Rhetorical Tricks You Could Never Quite Articulate
Or: Complaining about people not saying what they actually mean
I’ve created the following list to outline some rhetorical styles I see in online discourse that I think are particularly toxic. This list is far from complete, but I hope reading about these ideas and their examples will help you articulate your dislike of them when you confront them in the future.
Rhextortion
I think everyone’s experienced this at some point in their lives. A conversation with Rhextortion might look something like this:
You: There’s no high quality evidence supporting acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Them, privately: Hey, I think you shouldn’t say that there isn’t evidence for acupuncture or TCM working. Saying there isn’t good evidence to support them is just reinforcing the idea that the Western world’s medicine and practices are superior, which hurts a group that faces a lot of discrimination
You: I don’t mean that though! Of course I wouldn’t want to discriminate against anyone, but I think I’m right here — this is an empirical claim, something we can test
Them: Right, right. I’m just saying someone else might misinterpret what you’ve said and that could hurt them or make them hurt others. Is it really too much to ask that you take your tweet down?
This is what Oliver Traldi calls Rhetorical Extortion — Rhextortion for short. Here’s a more formal analysis of these scenarios:
“When someone prevents you from saying P on the grounds that someone else might interpret it as meaning Q, you haven’t been prevented from saying Q. You’ve been prevented from saying P. A realist has to assume that the goal, therefore, is to prevent people from saying P. Further, we should ask: would the rhextortionist ever be satisfied by a superficial recasting of your statement? You rephrase P as P*, which means pretty much the same thing as P but is harder to interpret as Q. But now the rhextortionist says: “P* could easily be interpreted as P. And we now know that P is a dog whistle for Q. So you want to be really careful about saying P*.” The treadmill never ends; symbolic power can always be continuously redshifted as the universe of unspeakable objects relentlessly expands.” — Rhextortion, Misinterpretation by Proxy
The rhextortionist in my example isn’t really concerned about me being misinterpreted as promoting a sort of Western supremacy — they want me to stop saying acupuncture and TCM don’t have high quality evidence of efficacy. Appealing to an imaginary person who might misinterpret me serves as plausible deniability for their request that I stop saying what I believe.
Kafka-Trapping
Them: You’re just such a defensive person all the time, it’s exhausting
You: I’m not being defensive, I just think [xyz]
Them: You being defensive about this right now only proves my point
Kafka-trapping is, at base, when denial of a claim is taken as evidence of the claim’s veracity. This is a particularly annoying form of rhetoric because if it isn’t called out, the person caught in a “kafkatrap” can feel helpless, or be convinced of their own guilt.
We see this technique applied everywhere, and I’d like to briefly outline a particularly bad offender: Robin DiAngelo. Robin is the author of White Fragility, a book that has skyrocketed in popularity in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement more broadly. While the goals of these movements are good, the method by which DiAngelo attempts to further them is incredibly kafkaesque.
A link to an interview of one of her workshop participants can be found here:
Robin’s principle thesis in her book is that white people have what she calls white fragility, defined as having negative reactions to being called racist. Having white fragility is itself racist, so disagreement with being called racist is a tacit admission of racism under DiAngelo’s theory — a classic kafkatrap. This may be why she openly states in her book that “white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist”.
Apophasis
“Now, I want this to be a clean debate, so instead of talking about how my opponent joined a satanic orgy group chat and regularly consorts with members of the murdering-bunnies party, I’d like to focus on tax reform. Anyways…”
Apophasis is, quite simply, bringing up a topic under the guide of not wanting to bring it up. We rightly see ad hominem attacks as a bad thing, but apophasis is a bit sneakier in that it makes us think about an ad hominem argument without the person speaking being implicated.
Guess who uses this all the time? President Trump:
“I promised I would not say that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, that she laid off tens of thousands of people and she got viciously fired. I said I will not say it, so I will not say it.” (source)
“I refuse to call [Megyn Kelly] a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct.” (source)
“Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?” (source)
Donald Trump is notable only in that he is painfully obvious about what he really means. People who use apophasis in a, shall we say, more subtle way have a bit more plausible deniability. A better example from Shakespeare:
“Have patience, gentle friends, I must not read it [Caesar’s will]; It is not meet you know how Caesar loved you. You are not wood, you are not stones, but men; And, being men, bearing the will of Caesar, It will inflame you, it will make you mad. ’Tis good you know not that you are his heirs; For, if you should, O, what would come of it!”
Well I sure bet the people of Rome know now that they are Caesar’s heirs, even if Mark Atony won’t come right out and say it.
