I tell a lie. I do know the reason or, at least, a reason for all the bitterness and vehemence, particularly in the blogosphere and it’s a reason thousands of years old.
Aristotle identified three different types of methods of persuasion or rhetorical proof: the character and credibility of the speaker (ethos), appeals to emotion (pathos), and the use of reason to construct an argument (logos). Ethos includes the resume of the speaker but it isn’t limited to that. It also includes the demeanor and apparent character of the speaker.
Pathos includes not only the appeal to pity but also the appeals to fear, ridicule, patriotism, outrage, a host of other emotions, and the appeal to consequences. Ad hominem arguments are appeals to the emotions.
Logos, the appeal to reason, includes statistics, mathematics, deduction, induction, and logical inference. Evidence, historical parallel or analogy, and logic are the bricks and mortar of the appeal to reason.
This isn’t a good time for persuasion based on character or credibility. Authoritativeness or gravity in demeanor have been supplanted by TVQ. Military leaders are looked down on. Divines have cast themselves into disrepute. Scholarship has become so specialized that, unless the matter under consideration lies within the minute field of study of the person in question, appeals to authority based on credentials may be fallacious. Persons of notably low character are adulated as idols.
I think that there are good reasons rooted in cognitive development rather than in abstruse philosophical theories that appeals to reason have little force these days. But that’s a post for another time (and one I’m working on).
That leaves appeals to the emotions of various different kinds as methods of persuasion and we’re getting them good and hard.
The blogosphere is something of a bellwether for this. The blogosphere is no respecter of personages; persuasive arguments that rely on ethos fall flat and, indeed, claims of authority are as frequently fallacious as not. And, as I’ve barely suggested above, a considerable portion of the blog-writing and -reading public may be nearly incapable of framing or following an appeal to reason.
Expect continued appeals to emotion. It’s what’s worked so far.
Logos relies on a receptive mind more interested in truth than ideology. You’re a rare example of a person with that sort of mind.
A person who refuses to examine — and indeed clean house on — his presuppositions and prejudices is uterly immune to reason. Presupposition will always trump logic.
The beginning of wisdom is drenching your own assumptions in an acid wash. Seek a state of presuppositionlessness. Then look again at the world and accept only those ideas which are grounded in reality. And once you’re sure you know what’s right, subject those new beliefs to the same hard-edged skepticism. Rinse and repeat.
Greek Ethos has some strong similarities with Roman Auctoritas.