October 2024 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Strategically Ambiguous Hyperbole

On December 3, 2020, the Missouri Gateway Pundit promoted the conspiracy theory that originated with Trump’s legal team: that there was had video showing two Georgia election workers “secretly inject tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots into the vote count and process the fraudulent ballots for counting multiple times without detection, despite several machine hand recounts” (“First Amended” 51). Later that same day, Gateway Pundit named one of the workers, Ruby Freeman, and would later also name and give identifying information about her mother, Wandrea Moss. Despite the immediate debunking of the conspiracy, Gateway Pundit continued to promote the lie (and they’ve never retracted it). In December of 2021, Freeman and Moss sued the owners of the site—two brothers named James and Joseph Hoft, and in January of 2022 the Hofts replied. The goal of that response was to avoid accountability for what they did and are still doing, and what I want to explore in this talk is the role that the “it’s just rhetoric” strategy plays in that evasion.

The Hofts made six major “affirmative” arguments:
• The statements they made are true. “Defendants aver that all statements allegedly made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs are true […] Any complained-of statements allegedly made by Defendants that may happen to lack 100% factual veracity are substantially true, and thus treated as true as a matter of law. ( 18)
• The gist of the statements is true. “Any statements made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs that are not literally true are substantially true, in that the “gist” or “sting” of the statements is true” (18)
• The statements aren’t literally true, but are opinion or rhetorical hyperbole (i.e., “just rhetoric”). “The statements at issue in the First Amended Complaint are either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.” (19)
• Moss and Freeman are public figures, so it doesn’t matter if the statements are true. “Due to the media scrutiny they received in connection with the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiffs are limited purpose public figures.” (19)
• Truth doesn’t matter because they were just repeating what reliable sources said. “Defendants’ statements were published in reliance on statements published by credible sources, including President Donald J. Trump and his campaign.” (19)
• Everybody was saying it. (“Incremental Harm”) “Defendants are far from the only persons to publish statements regarding Plaintiffs.” (20)

What’s striking about this set of arguments is the degree to which they contradict one another. Put simply, the Hofts are claiming that what they said is and is not true, and they did and did not believe it to be true, they did and did not want or expect their readers to take the statements literally. If what they said was literally true, and they believed it to be such, and they expected their audience to understand it as true, then it wasn’t hyperbole. The Hofts’ are using what I’m arguing should be called “strategically ambiguous hyperbole.”

Affirmative defenses are often contradictory because it’s legally acceptable to engage in “arguing in the alternative”—more or less a series of arguendo claims. Also known as throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. To claim that all of their statements were hyperbole is to say that they not only didn’t believe them, but didn’t think their audience would. Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones each tried this defense, and bungled it, Tucker Carlson tried it and succeeded. I want to talk briefly about the Carlson case, because it’s significant.

Carlson and his guest Alan Dershowitz had agreed that a woman who got hush money from Trump had committed “textbook extortion”—that is, a crime. She sued for defamation. Fox argued that the “extortion” accusation was hyperbole, and a judge agreed, saying that the “general tenor” (Memorandum 11, 17) and “context surrounding the statement” (14) would make it clear to any “reasonable” viewer that Carlson was not reporting facts, but engaged in opinion. Carlson’s “accusations of extortion are a familiar rhetorical device” of hyperbole (13). The judge said “that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes” (12), and “Carlson’s ‘dialogue was taking place on an animated, non-literal plane’” (16). The judge said that it didn’t matter whether some viewers took the statement as literally true; what matters is what a “reasonable” person would do, and that’s a common standard in law.

Common definitions of hyperbole emphasize that it is an “obvious and intentional exaggeration” (dictionary.com), “a rhetorical trope by means of which statements are made that are obviously exaggerated and thus untrue or unwarranted” (Snoeck Henkemans 269) That is, a hyperbolic statement is obviously not true, and not meant to be taken as true. But that isn’t true, as one can see in the Hofts’ brief—it isn’t obvious at all whether they believe their claims to be literally true. They are ambiguous on that point.

