Aristotle identified three types of rhetoric: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos appeals to the credibility or ethical standing of the speaker, logos is based on factual statements or logical conclusions, and pathos appeals to emotions. These three types are still used today in persuasion by speakers, writers, artists, and advertisers.
Rhetoric is the art of presenting information persuasively. Perhaps the most famous rhetorician in the history of Western thought was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who identified three types of rhetoric: ethos, or ethics; logos, or logic; and pathos, or emotion. More than 2,000 years later, these three types of rhetoric still describe the primary ways speakers, writers, artists, and advertisers are able to persuade their audiences.
Ethos is an appeal to the competence or ethical standing of the person presenting an argument. A politician, for example, might appeal to his credibility, his moral character or his past achievements. Expert testimony is another kind of appeal to ethos. A doctor’s or medical researcher’s endorsement of a particular drug, for example, would contain an appeal to ethos, while the testimony of a patient who had taken the medicine would not necessarily. In this type of rhetoric, the emphasis is on the subject rather than the subject itself.
The second type of Aristotle’s rhetoric is logos, which is based on factual statements or logical conclusions. Most scholarly articles are composed primarily of logo-based arguments, as they typically contain a thesis supported by research, data, and logical arguments. Of course, the data in many academic papers, especially in the humanities, are open to interpretation, and different authors may draw different logical conclusions about the same data. Calling an argument logical does not necessarily mean that it is free from opinion, speculation or error, but it does mean that it is grounded in fact rather than emotion.
Pathos is the Greek root of the word pathetic, which means “something relating to emotion”. Of the three types of rhetoric, it is the one most commonly used in advertising because people’s financial decisions are so often influenced by their emotions. Pathos is often a type of visual rhetoric. A dimly lit photo of a frowning, pimply teenager contrasted with a doctored glamor shot, for example, could be used to tap into the emotions of other acne sufferers to persuade them to use a particular type of skin treatment. Almost any type of rhetoric that uses humor will also fall under the category of pathos.
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