BAD EXAMPLES

Bad examples can ruin a case, or point to another dynamic.

Good examples reduce a thing to that one aspect an argument needs from it. Needs it to appear as.

Good examples make use of an understanding we already have (or could easily accept) without being able to claim from the example any evidence. The interpretation is baked in: because we already regard everything about Nazism as bad, it can be used as an example of any tendency or negative trait.

Good examples illustrate a point and are part of the form of a particular rhetorical presentation (a speech, a text); examples are not the body of a claim.

Evidence warrants claims. How do examples fit in? Examples cannot serve as warrants for a claim without suggesting a concept, principle, dynamic, mechanism, or texture that exceeds the example (that is more general than an actual event). They cannot be evidence because they don’t represent anything more than themselves (they are anecdotal). They are not a claim, or the example would itself have made the claim entirely by itself. The example may have already made something like the claim, but in a different context or in a more obscure way.

Bad examples introduce uncertainty, confusion, and doubt. You say everyone is angry about it, but your example is of a person who is always angry, or is exaggerating for the camera. Is this anger the current form of anger that is ongoing? Is this anger intensified by opportunities to be heard?

The bad example is more than lacking. It’s suggestive. It points another direction, adds a twist to the moral it is being asked to stand for, confuses what we thought was being discussed with something else that maybe we should be talking about instead, pushes the audience back out of the grasp of persuasion into the crossroads of doubt or apathy.