This ambiguity has consequences for our ability to make policy decisions. If someone uses a textbook example of hyperbole—“my suitcase weighs a ton”—and a listener refutes it by weighing the suitcase and showing that it only weighs forty pounds, the critic just looks like a humorless jerk. There’s no point in refuting a textbook case of hyperbole. But the Hofts’ claims were ambiguously hyperbolic—they were absurd, and they were false, and they were and are obviously false to any reasonable person, but they were and are not obviously false to someone who lives in a world of hyperbolic claims about the villainy of Democrats. Large numbers of Gateway Pundit readers didn’t understand those claims to be hyperbolic—they thought they were factually accurate–which is why the women got death threats. Those supporters may not be reasonable people, but that’s a legal and not rhetorical standard.

Thus, the exaggerated and fabricated claims of voting fraud enable Trump supporters to persuade their base that violence, negating election results, and various other authoritarian and extreme responses are justified self-defense, while evading accountability for the consequences of their persuasion. The absurdity of the claims also enables potential Trump voters who might “dislike Trump’s rhetoric,” but like his policies to deflect criticism for what they are supporting. They see his inciting violence and calling for authoritarian policies as “just rhetoric.” The same claims are hyperbole when strategically useful to call them that, and true or substantially true when that’s the useful strategy. And that’s what I mean by strategically ambiguous hyperbole.

I mentioned earlier that hyperbole isn’t always oriented toward rousing an audience. Sometimes it’s a strategy of deflection, by shifting the stasis. When Trump characterizes immigration as an “invasion,” that strategically ambiguous hyperbole means we’re now arguing about just how dangerous or criminal immigrants are. We are arguing about whether Moss and Freeman introduced tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots—that is, just how big the fraud was. That immigrants are dangerous, and that the election was stolen, are part of the frame, not part of the argument. And so we don’t talk about whether Trump tried to incite a riot that would steal the election—even if he did, it seems justified by the fraud that never happened.

Strategically ambiguous hyperbole also aids in the deflection of responsibility on the part of voters who intend to support Trump even if they don’t “like his rhetoric.” A common way of deflecting reasonable discussion of Trump’s corruption, fraud, and lying is to respond with, “All politicians lie”—a hyperbolic statement not intended to rouse but deflect. “All politicians lie” is simultaneously true and false. All politicians do lie—all humans lie—but that statement is used, implicitly, to dismiss the degree and kind of lies that Trump tells. It’s hyperbolic in its implications.

In addition to evading accountability, this flipping in and out of defending their rhetoric as hyperbole enables them to forestall refutation. To be effective at rousing an audience (and hyperbole can have other functions), a hyperbolic statement has to resonate as “true” in at least two ways: plausibility of the overall thrust of the argument, and sincerity of the rhetor.

In this case, the base believed/s that Democrats can only win elections by cheating; even if Democrats didn’t cheat exactly as much as the Hofts said, or in the specific ways they said. Claudia Claridge calls this kind of hyperbole “emotional truth” versus “factual truth” (18), but I don’t think invoking the rational/irrational split is either accurate or useful here. The people who find this kind of hyperbole powerful think they’re relying on factually and literally true assertions about reality. They consider it a fact that the election was stolen; the details don’t matter. The data presented as proof (analysis of the video, claims about a fake flooding) don’t have a particularly important relationship to the conclusion, so it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be false (Jenny Rice’s book on conspiracy thinking describes this process elegantly). I want to emphasize this point—that there is no expectation of a logical relationship between major claims and supposedly supporting evidence means that the argument cannot be refuted. If it can’t be refuted, it can’t be deliberated.

The Hofts, like Alex Jones, Giuliani, and Trump, openly violate the norms, even of a legal case, as it is going on, and as they claim they are honoring them. Alex Jones continued promoting on his radio show the very conspiracy theories and false claims he was in the midst of a lawsuit about, during which he testified under oath that he had stopped making those claims, and for which he had apologized enough already. He has testified in court to facts about his wealth, mental health, and intentions that he promptly and deliberately contradicted on his radio show; Giuliani signed and contradicted an admission of lying. The Hofts, in a legal document, said their claims were true and untrue. The incoherence is the point.

