SCARE TACTICS Argumentation Library Volume 3 Series Editors: Frans H. van Eemeren, University ofA msterdam t Rob Grootendorst, University ofA msterdam 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 Vlll 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 ix 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.