Rhetoric

Because of our modern societies' vast scientific achievements, we might tend to think that facts and deductive reasoning completely govern how we think. We imagine we are intelligent beings who can tell a truth from a falsity and are only swayed by evidence. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Deduction is only one tool in a powerful field of persuasion called rhetoric. All rhetorical arguments can be divided into three categories: logos, pathos and ethos.

Logos is what many of us would assume is the most persuasive argumentative technique. This is the purely logical. Facts and beliefs are arrived at through untainted deductive reasoning. In this manner, we can reduce statements to a binary true or false. This is the field of rhetoric we hope our world is governed by.
Mathematicians, engineers, judges and public officials we trust deal only in logos. They are swayed only by facts and logic. However, this is often not the case as logical arguments can become shrouded by the fog of the remaining two rhetorical categories.

No man can be an expert in all things. In today's complicated world there is simply too much information for one lowly human to accumulate. This is why we specialize, and why we defer to the judgment and expertise of other people. We take a statement from these experts as likely to be accurate because we assume they have analyzed the logical arguments and reached the proper conclusion. We then adopt their conclusions as our beliefs based on our faith in their reputation. We have outsourced our logical thinking to other humans and trust their conclusions are correct. This is the rhetorical category of ethos: when we are persuaded by certain arguments, not because of their inherent worth, but because of the status of those making them.

Unfortunately, neither of these rhetorical methods can safeguard us from illogical thinking. This is due in large part to the extremely persuasive powers of pathos. Pathos arguments function by manipulating us through our emotions. They persuade not because they are logical, but because they inspire a particular feeling within us. It may make us happy or frightened or patriotic or nostalgic. In this way it subverts our logical mind. We may not even be able to identify exactly what emotions it plays to, but nevertheless it can use our subconscious against us. This is an instinctual response which has served mankind well throughout our evolutionary history. Without emotional thinking we would never have been able to survive to invent logic. Avoiding things that frightened us and pursuing things that made us happy proved very advantageous to our development as a species. However today our susceptibility to pathos serves to further the agenda in the arena of marketers, political hopefuls, religious leaders, and anywhere else irrational thinking rules.