Appeal to Pity: Argumentum ad Misericordiam (Logic and Language

by Douglas N. Walton

Appeal to pity has frequently been exploited with amazing success as a deceptive tactic of argumentation, so much so that it has traditionally been treated as a fallacy. Using a case study method, the author examines examples of appeals to pity and compassion in real arguments in order to classify, analyze, and evaluate the types of arguments used in these appeals. Among the cases studied are the controversial use of "poster kids" in the Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy and the "baby incubators story" deployed by a public relations firm to influence the decision to send U.S. forces into Kuwait during the Gulf War. In addition to the analyses of these and other case studies, this book provides, for the first time, precise guidelines and useful criteria with which to identify, analyze, and evaluate instances of the ad misericordiam argument.

225 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1997

About the author

Douglas Neil Walton (PhD University of Toronto, 1972) is a Canadian academic and author, well known for his many widely published books and papers on argumentation, logical fallacies and informal logic. He is presently Distinguished Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor, Canada, and before that (2008-2014), he held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor. Walton’s work has been used to better prepare legal arguments and to help develop artificial intelligence. His books have been translated worldwide, and he attracts students from many countries to study with him. A special issue of the journal Informal Logic surveyed Walton’s contributions to informal logic and argumentation theory up to 2006 (Informal Logic, 27(3), 2007). A festschrift honoring his contributions, Dialectics, Dialogue and Argumentation: An Examination of Douglas Walton’s Theories of Reasoning and Argument, ed. C. Reed and C. W. Tindale, London: College Publications, 2010, shows how his theories are increasingly finding applications in computer science. A list of titles of many of Walton’s books is given below. Links to preprints of many of his published papers can be found on the website

http://www.dougwalton.ca