SCARE TACTICS

Argumentation Library

Volume 3

Series Editors: Frans H. van Eemeren, University of Amsterdam t Rob Grootendorst, University of Amsterdam

Joseph Wenzel, University of Illinois John Woods, University of Lethbridge

SCARE TACTICS ARGUMENTS THAT APPEAL

TO FEAR AND THREATS

by

DOUGLAS WALTON Department of Philosophy,

University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-481-5552-1 ISBN 978-94-017-2940-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2940-6

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved

© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

Liber Amicorum

This book is dedicated to the memory of my old friend and colleague Kevin Donaghy. Kevin and I were graduate students in the same philosophy program at the University of Toronto. But we kept in touch even after Kevin became Professor of Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. Kevin's premature death of cancer in 1998 was a deep loss to me, and to all who had the good fortune to know him.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

IN1RODUCTION xiii

CHAP'IER 1: FEAR APPEAL ARGUMENTS 1

1. What are Fear Appeal Arguments? 1 2. Fear Appeals in Sales and Advertising 2 3. Government Use of Fear Appeal Ads 6 4. Fear Appeal Ads in Presidential Campaigns 9 5. Scaring By Suggestion 14 6. Three Social Science Fear Appeal Models 16 7. Logical Structure and Rhetorical Structure of Fear Appeal Arguments 20 8. IntroducingtheAdBaculumFallacy 23 9. Fallacious and Weak Arguments 25

10. Evaluating Cases 26 Notes: Chapter 1 29

CHAP'IER 2: AD BACULUM IN THE LOGIC TEXTBOOKS 31

1. Historical Origins 32 2. Appeal to Force 34 3. Appeal to Fear 38 4. Shifting from Force to (Indirect) Threats 41 5. Are All Ad Baculum Arguments Fallacious? 46 6. The Question of Relevance 50 7. Shifting from Force to Fear 53 8. Prudential Versus Irrelevant Threats 57 9. Stili Floundering After All These Years 61

10. Unsolved Mysteries 67 Notes: Chapter 2 70

CHAPTER 3: AD BACULUM IN ARGUMENTATION TODAY 71

1. Van de Vate, Woods-Walton, and Kielkopf 71 2. Woods, Rescher, and Wreen 76 3. Jason on Scare Tactics 80 4. Wreen's Criticisms of Copi 83 5. Wreen's Criticisms of Hurley 87 6. Brinton's Criticisms ofWreen 89 7. Hooke on the Everydayness of Ad Baculum 92 8. Wohlrapp on Traditional and Modem Views 93

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9. A Dialectical Analysis 96 10. Need for a Dual Approach 99

Notes: Chapter 3 100

CHAPTER 4: THE SPEECH ACT OF MAKING A THREAT 101 1. Legal Concerns with Threats 101 2. Threats and Stalking 104 3. Speech Acts 107 4. Is Threatening an Illocutionary Act? 109 5. Threats and Promises 111 6. A Definition of the Speech Act of Threat 113 7. Threats and Undertakings 118 8. Credibility of a Threat 120 9. Indirect Speech Acts and Implicatures 122

10. A Pragmatic Analysis 125 Notes: Chapter 4 128

CHAPTER 5: THE NEW THEORY OF THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE OF FEAR AND THREAT APPEAL ARGUMENTS 129

1. Outline of the New Theory 129 2. Argument from Consequences 132 3. Practical Reasoning 134 4. Critical Questions about Consequences 137 5. Conditional Form of Threat Appeal Argument 139 6. Disjunctive Form of Threat Appeal Argument 141 7. Fonn of the Fear Appeal Argument 143 8. Psychologism and Logic 145 9. Arguer's Intentions in Fear Appeals and Threat Appeals 147

10. Threats Without Fear, and Fear Appeals Without Threats 148 Notes: Chapter 5 151

CHAPTER 6: QUESTIONS OF CLASSIFICATION 153 1. Can You Have Ad Baculum Arguments Without Threats? 153 2. Should Use of Force Without a Threat or Fear Appeal Qualify as an

