From Theory of Rhetoric to the Practice of Language Use: The Case of Appeals to Ethos Elements

Abstract

In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.

Towards a Holistic View on Argument Quality Prediction

“…Besides the well-studied logos dimension of logical plausibility and the pathos dimension investigated in this work, the third remaining dimension from classical argumentation theory is ethos, which did not receive sufficient attention by the AM community so far. Existing smaller datasets (Koszowy et al, 2022;Duthie et al, 2016b) invite to visit these uncharted territories, e.g., by studying argument strength in context to the provenance of an argument.…”

Argumentation and Identity: A Normative Evaluation of the Arguments of Delegates to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference

“…Since arguments of this type are clearly designed to influence the way in which the speaker is perceived, there are certainly links to be explored with character judgments (Walton 2006) and the recently invigorated field of study into ethotic arguments (Koszowy et al 2022;Pereira-Fariña et al 2022). This would require a full treatment of its own, not least because the need to differentiate character and identity, and the use of arguments to reduce the ethos of others, rather than to build our own identities, would add levels of great complexity.…”