Evaluation of Cases

Abstract

The presumption in chapter 1 that fear appeal arguments are useful and socially commendable ways of changing behavior clashes dramatically with the general line of presumption of the logic textbooks that ad baculum is a fallacy. The problem of evaluating such arguments has been deepened by the subsequent exposure of their underlying cognitive structure as instances of practical reasoning. The task of evaluating fear and threat appeal arguments has turned out to be harder than the textbook treatments generally presume. Many of the cases studied above turn out to be reasonable arguments, once the form of the argument is identified, and its practical reasoning structure is properly analyzed. Also, it will be the contention of chapter 7 that to properly evaluate a fear or threat appeal argument, the context of dialogue in which the argument was used must be taken into account. What this means is that the same fear appeal or threat appeal argument could be fallacious as used in one context of dialogue, but reasonable (nonfallacious) as used in a different context of dialogue. A dialogue, to use the current term (Walton, 1998) is a conventional type of conversation that two speech partners contribute to, according to maxims (rules) of politeness (Grice, 1975).