In addition, for some people, wild exaggeration adds credibility to an argument because it shows the passionate and sincere commitment of the rhetor to the in-group. It is a kind of performative appeal to authority—you should trust me because my commitment to the in-group is unconstrained, as shown by my being rhetorically unconstrained–and that appeal to authority works in several ways. It shows passionate commitment to the in-group (“the power of the irrational rhetor”), as well as an authoritarian understanding of truth (the argument made by Robert Paxton). The “truth” of the statement might be the sincerity of the rhetor. It can be an instance of what Ryan Skinnell calls “deceiving sincerely,” a characteristic Skinnell (and others, like Paxton) have argued is present in fascism (Rhetoric of Fascism). The truth of the statement is that the speaker is truly committed to dominating, exterminating, or expelling the out-groups. And that makes everything they say, even if false, true because the “gist” (Democrats stole the election) is true.

Brad Serber has argued that Trump and his supporters don’t engage in “dog whistles,” but “howling.” Serber says, “Dog Whistling carefully avoids the direct use of epithets, calls for violence, and other more overt kinds of hate speech, [but] Howling drops all pretense of civility and political correctness” (194). The rhetor is willing to violate rhetorical norms, and so will be willing to violate other norms as well to get the policies the in-group wants. What Trump models and offers to his followers is the opportunity to participate, via agency by proxy, in grandiose violation of legal, moral, and rhetorical norms without accountability.

Finally, it isn’t just rhetoric. The strategically ambiguous hyperbole is in service of policies that cannot be deliberated because the affirmative case is made up of claims that cannot be refuted. Both the rhetors and the policies they advocate are rhetorically, ethically, and politically unmoored. As Mary Stuckey has shown, hyperbole tends to correlate to times of increased incivility—that is, violations of discursive norms, “a certain vagueness regarding means and ends” (that is, what I’ve called a depoliticized public sphere), “and a reliance on hope and nostalgia” (676). If being irrational and extreme becomes the criterion for having credibility, then deliberation, nuance, complexity, uncertainty, reciprocity, inclusion, are all deflected if not demonized. The point of strategically ambiguous hyperbole is to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric, and the requirements of democratic deliberation. When Trump says that, on his first day in office, “we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” it is tempting for people who like certain policies of Trump’s (overheating the economy, reducing environmental protection, ending gay marriage) to dismiss the anti-democratic and authoritarian policy agenda as hyperbole. That’s a mistake. It isn’t just rhetoric.

Works Cited

Claridge, Claudia. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
“Defendants’ Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Petition and Counterclaims.” https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2023.01.16-Defs-Answer-to-Pltffs-2nd-Amended-Petition-Counterclaims.pdf
Fioroni, Sarah. “Following Public Individuals for News in 7 Charts.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/506084/following-public-individuals-news-charts.aspx
“First Amended Complaint.” Case: 4:21-cv-01424-HEA Doc. #: 33 Filed: 01/14/22. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21315827-tgp_amendedcomplaint
Gerstein, Josh and Kyle Cheney. “‘He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob’” Politico 12/14/2023 01:03 PM EST https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/14/rudy-giuliani-jury-georgia-election-00131796 Updated: 12/14/2023 05:06 PM EST
(Giuliani) Nolo Contendre [sic] Stipulation. Case No. 1:21-cv-03354 (BAH). https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Defendant-Giulianis-Superseding-Nolo-Contendre-Stipulation-Conceding-to-Default-Liability.pdf
Henkemans, A. Francisca Snoeck. “Strategic manoeuvring with hyperbole in political debate.” Contextualizing pragma-dialectics 12 (2017): 269-280.
“Hyperbole.” Dictonary.com https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole
Kreider, A. J. “Argumentative Hyperbole as Fallacy.” Informal Logic 42.2 (2022): 417-437.
Levine, Sam. “Jury in Rudy Giuliani Defamation Trial Urged to Send Message: ‘Don’t Do It’” Thu 14 Dec 2023 15.05 EST https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/14/rudy-giuliani-testimony-federal-defamation-case-atlanta-election-workers
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
McFadden, K. “Hyperbole.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, p. 648. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2388000525/GVRL?u=txshracd2598&sid=bookmarkGVRL&xid=776ca8ac.
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
Paxton, Robert O. The anatomy of fascism. Vintage, 2005.
Rice, Jenny. Awful archives: Conspiracy theory, rhetoric, and acts of evidence. The Ohio State University Press, 2020.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical schemes: Proslavery rhetoric and the tragedy of consensus. University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Skinnell, Ryan. “Deceiving Sincerely: The Embrace of Sincerity-as-Truth in Fascist Rhetoric.” Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. 2022.
Stuckey, Mary E. “American elections and the rhetoric of political change: Hyperbole, anger, and hope in US politics.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs. (2017): 667-694.
Trump, Donald. ”We Will Begin.” Right Side Broadcasting Network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GF_SRHFlmc

