Recenzja/Review: Barbara Konat, Emotional Appeals in Argumentation. From Rhetoric to Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Cham: Springer, 2025.
Abstract
Barbara Konat offers in Emotional Appeals in Argumentation an helpful synthesis of many years of research on emotional appeals in argumentation, notably the project "Computational Pathos", supported by the Polish National Science Centre, of which she was the principal investigator.Although the title unsurprisingly echoes, given the series in which the volume appears, the terminology of argumentation theory and of so-called fallacies of "appeals to emotion", the central concern of this 160-page book, published in 2025 in the Argumentation Library series, is more specifically-and more appropriately-the rhetorical question of pathos.The volume crowns the work carried out by the group behind the "Computational Pathos" project, but it also perfectly illustrates, through its alignment with contemporary research orientations, the renewal of the field that has become visible in recent years and that rests on at least three foundations.First-and this has become self-evident, although it still struggles to penetrate certain mindsemotions should not be reduced to fallacious appeals, but should be regarded as an integral part of the means of persuasion, inseparable from reason and comparable in this respect to the construction of self-image (ethos).Second, especially when a computational dimension is introduced, analyses and models need to be grounded in texts as they actually occur, rather than in fabricated, stylized, or simplified examples.Third, due attention must be paid to the emergence of innovative methods capable of investigating fields that were once largely inaccessible.The book, however, does more than testify to the modernity of its research agenda.Across three parts, it establishes a descriptive model for the analysis of pathos, moving, as the subtitle indicates, from Aristotle to generative artificial
- Journal
- Res Rhetorica
- Published
- 2026-06-29
- DOI
- 10.29107/rr2026.2.11
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- Open Access
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