Practical Reasoning and the Structure of Fear Appeal Arguments

There is considerable interest in fear appeal arguments in both the normative (logical) and the empirical (psychological) literature on argumentation. However, these two streams are, so far, relatively independent of each other. In this paper, an attempt is made to join them together, or at least to open up a canal between them.1 Fear appeal arguments are studied in logic under the category of argumentum ad baculum, a species of informal fallacy (although there has been some doubt expressed whether they really belong here, as we will see below). In speech communication, fear appeal arguments have been studied to determine their efficacy in getting a target group of respondents to adopt a recommended course of action. Primarily, commercial advertisements directed to a public audience have been the focus. In this paper, we identify important, underlying structural relationships between these two aspects, that is, the normative aspect of whether the argument is correct or fallacious and the empirical aspect of whether the argument is efficacious or not in gaining compliance.