How to argue badly: assume that need = plan

Two bunnies — Image from here: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/understand-mammal-behaviour-rabbits

Imagine this. You and I are house-mates having trouble making rent, and I say, “We should get a bunch of bunnies.” You say, “I think getting bunnies would be spending more money, when our whole problem is that we don’t have enough money.” And I say, “You just think we should get evicted?” And then I go on about how disastrous it would be to get evicted. I accuse you of not caring about whether we get evicted.[1]

You’d recognize my response as unreasonable. Because it is.

Yet, that is exactly the pattern of our public discourse about politics. Too often, we assume that there is only one “plan” (solution, policy, approach), so if someone rejects our preferred plan, it’s because they don’t acknowledge the need. Therefore, our political discourse is all about need, and how horrible (irrational, corrupt, stupid) everyone is who disagrees with our plan. I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with what a good disagreement looks like.

And here’s where some concepts shared by folks in conflict resolution, policy argumentation, and a bunch of other fields come in. It’s useful to think about a problem in terms of seven questions:
1) What is the problem?
2) How bad is this problem? (What are the consequences of not solving it? Will it go away on its own?)
3) What caused this problem? How did this problem arise?
4) What are our options for solving this problem? (What are the various plans we might adopt?)
5) Which plans solve the problem we’ve identified?
6) What is the likelihood of success, ads/disads, costs/benefits for the most plausible plans? How do they compare to one another?
7) What are the likely consequences of the various plans? Is there a possibility of unintended consequences worse than the problem we’re trying to solve?

1) For you and me, the problem is that we can’t make rent, and 2) that’s a bad problem, since if we can’t solve it, we’ll get evicted.

3) So, what caused it? Our problem might be that the rent has gone up astronomically, or that I lost my job and haven’t tried to get another one, or that I’ve been spending money recklessly.

Here’s why the narrative as to how we got here matters: each of those causes implies a different kind of solution.

4) If the only reason is that the rent has gone up astronomically, then one approach might be to see if that was legal—did the landlord violate the lease? Laws regarding rent? If the only reason is that I lost my job and haven’t tried to find another, then it would make sense for me to try to find another job, or it might make sense for you to evict me, and get a new house-mate. If I’ve been spending recklessly, then I should stop doing that, and you might have some trouble figuring out how to get that to happen.

It’s possible that there are several contributing factors, in which case the approaches most likely to be successful might be combinations—I try to get a job and get my spending under control; you give me a deadline by which I’ve gotten a job or you’ll evict me; I try to get a job and we get a third room-mate.

One option is for us to get bunnies; it isn’t necessarily a good option, but it’s an option. And so the question is: why do I think that would solve the problem? How is that related to how we got here? If I am unable to pay rent because I keep getting involved in MLM, and I’ve become enamored of a bunny MLM, it would be reasonable for you to point out that I’m repeating exactly the behavior that caused the problem.

