Scare Tactics

This volume provides a theory of the structure of reasoning used in fear and threat appeal argumentation. Such arguments come under the heading of the argumentum ad baculum, the "argument to the stick/club", traditionally treated as a fallacy in the logic textbooks. As examples show, some of these seem reasonable, while others are highly suspicious, or even outrageously fraudulent. In addition to the examples taken from logic textbooks, other cases treated come from a variety of sources, including political debates, legal arguments, and arguments from media sources, like magazine articles and television advertisements. The purpose of this book is to explain how such arguments work as devices of persuasion, and to develop a method for analyzing and evaluating their reasonable and fallacious uses in particular cases. The book shows how such arguments share a common structure, revealing several distinctive forms of argument nested within each other. Based on its account of this cognitive structure, the new dialectical theory presents methods for identifying, analyzing, and evaluating these arguments, as they are used in specific cases.