'm glad you joined me i'm going to see you guys in our next lecture and that's going to be on advertising techniques take care