I might argue that I’ve always wanted bunnies, or that getting evicted is making me sad and bunnies will cheer me up—getting bunnies might solve some problem (my desire, my sadness), but not this problem: our facing eviction. In fact, since there would be added expenses, it might make the problem worse.

It’s also possible that there is no solution—that I can’t get a job that would enable us to afford the astronomical rent. In that case, it might make sense to try to find a way to break the lease that doesn’t involve eviction (so we don’t have an eviction on our financial record).

6) Winning the lottery would solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean that spending all our money on lottery tickets is a good plan; the likelihood of success is small. Advocating that we spend all our money on lottery tickets presumes that it’s a successful plan—people sometimes advocate a plan on the grounds that it would work, when in fact it might not. Seeing if the landlord has violated the lease (or the law) might work, but adopting that plan would mean getting expert advice (which might cost). Getting a job might also require expenditures, or be difficult in various ways. Every possible plan has advantages and disadvantages, and some plans are incompatible. We can’t spend all our money on lottery tickets and spend money to get expert advice on the lease. If I’m spending all my time job hunting, I wouldn’t have time to talk with experts about the lease.

7) Talking about unintended consequences is that hardest, I think. It’s basically worst case scenario thinking (how might this go wrong), and many people are superstitious about worst case scenario thinking. But thinking about it ahead of adopting a plan can mean that we put things in place to prevent the worst case from happening (e.g., have a backup plan), or that will let us know things are going south. Hiring an attorney to fight the rent increase might cost a lot of money and simply enrage the landlord, guaranteeing our eviction. Getting bunnies might be a violation of the lease, another way of guaranteeing our eviction.

My basic point is that acknowledging that there is a need is not necessarily associated with one solution. Similarly, disagreeing about what we should do (the plan) doesn’t mean disagreeing that there is a need. You might believe that we should have a lemonade stand, or cut back on what we’re spending in various areas, or get a loan—we have a lot of policy options, and we need to talk about them.

What happens in too much political discourse, though, is the bunny move. We have a problem, and disagree about the plan, and then instead of going through the various questions, we stay on the first. We either accuse the opponent of not really caring about the problem. Or, if we don’t like what we think are the only possible plans, or have no idea what to do, we deny that there is a problem. Neither tactic gets us reasonable disagreement or effective policies.

[1] For added unreasonable points, I might accuse you of being a bunny hater, communist, fascist, or some other group I hate.

Our political discourse sucks because it’s gerfucked by the rational/irrational split

Once again, people are bemoaning the morass that is our political discourse, and, once again, blame is placed on the lack of civility. Then the conversation follows a deeply-rutted path: what civility is, whether there’s less of it than there used to be, and “which side” is more incivil, or who is justified in their incivility. It’s a route that can’t get us out of the morass, let alone toward better political disagreements, because incivility is the consequence and not the cause of what is really the problem.

The problem is the extent to which people think and talk about politics in terms of the rational/irrational split—a binary that is wrong in so many ways. To explain some of these ways, I need to start at a place the civility road evades: what is political discourse supposed to do in a democracy?

One answer is that political disagreements don’t actually do much of anything—it’s just a right: democracy is supposed to allow people to express their beliefs, so the ideal public discourse is one in which everyone is allowed to express whatever they think with no constraints.[1] This is sometimes called the “expressive” model of democracy. Another, sometimes called the “marketplace” model, is that public discourse is a bunch of people selling their policies—just as the marketplace always inevitably rewards the best product, so a free-for-all of people making whatever arguments will persuade others always results in the best policies.[2]

What if we instead imagined political disagreement as policy disagreement? What if we saw the purpose of public discourse as enabling us to come to decisions that are the most reasonable, given our very different needs, values, perspectives, opportunities; policies that distribute the burdens and opportunities of our shared lives in a reasonable way?

If we think about the purpose of public disagreement that way, then what matters isn’t whether someone is particularly nice when they make their argument, but whether their argument is reasonable. An argument that is dishonest, misleading, and fallacious isn’t transmogrified into an honest, accurate, and reasonable argument if it’s presented politely. It’s still a bad argument, and probably in service of a bad policy—if you can’t advocate your policy with accurate information, a fair representation of the opposition, and reasonable connections among claims, then there are probably better policies out there.

