Emotions and Arguments

Hokay-

Yesterday I had the pleasure of a lovely "debate" with someone on the merits of the "Appeal to Emotion" fallacy.

For those interested and unaware, standard argumentation has two main kinds of fallacies- formal and informal.

Formal fallacies are those that make an argument structurally nonsensical. For example:

Socrates was smart. Socrates was a human. Therefore, all humans are smart.


Informal fallacies, on the other hand, don't completely destroy an argument the instant they're made, but rather, they diminish the trust one may have in the arguer.
An appeal to authority- "The world is flat. My daddy told me so."
Ad hominem (a personal attack)- "The world is flat because you're an idiot."
Ad populum- "97% of people believe the world is flat, so it is!"
Appeal to emotion- "The world is flat because I'm sad/you're upsetting me."

And so on- Informal fallacies don't technically make you wrong or anything, but they usually make you less trustworthy if you're willing to overuse them.
We use appeals to authority constantly in reference to the authority of our textbooks or our professors or scientists- but that doesn't make us wrong. Informal fallacies are reserved for arguments that you make that have no actual bearing on evidence, whether they're right or wrong.

My textbook might say that the world is flat or round. By trusting in it without using other sources, I'm at least not making the best logical choices.

Now then- with that at least glossed over, the argument in question presented to me was that appeals to emotion are not wrong or bad because humans are emotional creatures and so long as we approach any argument, there will be some emotion behind it.

The premise is a valid point. Humans are always emotional. However, the conclusion was a gross misunderstanding of what an appeal to emotion is. The idea behind informal fallacies being bad is that your sole "evidence" for your argument is that an authority said so, or because you feel it, or because other people agree.

This seems to cause some common misconceptions with argumentation in general.
People often want to divorce themselves from all emotion when arguing. Or, the other extreme- they want to rely on their emotions.
Emotions aren't inherently evil or anything. If you're upset with someone and it's the *reason* you're arguing, that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong at all with having emotions. The problem is when your emotion becomes the reason you're right or the other person is wrong.

"I'm upset. You're not listening to me- you've failed to demonstrate that you understand the position I'm coming from." That's fine.
"You don't understand where I'm coming from because I'm still upset." That's not fine.

A healthy balance where we endeavor to understand how and why we feel the way we do allows us the opportunity to better empathize with someone who may be upsetting us to no fault of their own. Everyone's emotions and emotional responses are unique to them and all too often, we get sucked into how lousy we're feeling without recognizing that it may not be anyone else's fault that we're feeling that way.
This is why human communication is so important. Because we can't understand each others' emotions by default, and most people aren't in touch enough with humanity to be able to accurately judge emotions through conversation unless it's an explicitly discussed topic.

Talk to each other. Don't try to avoid how you feel, but just remember that how you feel has no factual bearing on things that did or did not happen. Your emotions are simply how your mind is knee-jerk responding to events that it perceives have occurred, even if they haven't.

So sit down, shut up, and talk to each other! (Did I say shut up? I meant the opposite of that...)

-
Waddles