The Three Appeals: How to Know When You're Being Persuaded
Ethos, pathos, logos — Aristotle sorted the art of persuasion into three appeals, and every one has an honest form and a counterfeit.
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Ethos, pathos, logos — Aristotle sorted the art of persuasion into three appeals, and every one has an honest form and a counterfeit. Learn to spot the credentials-flash, the ticking clock, and the number that skips the base rate; walk through the ad, the pitch, and the politician; and leave with a two-question audit you can run before the pitch ends.
Drawn from: Aristotle's Rhetoric, Book I, in the W. Rhys Roberts translation of 1924 (public domain) — the definition of rhetoric and the ethos line are quoted verbatim, and the pathos and logos passages are closely paraphrased from it; plain mathematical facts about relative risk and base rates; ordinary observable structure of advertising, sales pitches, and political speech. No in-copyright text quoted.
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