The incivility of our public discourse isn’t the cause of being able to have productive disagreements—it’s the consequence of our tendency to characterize anyone who disagrees with us as “irrational,” and that tendency is the consequence of how we think (or don’t think very clearly) about what “rational” should mean.

After all, what does it mean to have a reasonable policy argument? We often use terms like “rational,” “reasonable,” and “logical” interchangeably (although there is a reasonable argument for making a distinction—I’ll get to that in another post), and all three of those tend to part of a binary: rational/irrational; reasonable/unreasonable, logical/illogical.[3]

Definitions tend to be circular, depend on negation (being “rational” means not being “irrational” and vice versa) and muddled. Webster’s, for instance, defines “rational” as “having a reason” or “reasonable.” Notice that those two are actually very different. If I say, “You should be opposed to nuclear power because my I have a bunny named Fluffy,” I’ve given a reason. But we wouldn’t say that’s a reasonable argument. My statement gives a reason—it has the form of “claim because reason”—but the reason isn’t logically connected to my claim.[4] Even were the “because clause” true (I do have a bunny, and it is named Fluffy), I doubt any of us would say that’s a reasonable argument.[5]

But if “rational” means “reasonable,” what does it mean for something to be “reasonable”? Webster’s again offers two definitions that are relevant: “being in accordance with reason” and “not extreme or excessive” (I’ll come back to the second). “Reason” is “a statement offered in explanation”—so back to a form definition (and, once again, the nuclear power argument is reasonable); or “a rational ground or motive.” We’ve come full circle.

This simultaneously contradictory and circular definitions of “rational” isn’t the consequence of some failure on the part of Webster’s. The point of a dictionary like Webster’s is to show common usage, and common usage of the term “rational” has those qualities. For instance, we tend to use the term rational to describe some very different things: an argument, a claim, a person, a way of arguing, a way of thinking. For some people, a “rational” argument is not necessarily true—it just has a particular form—but the term is also sometimes used to imply that the argument is true. Some people use the term “rational” to mean an amoral assessment of means and costs (so, the argument runs, Hitler invading the USSR was “rational” insofar as it was the only way to achieve his ends). The most common sense about rationality is that it is not its opposite—a rational argument is not irrational, and “irrationality” is associated with emotion. So, a rational argument is not emotional, a rational policy is not grounded in feelings. That’s how one gets to the argument that Hitler’s invasion of the USSR was “rational”—considering the devastation to peoples, the morality of the cause or means are all deflected as about “feelings,” and therefore “irrational.”

And, of course, Hitler’s desire to invade the USSR was all about feelings. That’s pretty typical of the attempt to characterize rationality as an amoral and unemotional determination of the most effective means—it’s all in service of deflecting, suppressing, or ignoring the very present feelings. I have had more than one person shout at me that we needed to be “rational” about this situation rather than emotional. Since I wasn’t particularly far away, and therefore would have no trouble hearing them if they spoke in a normal tone of voice, there was no reason to shout, other than that they were very, very emotional at the moment.

Sometimes rational/irrational is described as a binary, meaning that the slightest bit of emotion taints the argument, person, policy, and so a “rational” person (etc.) has no emotion. And, obviously, that’s never the case. We wouldn’t be arguing about the policy or issue unless we had feelings that it’s important.

Policy decisions involve feelings of honor, hope, care, compassion, fear, anger, and they should. So, let’s just set aside the muddled notion that a rational argument is one devoid of feeling. A person devoid of feeling wouldn’t be rational; they’d be dead. (Even sociopaths have feelings—they just don’t have feelings of compassion for others.) It wouldn’t be rational to ignore feelings completely; if I am miserable any time I’m near the beach, it would be rational to take those feelings into consideration before buying a house on the beach.

