Rhetoric and Argumentation
Rhetoric and Argumentation tests how claims are built, supported, and challenged. You will identify thesis and claim, evidence and warrant, appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos, concession and refutation, and common fallacies. The exam also asks you to judge whether reasoning is valid and whether evidence is sufficient and relevant.
Core rules
- A claim is debatable; evidence is what supports it; a warrant is the unstated assumption linking them.
- Ethos concerns credibility and fairness; pathos concerns values and emotion; logos concerns logic and evidence. Most strong arguments combine them.
- Qualify claims (“often,” “in most cases”) when evidence is limited; absolute language invites refutation.
- Address the strongest counterargument, concede what is valid, then refute the rest.
- Name fallacies precisely: ad hominem attacks the person; false dilemma limits options to two; hasty generalization samples too little; straw man misrepresents an opponent.
Worked example
“My opponent wants smaller budgets, so he must want crowded classrooms.” This is a false dilemma plus a straw man: smaller budgets do not necessarily mean crowded classrooms, and the opponent’s position is reduced to an extreme. A fair response would ask which budget lines are proposed and what evidence links them to class size.
Traps
Calling every emotional appeal a fallacy; confusing evidence with assertion; ignoring the warrant; accepting statistics without asking about sample or source; refuting a point the author did not make.