Article Response-John Seabrook's psychopathy article (logos)
Uploaded by Melania on Nov 30, 2008
Reporter John Seabrook uses logos to argue that psychopathy needs to be funded more research money.
Given that most readers of the New Yorker are highly educated individuals, Seabrook feels that he can connect best with the audience by using logical appeal. Since Seabrook does not reveal a valid thesis in the passage, he relies on logos to argue that psychopathy needs more research money.
He describes the condition of psychopathy in a rational way, rather than an emotional way, to make the audience know that limited funding is a serious matter. To show that psychopaths are being treated unfairly at prison facilities, Seabrook uses hard evidence rather than an inference. When Seabrook remarks that Dr. Kent Kiehl was in the minority of doctors that actually spent hours with the patients instead of just reading about them like other doctors, it makes the readers aware that the world of psychopathy needs to be further researched in other ways than reading about them.
Seabrook provides statistics to better show the audience that funding for other illnesses that affect fewer people are subsidized a more gracious amount than psychopathy. When he mentions that there are more than a million psychopaths at large in the United States, it lets the audience know that even though the number of psychopaths who are not in prisons is thought to exceed the numbers who are in facilities, it does not mean funding should come to a halt, funding should prosper.
Seabrook uses references in his article to let the audience have reliable sources to where he obtains his information and statistics regarding psychopathy. This branch of logical appeal is helpful since readers of the New Yorker always want to better understand what they had just read. He brings up two psychologists, Reid and M.J. Meloy, followed by a statistic to not only create an assertion, but to also provide evidence about why psychopathy should be funded.