Another way of thinking about rationality is in terms of the form of the argument. Some people assume that a rational argument has data, and they may even have a strong desire to privilege some data over others (e.g., numbers). Defining a “rational” argument as “one that has statistics” has the same problems as the bunny named Fluffy—that it has a particular form (claim plus statistics) doesn’t necessarily mean the statistics are valid. They may be fabricated, misleading, or irrelevant. A lot of arguments in which people cite statistics have the correlation/causation problem—according to the wonderful website “Spurious Correlations,” automotive recalls for issues with the air bags strongly correlates to the popularity of the first name “Killian.” There is, by the way, no causal relationship between those two phenomena.

The idea that rationality is a trait that some people have is singularly pernicious and consistently anti-democratic. It’s often the consequence and cause of stereotypes about groups we don’t like: the dumbass “Southerner,” corrupt Irishman, skinflint Scot…and so on. In the 1830s it was common to argue that Catholics were incapable of independent reasoning (“rationality”) since they would just do whatever the Pope said, and so should be denied the vote. A similar argument was made about the Japanese Americans in 1942—that Shintoism meant they were incapable of independent thought and were therefore essentially traitors—an irrational argument on two grounds, including that not all Japanese Americans were Shintoist.

There have been moments when people assumed that “experts” are more rational about their own subject than non-experts (Walter Lippmann’s argument), a claim belied by “expert” witnesses whose testimony turned out to be tremendously biased and completely wrong (see especially Junk Science).

This isn’t to say that experts shouldn’t be treated with any credibility—this whole post is about rejecting a binary, and so I’m not arguing we should substitute another (there isn’t a binary between experts and non-experts, or reasonable v. unreasonable–both are more like a color wheel than a binary or continuum). It isn’t possible to reason without cognitive biases, but that isn’t to say all people (or all experts) are equally biased.

Because the rational/irrational binary is a…well…binary, if we value “rationality,” then we’ll attribute rationality to ourselves and our in-group (i.e., people like “us”), and “irrationality” to Them (people not like us).[6] We will consider it “irrational” to support an opposition candidate or policy, and therefore believe we shouldn’t listen to them. If They are irrational, then we should try to purify our media of Them; it’s even justified to silence them (since there is no merit to anything they have to say). We don’t have to take seriously anyone who disagrees with us.

Being “civil” about how completely irrational everyone is who disagrees with us doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got a public sphere in which we don’t listen to anyone who disagrees. It’s that assumption that every and anyone who disagrees with us is an irrational, immoral, doofus that causes the incivility.

The final way to think about rationality I want to mention is about rules. I’ll be clear: I’m on team rules. Sometimes. What matters is what the rules are—there are some ways of thinking about the rules that are just as harmful as any of the other problematic definitions above. For instance, rules of “civility” have often been used to silence important information, as when pro-slavery politicians voted for a gag rule about criticism of slavery–it was considered a violation of civility to criticize slavers. Neo-Aristotelians believed that a rational argument had to be derived syllogistically from a universally valid major premise; that was a kind of training not provided to women, so women were, by definition, incapable of a rational argument.

The “rules of logic” can be either usefully inclusive, or irrationally exclusive.

Scholars of argumentation still argue about what the rules should be (there’s an entire journal devoted to that topic), but there are a few points of agreement that will surprise the Logic Nazis out there.

Attacking someone’s character is not necessarily a fallacy, and attacking how they argue rarely is. Saying “You are lying” or “You are misrepresenting that source” is not ad hominem.[7] “You” statements do not constitute ad hominem. Ad hominem is a fallacy of relevance—it’s a way to change the subject. Saying that Trump is a bad candidate because he has a gold toilet is ad hominem (especially since he doesn’t and never has), but saying that he hasn’t put together a coherent healthcare plan in eight years is not. Saying that Harris is a bad candidate because she cackles is ad hominem; saying that she plans to reinstate a high capital gains tax is not.

Similarly, appeal to emotions (ad misericordiam) and appeal to expert opinion (ad verecundiam) are only fallacies if the appeals are irrelevant, such as that the cited person does not have relevant authority.