Sealioning
Dr. Jonathan N. Stea describes Sealioning as a form of “advanced trolling”. The term was coined based on this comic by David Malki:
From Dr. Stea’s medium article:
“Sealioning is an insidious Trojan horse. It cloaks misinformation and propaganda in many disguises: politeness, sincerity, curiosity, compassion, and even martyrdom. It is the sophisticated adult-version of the fraternity-esque “debate me bro” plea. At its core, however, those who engage in sealioning still have their ears plugged and their eyes shut, and they’re annoying as hell.” — Dr. Stea
The goal of a sealioner is to make someone stop saying something. But they don’t go about it through the usual channels of shouting or angry comments — instead they simply wear you down with a barrage of superficial politeness. The rhetorical trick employed by sealions is in cloaking themselves in plausible deniability. To an outside observer, the following conversation may look anodyne:
Scientist: Anthropogenic climate change is an important issue, and we should be marshalling resources to deal with it
Sealion: Great point! I was curious about one thing, however, a recent paper (linked here) came out with a revised estimate for the impact of an additional degree of warming — and it’s lower than most experts have predicted. Could you comment on that/ I want to better understand how you evaluate the literature.
Scientist: Go away, I don’t want to deal with you right now.
To an outside observer, the scientist kinda looks like a jerk — they aren’t really engaging with this person’s very polite and interesting question. An outside observer, however, may not have all of the context in mind. What if this person made similar long-form comments asking for an answer on every single one of this scientist’s posts? What if indulging in this person’s question only led them to continue with a barrage of random studies, asking the scientist to give a solid reason for their dismissal of climate skeptics?
Everything could be above-board and seem nice from the outside, but from the scientist’s perspective it can amount to nothing less than a targeted campaign of harassment with the added function of gaslighting the victim into thinking they’re over-sensitive.
Isolated Demands for Rigor
Related to sealioning is a concept Scott Alexander calls “isolated demands for rigor”. Imagine a scientist saying the following about a study:
“While I think this is a valuable area of research, there’s some methdological flaws in the paper I’d like to address. To start, their hypothesis of bunny rabbits causing homicidal rage in children is a strong claim and requires a high degree of evidence. To that end, I would like to see more than a single study done on bunny rabbit proximity and the child-homicidality-index, because we really can’t say there’s a big effect without looking at the overall shape of the literature. I’d also want to see a funnel plot to check for any publication bias.”
It sounds very reasonable for this scientist to be skeptical. However, suppose the scientist is a big bunny rabbit fan and sees another single study of similar quality:
“This study that shows bunny rabbits make children happier and more financially successful is PROOF of what I’ve been saying ALL ALONG. Bunnies are good for you! To all the anti-bunny scientists out there, explain THIS”
Well now it just sounds like the scientist is applying a higher standard of rigour to findings he doesn’t like and is overly credulous of ones he supports. Viewing statement #1 in isolation, however, may seem like a perfectly reasonable claim. When looking at their behaviour in its totality, we instead see the scientist is pushing a very specific agenda. Per Scott Alexander:
“Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher catches him at his nefarious business, he patiently explains to them that identity doesn’t exist, and therefore the same argument against private property as made above. Flummoxed, they’re unable to think of a response before he rides off into the sunset.
But then when Heraclitus himself needs the concept of stable personal identity for something — maybe he wants to deposit his ill-gotten gains in the bank with certainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to withdraw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sheriff to ignore his activities for the next while — all of a sudden Heraclitus is willing to tolerate the watered-down vulgar sense of identity like everyone else.
…
Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent.
But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people’s cows, then we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.” — Scott Alexander, Beware isolated Demands for Rigour
The Motte and Bailey Doctrine
A conversation with someone using the Motte and Bailey Doctrine might go something like this:
Alice: Aliens exist, I met one.
Bob: When did you meet one? Do you have evidence they exist?
Alice: Um, if you bothered to learn the Drake Equation, you’d know the vast quantity of stars with habitable planets implies it is very likely that aliens exist.
Bob: …. Yeah, but you just said you met one?
Alice: Listen, I don’t have time to educate you. Look it up on Wikipedia.
Bob leaves, and Alice goes back to loudly proclaiming aliens are real and she’s hitching a ride to Mars next Tuesday.
This is a contrived example — I confess I’ve never met a diehard believer-in-aliens before — but I think you get the idea.
I’ve written previously about this phenomenon. In short, the Motte and Bailey is based on a medieval warfare technique; high value economic activity is conducted in the Bailey, but the citizens can retreat to the heavily fortified Motte when attacked. The Motte and Bailey technique with respect to arguments functions in a similar manner; people can make outrageous claims (the Bailey) and, when criticized, fall back to an uncontroversial and trivially true claims (the Motte)as a form of defense. When the critics leave, the Motte and Bailey arguer goes back to saying whatever outrageous thing they started out promoting.
For a visual representation of this phenomenon, see this photo:
I think you can see how the Motte and Bailey can be used to smuggle bad ideas into the public discourse — cloaking them in a guise of respectability.
