Friday, April 9, 2021

When the speaker confuses their illogical emotive sounds for an actual argument.

This is another good example of the two languages I was speaking of some time this past week.  People both speaking English but their priors and their habits standing in the way of understanding one another. 

Representative Jason Crow is making a subjective, emotional and rhetorical assertion and claim.  He is not making an argument in any meaningful way.   

A normative statement and statement of personal belief - "I know weapons of war have no place in our communities."

A rhetorical device - "Weapons of war."   Any instrument of death (hands, feet, sticks, etc.) can be characterized as a weapon of war.  The effort by Crow is to select words for their emotive effect, i.e. the logical fallacy of Argumentum ad passiones, an argument from emotion.

Logical fallacy, Argumentum ad verecundiam, appeal to authority - "As a hunter, gun owner, & former Army Ranger" -  Crow is basing the entirety of his argument on his authority as a hunter, gun owner, and former Army Ranger.  The speciousness is obvious.  There is no reason to believe that any collection of individuals who meet those three criteria will all reach the same conclusion. There is no authority.  Indeed, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that individuals with all three of those characteristics are going to reach a different conclusion than that reached by Crow.  

Logical fallacy, Argument by assertion - "@POTUS’s EAs will save lives & take common-sense steps to combat the gun violence epidemic."

Logical fallacy, Argumentum ad populum - "The House is ready. @POTUS is ready. The Senate must follow our lead & act now."  Crow is suggesting that simply because the House and President are ready to do X, the Senate must then also do X, no matter what X is.  The fallaciousness of the reasoning speaks for itself.

 So Representative Jason Crow has strung some words together that are at best rhetoric (or gibberish) but are certainly not an argument.

Huntsman merely makes a reasonable request "Now that your moral authority is cancelled out, please offer a rational argument for these executive orders based on the Constitution, case law, and neutrally-sourced statistics."  In other words, please make an argument, don't spew nonsense.

Seems like a reasonable request.


No comments:

Post a Comment