Logos: Mind Your Ps & Qs

Growing up my mother would frequently tell me, "You're too literal."  I'd often says things in perfect seriousness and be surprised to get a resounding belly laugh in response.  In my twenties, I taught myself Japanese and it opened my eyes to aspects of human interaction that I had been quite oblivious to. 

Japanese is a high context language.  It's far less explicit than English.  The onus is on the listener to understand rather than the speaker to make themselves clear.  It's consequently far less verbose.  In fact the ability to communicate significant meaning in only a few words gives the speaker a touch of sophistication.  In fact this is largely the point of Haiku, to conjure a romantic image of nature while being constrained to a terse form.  The culture is rather homogeneous so there's a shared common knowledge.  It's a far departure from the heterogeneous, chaotic, and therefore necessarily direct style of communication we have in the United States.

Awareness of indirect communication paired with my professional experience with logic spurred an interest in the meta language of everyday interaction.  It's said that 55% of communication is via body language, 38% is tone of voice, and only 7% is choice of words.  Within that 7%, there's a great deal of meaning to be extrapolated.  I'd say you can learn at least as much by what's left unsaid as by what's spoken.  The choice of vocabulary, the interplay between call and response, and the way that arguments are formed all reveal a great deal about the speaker, his/her relationship with the listener, and his/her intent.

The study of rhetoric breaks verbal communication into three categories Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.  Pathos perhaps occupies some portion of the 38% tone of voice and 55% body language.  It is concerned with creating an emotional connection with the audience.  Ethos is concerned with the character or credibility of the speaker.  Logos is the formation of a logical argument.

We engineers should feel right at home with Logos.  It's our strong hand.  After years of battling with an adversary more obtuse than Spock must have seemed to McCoy, the computer's pushed us to the limits of our logical abilities as mere humans.  If we're to approach the world of rhetoric or influence, this is a likely place to start.

Fallacies are arguments that appear logical at casual glance but in fact contain some flaw.  They're hard to detect.  This makes them both easy to innocently stumble into as a speaker and easy to fall prey to as a listener.  Whether they're used intentionally or by accident, as both a listener and a speaker it's helpful to be aware of them.

They can be entertaining too.  Equipped with an awareness of common fallacies, what was once mundane can become quite entertaining.  I love to watch movies, interviews, and political speeches all with a game-like mentality, "Spot the Logical Fallacy."  Once you get into it, listening can be quite like watching a boxing match or a game of chess.

Wiki has an intimidating list of fallacies.  Some are amusing in their own right, like "if-by-whiskey" and the McNamara fallacy.  This poster is a great starting place.  Here are some I've taken notice of lately:

Loaded Question = Asking a question that carries with it an assumption.  The act of answering risks affirming the assumption and thereby weakening the speaker's argument or credibility.

Begging the Question = A circular argument in which the conclusion is included in the premise.  This resembles collinearity in linear regression.

Equivocation = Offering a misleading interpretation of a vague expression by glossing over the intended meaning.  This closely resembles a Straw Man argument.  The former being a jab and the latter being a combination punch, offering the interpretation and subsequently knocking it down.  Since Equivocation and Straw Man rely on reinterpreting an argument to weaken it, the new interpretation often comes in the form of yet another fallacy.  It's like using a power-up to raise your fallacy's offensive strength.  Between the poster and these interactions, one can see how this could start to resemble a parlor game.

Recently, I got into a debate with someone who used a Straw Man against me.  I pointed the fallacy out but in doing so accidentally used a Fallacy Fallacy (disagreeing with his point because he's used a fallacy).  I got a chuckle when I realized I'd have to taste my own medicine.

Hyperbole and Ambiguity are forms of appealing to Pathos by sacrificing Logos.  The speaker over or under emphasizes the facts to make an emotional point.  As such, a counter in the form of Equivocation pointing out the logical inconsistency that arrises from Hyperbole or Ambiguity is natural.  In fact it's almost a cheap shot.

The speaker has knowingly lowered their Logos gloves to make a point using a common rhetorical device.  It should be given that by doing so they're not advocating the logical inconsistency that comes with it.  To then question their logic is obtuse.  I see this pattern in particular almost daily in American English conversation.

There are a number of conversational flow patterns like these.  They're predictable almost to the point of forming a grammar at the meta-communication level.  They're also very much cultural.  The hardest part of picking up a new language for me was not the rote learning of vocabulary and grammar memorization.  It was recognizing my own meta-communication patterns as an American, observing the foreign ones, and attempting to employ them effectively.  This meta-communication-grammar offers a unique window into a culture's descriptors in my opinion and is why becoming bilingual requires not just the recollection of words but also the understanding of culture.