9e Finding good reasons

9eFinding good reasons

In his Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses various ways that one can support a claim. Torture, he notes, makes for a very convincing argument but not one that reasonable people will resort to. In effecting real changes in minds and hearts, we need instead to rely on good reasons—reasons that establish our credibility (9f), that appeal to logic (9g), and that appeal to emotion (9h). You can use these appeals to analyze the arguments of others (8d) as well as to construct arguments of your own.