Abstract
This paper discusses the ways in which a person’s character (ethos) and a hearer’s emotional response (pathos) are part of the complex judgments made about experts’ claims, along with an actual assessment of those claims (logos). The analysis is rooted in the work of Aristotle, but expands to consider work on emotion and cognition conducted by Thagard and Gigerenzer. It also draws on some conclusions of the general epistemology of testimony (of which expert testimony is a special subset), where it is argued that we learn not just from the transmission of another’s beliefs, but from the words they speak. This shifts the onus in testimony away from the intentions of a speaker onto the judgments of an audience, capturing better its social character and reflecting our experience of receiving testimony. I conclude, however, that accepting the arguments of experts involves much more than simply believing what they say.
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Notes
The following web sites indicate the nature of the support Wakefield continues to receive. Details of the case against him and the U.K. trial can be found on http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article7009882.ece; an indication of his support is apparent from: http://www.wesupportandywakefield.com/. See also Dominus (2011).
Here I am thinking only of the speaker’s ethos as this is first discussed in Book I, and not the extended discussion later in the Rhetoric that involves the character of the audience and thus what the speaker must know about that audience.
The translation here is from Kennedy: (Aristotle 2007).
This is a different use of heuristics to the earlier model popularized by Kahneman and Tversky (1996), founded in a different conception of the underlying nature of rationality. The differences involved are beyond the parameters of this paper.
A good error is one that a person would be better off making than not making (Gigerenzer 2008: 66). Trial-and-error learning is indicative of this.
I am grateful to Michael Baumtrog, the editors and to two anonymous reviewers for suggestions for improving the paper.
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Tindale, C.W. Character and Knowledge: Learning from the Speech of Experts. Argumentation 25, 341–353 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9224-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9224-9