Argument from Verbal Classification: The Power of a Label
"It's not torture — it's enhanced interrogation." "That's not a tax hike, it's a revenue adjustment." "He wasn't murdered; it was a targeted killing." "They're not refugees — they're economic migrants." In each case, the argument isn't about facts. The facts are often agreed upon. The argument is about what category those facts belong to — and categories carry enormous argumentative weight. Once you've successfully classified something, the normative implications follow almost automatically.
The Structure of the Argument
The argument from verbal classification — also called the argument from classification or definitional argument — has the following basic structure in Douglas Walton's taxonomy of argumentation schemes:
- Classification premise: A falls within the definition of category C (or: A has properties that define C).
- Major premise: For everything that falls under C, property P holds (or action A is appropriate).
- Conclusion: Therefore, A has property P (or: action A is appropriate for this case).
Consider: "Abortion is the taking of a human life. Taking a human life is murder. Therefore abortion is murder." Or the inverse: "A fetus is not yet a person in the legal sense. Murder is the killing of a person. Therefore abortion is not murder." Both arguments share the same structure — they are both arguments from verbal classification. The disagreement is not logical but ontological: what counts as a "person"? The rhetorical contest is a contest over categories.
Why Classification Is Always Argument
One of the most important insights from the philosophy of language and rhetoric is that classification is never merely descriptive — it is always, in some measure, evaluative and argumentative. Categories are not natural kinds waiting to be discovered; they are human constructs that reflect theories, values, and purposes.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed that concepts are bounded not by sharp definitions but by "family resemblances" — overlapping similarities without a single shared essence. This means the boundaries of categories are genuinely contestable. Is a virus alive? Is a hot dog a sandwich? These seem trivial, but the same logic applies to: Is waterboarding torture? Is a particular military action a war? Is a platform a publisher? The stakes in these classification disputes are enormous.
Political scientist Murray Edelman argued in Politics as Symbolic Action (1971) that political language systematically uses categorisation to prime emotional responses and mobilise or demobilise constituencies. Labelling welfare recipients "dependents" rather than "citizens in need" shifts the entire frame of policy debate. Calling an estate tax a "death tax" activates different intuitions than calling it an "inheritance tax." The same policy, differently labelled, generates different public responses — a fact that political operatives have exploited for as long as there has been politics.
Everyday and High-Stakes Examples
Tax vs. contribution. Mandatory social insurance payments are functionally indistinguishable from taxes — they are compulsory, government-administered, and fund public goods. But in many jurisdictions they are classified as "contributions" or "premiums," which activates an insurance frame rather than a taxation frame, and changes public acceptance, legal treatment, and political accountability.
War and its euphemisms. The US military operation in Korea (1950–53) was officially called a "police action," not a war — which had constitutional implications (Congress's power to declare war was bypassed) as well as psychological ones. The "War on Terror" conversely elevated counter-terrorism from a law-enforcement matter to a military one, with profound consequences for which legal regimes applied, including detention, interrogation, and due process. Classification was the argument.
Refugee vs. migrant. International law defines a "refugee" as a person fleeing persecution, war, or disaster — and confers specific legal protections. An "economic migrant" is someone moving for better opportunities and has no such protections. The classification debate is not academic; it determines whether states are obligated to offer protection or can turn people away. Applying one label or the other is a political argument with life-and-death consequences.
Personhood in law and ethics. Corporations are legal "persons" — a classification with profound implications for their rights (speech, property, due process) and liabilities. The classification debate around fetal personhood, AI personhood, and the legal standing of ecosystems (several rivers have been granted legal rights in some jurisdictions) are similarly consequential disputes about what category something belongs to, and what normative treatment that implies.
The Critical Questions
Walton's framework identifies specific critical questions that should be applied when an argument from verbal classification is encountered. These expose the assumptions that make the argument vulnerable:
- Does A truly have the defining properties of C? The classification must be empirically accurate. Does the case actually meet the criteria for the category?
- Is the definition of C clear and precise? Vague or contested definitions allow classification arguments to slide — applying C to cases that only superficially resemble its core instances.
- Is the category appropriate for this context? Categories that are useful in one context may be misleading in another. Legal categories, scientific categories, and moral categories often do not coincide.
- Are the normative implications of C genuinely applicable here? Even if A is correctly classified as C, the consequences drawn from that classification may not follow.
- Who benefits from this particular classification? Classification disputes are often interest-laden. Asking who gains from a label being applied is not an ad hominem dismissal — it is a legitimate inquiry into motive.
The No True Scotsman Connection
The argument from verbal classification is closely related to the no true Scotsman fallacy, which involves reclassifying counterexamples out of a category to protect a generalisation. "No true Christian would do that." "That's not real capitalism." The fallacy arises when definitional revision is used to immunise a claim from refutation — when the category is stretched or contracted post hoc to exclude inconvenient members.
The relationship to loaded language is equally direct. Loaded terms — "freedom fighter" vs. "terrorist," "pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion," "collateral damage" vs. "civilian deaths" — are often classification arguments compressed into single words. The label does not merely describe; it classifies, evaluates, and prescribes in a single move. The critical reader learns to notice when a term is doing this kind of work and to ask what would be lost (and gained) if a more neutral descriptor were used instead.
Also related: equivocation, which exploits the slippage between different senses of the same word — a close cousin to definitional manipulation. And confirmation bias, which makes us find our preferred classifications natural and obvious while making alternative classifications seem strained.
Classification as Genuinely Productive Argument
It would be a mistake to conclude that all classification argument is manipulation. Disputes about categorisation are often genuinely important and genuinely difficult — they force us to examine the values embedded in our concepts and to decide what really matters.
Whether a disease is categorised as a "disability" or merely a "difference" has implications for how society should respond. Whether a given act counts as "violence" shapes what responses are justified. Whether an AI system is a "tool" or an "agent" affects who bears moral responsibility for its outputs. These are not merely verbal disputes — they engage substantive questions about what we value and how we should organise our collective life.
The critical skill is distinguishing between classification arguments that open genuine normative inquiry and those that smuggle in contested values under the cover of apparently neutral description. The former deserve engagement; the latter deserve exposure.
Sources & Further Reading
- Walton, Douglas, Chris Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno. Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Macagno, Fabrizio, and Douglas Walton. Emotive Language in Argumentation. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
- Edelman, Murray. Politics as Symbolic Action. Academic Press, 1971.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, 1953.
- Lakoff, George. Don't Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.
- Wikipedia: Definitional argument
- Wikipedia: Persuasive definition