Ad Baculum? 157 3. Should Appeal to Fear be Included in the Ad Baculum Category? 158 4. How Can a Balanced Approach be Achieved? 160 5. Should There Be a New Category of Danger Appeal Arguments? 162 6. Can Nonarguments Be Classified as Ad Baculum? 163 7. How Can a Threat Be Identified in a Case? 165 8. Can Fear or Threats Suffuse the Atmosphere in a Case? 168 9. Why is a Classification System Important? 171

10. Summary of the Classification System 173 Notes: Chapter 6 175

CHAPTER 7: EVALUATION OF CASES 177 1. The Sleaze Factor 177 2. Types of Dialogue 180

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3. Relevance of Threats and Fear Appeals 182 4. Threats in Negotiation 184 5. Fallacious Cases 188 6. Critical Questions and Evaluation 191 7. Manipulation and Deception 193 8. Sales and Advertising Cases 195 9. Political Discourse 198

10. Summary of the Evaluation Process 200 Notes: Chapter 7 204

BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

INDEX 213

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for this book was supported by a Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a Fellowship from the Oregon Humanities Research Center at the University of Oregon. Thanks are given to the editors of Philosophy and Rhetoric for permission to use parts of my paper, 'Practical Reasoning and the Structure of Fear Appeal Arguments' (Philosophy and Rhetoric, 29, 1996, 301-313), which appear (in modified form) in chapter one of this book. I would like to thank Anne Levack for letting me use two large boxes of articles on fear appeal arguments she had collected as part of her dissertation work, and Kevin Donaghy for sending me a copy of his master's thesis in computer science (Donaghy, 1987).

My special thanks to Louise Lepine for typing an initial draft, and to Amy Merrett for producing the final script of the book. I would also like to thank Rita Campbell for preparing the index, and Harry Simpson for help with proof-reading the final version of the manuscript.

INTRODUCTION

This book presents many interesting cases of arguments that use scare tactics-appeals to fear, threats and force, of various kinds. Many of these arguments are amusing, once you see the clever tactic used. Others are just scary. Some of the arguments appear to be quite reasonable, while others are highly suspicious, or even outrageously fraudulent. Many of them are examples of the so-called argumentum ad baculum, the "argument to the stick/club," traditionally treated as a fallacy in the logic textbooks. Many others are examples of fear appeal ads, currently much in evidence in television commercials that portray the deadly consequences of drunk driving or having sex without a condom. The purpose of this book is to explain how such arguments work, and to present a method for analyzing and evaluating their use in particular cases.

Appeals to fear and threats have long been known to be powerfully effective arguments. It is easy to routinely dismiss such arguments as fallacious, as the logic textbooks have generally tended to do, and to assume they are always wrong (from a logical point of view). But these appeals are used so commonly in advertisements, negotiations and other kinds of everyday conversational argument exchanges­sometimes for a good purpose, for example to try to get teenagers to avoid risky sexual behavior-that they do sometimes appear to have a legitimate function as reasonable arguments. Hence it is simplistic to condemn them as being logically fallacious in every case. This being so, the problem is where to draw the line, distinguishing between the fallacious and legitimate cases.

A speaker presenting a plan for a reorganization of a business concludes her presentation to the employees of the business with the following words: "Gentlemen, I am sure that if you think it over you will see that my suggestion has real merit. It is only a suggestion of course, and not an order. As I mentioned at our last conference, I am planning to reorganize the whole business. I still hope, however, that it will not be necessary to curtail the operations of your department." No explicit threat is made, but it would be very clear to the employees at the meeting that the speaker has indeed made a threat, and that the threat was made to get the employees to support the speaker's suggestion for reorganization. The problem here appears to be a failure of relevance. The threat does not really support the arguer's thesis that her suggestion has merit as a plan. Even if its irrelevance is recognized however, the threat could be quite persuasive to the employees, as a reason for compliance. This case is an example of the kind of argument traditionally classified as an ad baculum fallacy by the logic textbooks. But exactly what the fallacy consists in remains unclear.

