Friday, November 5, 2010
Appeal to Emotion
According to the “Critical Thinking” textbook by Richard L. Epstein, “An appeal to emotion in an argument is just a premise that says, roughly, you should believe or do something because you feel a certain way.” The type of appeal to emotion that strikes me is the appeal to pity. Appeal to pity is a premise that seeks to make an agreement with people by the use of sympathy. An example of this type of fallacy is; “That commercially on TV was so sad. It almost made me cry seeing all those poor, abandoned animals. That place said they only offer a temporary home more the animals. We should go to that place and get a dog.” The unstated premise is that “If we feel sorry for the abandoned animals, then we should help them out by getting an animal from there or help spread the word and influence others to get animals from this organization.” I have taken notice to this type of appeal to emotion more recently since I have learned more about it.
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Appeal to emotion was a very interesting chapter of the book for me. When I was reading through this chapter, appeal to pity stood out for me as well. You did a good job of explaining what appeal to pity means. The example that you used was good and it helped me to better understand this concept. I have seen appeal to pity many times in television commercials such as the one you described. Many commercials use this type of fallacy to convince people to send in donations. There is definitely an unstated premise in commercials that are similar to this. Overall, this was a very informative and well thought out post.
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