I’ll be clear: I’m on the side of thinking that we should not define rationality in terms of identity, affect, tone, kind of data, but on the relation of claims to one another and to the context of the disagreement. And I think those rules should be up for argument.

The set of rules I prefer isn’t particularly controversial—it’s pretty close to what anyone engaged in conflict resolution advocates. And, in my experience, it’s held up pretty well to historical cases (to my surprise). The shortest version of that set of rules is:
1) Whatever the standards of proof are (whether citation of religious texts, personal experience, myths, personal credibility, for instance, are allowed), they apply to all participants. That is, rules apply across groups. So, if I cite a relevant personal experience as evidence, then the relevant personal experiences of others are also evidence. If I condemn an out-group political figure or rhetor for shouting at babies, then I need to condemn in-group political figures and rhetors who shout at babies. I need to rely on evidence, and not signs.
2) People represent opposition arguments fairly and accurately, and people try to find the smartest opposition (no cherrypicking of outlier statements or rhetors, and no genus-species arguments about non in-group members).
3) Participants use data that can be falsified (not that they are falsified, but that it’s theoretically possible to imagine what data would contradict them, and therefore show the claims to be wrong).[8]
4) People are open to explaining their arguments and strive for reasonable relationships among claims, avoiding the major fallacies of form and relevance.

These are my preferences, largely the result of looking at train wrecks in public deliberation, but they’re open to argument. Whatever standards we have should enable judgment—they should help us identify the ways of arguing that tend to lead to train wrecks—while still being inclusive. There’s no point in setting standards only angels can meet, or restricting policy deliberation to a narrow set of experts. And the standards we set need to be based in the faith that there are often legitimate reasons for disagreement, that policy determination is complicated and uncertain, and that not every person who disagrees with us is a benighted irrational dupe.

[1] Actually, no one thinks that—it only takes a few examples before people start making exceptions. We all agree that some kinds of speech can be restricted in public and that private entities can greatly restrict speech; we just disagree about which restrictions should apply where. And we’re particularly protective of in-group speech.

[2] Yes, I’m being snarky.

[3] The rational/irrational binary is a relative newcomer to philosophy, running from Descartes and reaching its height among the logical positivists. Plato and Aristotle are often read as advocating it, as are various Enlightenment philosophers, but it’s worth remembering that Plato describes feelings—such as admiration of beauty or love—as ways of perceiving Truth. Aristotle’s logos v. alogos similarly doesn’t have the exclusion of affect or emotion that are part of our current rational/irrational binary.

[4] It’s theoretically possible that my overall argument is reasonable (there might be connections I could make if pressed, although none occur to me right now) but not in its current form.

[5] A lot of public arguments have exactly that form, and that logical flaw: “You should vote for Chester because 2 + 2 =4.” For reasons I’ve never entirely figured out, that sort of very unreasonable argument tends to be most persuasive when the “because clause” involves statistics. Even if the statistics are true—and sometimes they are—they’re often either irrelevant or only tangentially related to the main claim. As it happens, I don’t have a bunny, let alone one named Bunny.

[6] Sometimes people accept the idea of the binary, but flip the privilege, so they think “rationality” is bad, and “irrationality” is good—the Beats, Romanticists of various kinds. They tend to describe “rationality” as cold, number-driven, and passionless.

[7] Because I have a sick sense of humor, I think it’s hilarious when someone says, “You’re engaged in ad hominem because you’re attacking how I argue” since, by their definition, that statement is ad hominem. (It isn’t—neither is the original attack.) Or, sometimes they’ll say, “By engaging in ‘you’ statements, you’re engaged in ad hominem.” Notice the pronouns.

[8] And here the language needs to get a little precise. Many of my policy commitments come from my religious faith, and religious faith is, by definition, not falsifiable. So, my religious faith is not rational. My policy commitment to school lunches is grounded in Jesus’ commandment to care for the children, but the claims I make about free school lunches should be falsifiable—how many are provided, how many children need them, the consequences of providing lunches.

Another way to think about this “rule” is: are there any conditions under which you would change your mind about this? So, it’s whether there is any point in having a disagreement on that issue.