Another kind of argument covered under the same heading is the fear appeal. Much used in current politics, as well as sales and advertising argumentation, this argument tries to get a target audience to adopt a course of action by portraying the only alternative as some horrible disaster (usually death or severe injury) that is very fearful to the audience. In anti-smoking campaign ads, for example, cigarettes are shown as melting into a slimy mass of poisonous chemicals and being drunk by a

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person from a beer glass (case 1.5). In an ad to target teenagers on drunk driving, a horrible traffic accident is depicted, where a young girl is killed. Then someone is shown informing her parents of her death (case 1.10). Use of fear appeal argumentation is very common, and these appeals often appear to be quite persuasive, or to be successful tactics for gaining compliance. One could even say that, in many case, they seem to be appropriate arguments, as used in a particular context. Aristotle (Rhetoric 1382a20) described appeal to the emotion of fear as a fundamental rhetorical strategy of argumentation. Religious argumentation has always relied heavily on fear of the devil and the tortures of hell as a central theme in the fiery sermon. In management-union negotiations and in business bargaining of all kinds, threats to take actions that will have bad financial consequences for the other party are extremely common. Such threats seem to be a normal part of the fabric of the negotiation process. Advertisers commonly use fear appeal arguments suggesting that the viewer will be a social outcast, or will be infected by scary germs, if he does not use a recommended deodorant, mouthwash, deodorant, or toilet bowl cleaner. Politi­cians use attack ads to tell voters that an opponent will raise taxes or lower taxes, with disastrous consequences, in a way that appeals to the fear of the respondents. In one famous ad, a candidate for the U.S. presidency was characterized as "trigger happy," and the ad featured a nuclear explosion. And of course, governments now use fear appeal ads on a wide scale, to try to get teenagers to stop smoking, to try and discourage drinking and driving, to warn of the dangers of AIDS, and for other purposes of promoting public health and safety. Here we have an abundance of actual cases that suggest that the use of scare tactics is not only very common in everyday argumentation, but also that such tactics often appear to be highly persuasive. Experimental findings are mixed, but the perception at present is that fear appeal ads can be successfully used to change behavior and attitudes of the groups to whom they have been specially addressed.

In the past decade, there has been an especially well accepted belief in government and business that fear appeal arguments are an effective tool of advertising, public persuasion, and advocacy. This perception has prompted, and been encouraged by, a mass of experimental work in the social sciences. This work seems to suggest that fear appeals are effective in changing behavior and attitudes, and it has tried to explain why, but only with partial success. The problem is that experimental investigations discovered that fear appeals have a cognitive component, as well as an emotional­affective component. In other words, the subject, when confronted by a fear appeal argument, does not just respond directly to the level of fear induced by the message, but may tend to think out how to deal with the message by looking at alternatives, or coping with the fear, instead of just acting in accord with the solution advocated in the message. Studying how fear appeals work is shown (in chapter one) to require more than just an empirical study of experimental responses to fear appeal messages. It requires a logical analysis of the structure of reasoning that a subject uses when confronted by a fear appeal argument.

It is the argument of this book that this logical structure is a kind of agent-based practical reasoning of the kind currently being used in artificial intelligence in the design of intelligent robots and software system. Called practical reasoning in multi­agent systems, this structure is based on the concept of a goal-directed agent as a reasoner that interacts with its environment (including other agents) in order to carry out its goals. A basic component of multi-agent systems is the communicative

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interaction of one agent with another, so that the two agents can engage in argumentation by reasoning with each other. For example, one agent can try to persuade the other agent to carry out a particular course of action by arguing that if the first agent did not carry out this action, negative consequences for the first agent would be likely to occur. This basic form of reasoning, called argumentation from consequences, is shown in the book to be fundamental to the structure of fear appeal and threat appeal arguments. By specifying other different forms of inference that make up the cognitive structure underlying fear and threat appeal arguments, Scare Tactics classifies the various different types of argument involved, and shows how they relate to and reinforce each other. The most important of these forms of inference are collected for easy reference in the summary of the evaluation process presented in the last section of the last chapter (chapter 7, section 10).

This book gives general criteria for the identification, analysis and evaluation of fear and threat appeal arguments that apply to the above kinds of cases, and many others as well, challenging the traditional presumption that all such arguments are fallacies. Forms of argument representing the different types of scare tactics arguments are defined, and it is argued that these forms are often used in common arguments in a way that is not fallacious. Many interesting cases of this type of argument are studied, in all kinds of contexts, including politics, legal arguments, international negotiations, sales, and advertising.