Arguing with Trump supporters III: tone isn’t rationality

Just to recap: Trump supporters avoid taking on the responsibilities of rational argumentation by taking the position of a negative case even when they’re making an affirmative claim. They do so this through shifting the issue from Trump to various distractions: your emotionality (“Why are you so upset?”), your sense of humor (“You just can’t take a joke”), your supposed biases (“Snopes is a liberal site”), your identity (“Typical Social Justice Warrior bullshit”), whatever the latest fear-mongering distraction-of-the-moment whaddaboutism is that pro-Trump propaganda is promoting (her emails, Benghazeeeeee, abortion, socialism, immigration, a prayer blanket found in the desert, the caravan, ISIS, Biden will kick in your door and take your guns), and by what amounts to a version of sealioning (setting themselves as the arbiter of truth).

Sometimes, they make claims, but they rarely engage in argumentation—at this point, they even rarely engage in pseudo-rational argumentation. Since maybe they still are, and just not in places I hang out, I’ll go ahead and explain how it works and why it’s hard to argue with. Pseudo-rational argumentation is neither rational, nor argumentation, but it has surface features that people (fallaciously) associate with rational argumentation, so it can look like it’s rational.

We too often characterize rational argumentation by surface features and, paradoxically, our visceral response. As far as the surface features, we’re tempted to call something a rational argument if it has: a calm (or “matter of fact”) tone, what are sometimes called “rationality markers” (words like “because,” “therefore,” “it necessarily follows”), appeals to external knowledge (“everyone knows,” “everyone agrees,” “obviously,” “clearly”), data, appeals to expert opinion (citing reliable experts, or people with apparently expert information). Finally, a lot of people think (because they have been taught) that a “rational” argument will “make sense”—it resonates. That’s the visceral response part. Let’s call an argument that fulfills these criteria but not the criteria of rational argumentation pseudo-rational argumentation.

Such arguments appear to be rational, as long as we judge on the basis of superficial traits of the argument and the person making the argument (and how we’re cued to judge the argument and person).

Tone is not an indication of the ir/rationality of an argument
Pseudo-rationalism plays on the common misunderstanding of rationalism as not emotionalism (a relatively recent want to think about emotions v. reason). In this world, a person is rational if they are not emotional, and an emotional person is not rational. In fact, that someone appears unemotional might mean all sorts of things, such as that they’re just good at suppressing their expression of emotions, they’re not an empathetic person, they don’t understand the situation, the person judging whether someone is emotional is a bad judge of emotionality (this last is pretty common, I think).

Being emotional doesn’t necessarily mean that one has an irrational argument. One of the things Rando might do (especially if Chester is female) is first deliberately outrage Chester, and then accuse Chester of having an invalid argument (or being unable to argue) because they are emotional. (This is a classic strategy of abusers). What this does is shift the stasis (that is, the thing about which we’re arguing) from Chester’s argument to Chester’s emotional state.[1]

This is one instance of Rando’s (the nickname of Random Internetasshole, the hypothetical interlocutor of Chester’s) favorite strategy—throw the burden of proof onto Chester, and, ideally, to things Chester can’t prove. (How do you prove you’re not emotional? That’s proving a the presence of an absence, and it’s notoriously hard to do.) And it doesn’t matter. That Chester is now emotional doesn’t mean their argument is irrational. (The “you have no sense of humor” accusation is another instance of this strategy—trying to make the argument about your feelings).

We have a tendency to think about arguments in terms of identity—a good person makes a good argument; a rational person makes a rational argument; an expert makes an expert argument. Good people do not necessarily make good arguments. (By the way, I’m often misunderstood as rejecting the notion of identity politics—I’m not.) Identity politics is an acceptance that different policies have different impacts on various identities—that we are not the same. Good v. bad people is not a useful way to think about identity, especially since neither guarantees the ir/rationality of the argument a good or bad person makes.

A slight variation on this muddle about rationality is the notion that a rational person is in control (of their emotions, themselves). It was this sense of rationality and control being connected that meant that women and non-whites were prohibited from rationality—they (we) weren’t allowed to control anyone. Thus, for someone who believes in this pseudo-rationality, a woman or POC can’t argue because we’re too emotional; if we appear not to be emotional, we’re hiding it, or—worse yet—we’re trying to control them. Then, oddly enough, it’s okay for them to get angry.

Later, I’ll get back to how to respond to these moves in pseudo-rationality (all of which you can see in Trump supporters). Here the point is simply that a person appearing to argue calmly is not necessarily someone making a rational argument.

To judge the rationality of the argument, we have to look at the argument. Pseudo-rationality tries to pretend that we can infer the rationality of the argument from the tone of the arguer. We can’t.

Something else that I’ve noticed tricks people into thinking an associative argument is rational argumentation is the use of what linguists call “metadiscourse” (especially “rationality markers” and “appeals to external knowledge”). “Metadiscourse” is the term used for the language that tells the reader about what you’re telling them. That’s a weird sentence, but it’s a useful concept. Imagine the claim, “Bunnies are fluffy.”

I might say, “Unfortunately, bunnies are fluffy,” “Thankfully, bunnies are fluffy,” “Obviously, bunnies are fluffy,” “It’s well known that bunnies are fluffy,” “Bunnies are generally fluffy,” or “I think bunnies are fluffy”—those are all sentences with that same predicate (“bunnies are fluffy”), but with metadiscourse that tell you how I want you to consider the claim.The first two tell you how I feel about bunnies being fluffy. The third and fourth are “appeals to external knowledge”—they’re saying that this claim about bunnies isn’t just my opinion, (and the “obviously” is what is called a “booster” in that it boosts the strength of the claim). The fifth and sixth have “hedging” in which I’m restricting the claim (the opposite of boosting). “Rationality markers” are words we use to signal that it’s a rational argument—often words like: because, therefore, thus, in conclusion.

The tendency to infer that the presence of a lot of those sorts of words and phrases means the argument is rational is connected to our tendency to think associatively. As I’ll explain when I get to the issue of data, “Bunnies are fluffy because 1 + 1 =2” is not a rational argument. It doesn’t matter how much metadiscourse I add, or how calmly I say it. It’s a sentence that has two logically disconnected claims. “Bunnies are fluffy because bunnies are mammals” has two claims that are more associated (they’re both about bunnies) but they’re still logically disconnected. People are likely to read them as logically connected simply because of the word “because.” We’re particularly likely to make this mistake if we believe both claims to be true.

Boosters and appeals to external knowledge are likely to persuade some people of the truth of the claims (even though they aren’t evidence, let alone proof) because we too often conflate certainty and credibility. That is, a lot of people assume that decisiveness, rhetorical clarity, and certainty are signs that someone has a perfect and complete understanding of a situation. They aren’t.

The calm tone, rationality markers, and signs of certainty are all surface qualities of a text that persuade people who mistakenly believe that those surface features are indications about the rhetor being a reliable person—rational and knowledgeable. Instead, we have to look at the argument they’re making.






[1] Since this is my blog, I get to put forward some of my crank theories. One of them is that a lot of people who say they are opposed to valuing rational argumentation have been traumatized by people in their lives who use pseudo-rational argumentation as a weapon to abuse and often gaslight them (particularly the move of deliberately upsetting someone and then condemning that person for being “emotional”). I think their experience of pseudo-rational argumentation as a kind of abuse is important to keep in mind.