In 1976, Dr. Myron L. Fox gave lectures to psychologists and psychiatrists on the application of game theory in the education of doctors. As a speaker, he was charismatic. He spoke loudly and gestured. No one in the audience paid attention to the fact that he was not a scientist but an actor. For recipients, it was more important that Dr. Fox says, not what he says. It has been proved in this way that the more expressive the statement, the more credible the speaker and the more inclined to believe him. The effect of Dr. Fox means that the character of such a speaker therefore plays a key role in communication.

Douglas Walton was one of the first to systematically examine arguments referring to the character of the speaker and conduct research on “ethical arguments.” He dealt with, among others arguments from expert opinions, arguments from authority and ad hominem attacks, i.e. those where the interlocutor refers to opinions recognized by the opponent, drawing arguments supporting his thesis from them.

Contemporary ethos research is mainly undertaken in the theory of rhetoric, argumentation theory, informal logic and the theory of critical thinking. These studies focus on answering the question: How does ethos, the character of the speaker, determine successful argument, speech communication and persuasion? The aforementioned studies by Douglas Walton are a representative example of this direction in science. Although there is little research into the ethos taken out of the rhetoric context as such, issues of rhetoric and argumentation strategies continue to interest scientists around the world, including us.

As a New Ethos Lab research team, we analyze the language of public debates through the prism of the character of the speakers, i.e. the ethos, based on the actual behavior of people, automatically processing the natural language they use, and then analyzing the entire discussions, not just their fragments. The insight gained in this way into large data resources allows us to formulate a theory that allows us to designate a new area of ​​research and new research methods in the philosophy of argumentation – the new ethos.

More specifically, our approach to ethos is new in two senses: (1) we inspect how our language use is transformed when we move from the real world to the digital (i.e. new) world; and (2) we employ technologies, i.e. new methods, from Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Data Science in order to investigate the rhetorical use of language.

As The New Ethos lab, we look at how we use ethos and other rhetorical devices in sharing, managing as well as manipulating information in the digital society. That is, we are interested in what we say and to whom and about whom we are saying it; and how we say what we have to say to others (and sometimes about others), and why we say it. In particular, we study communication understood as a network of interactions between messages and people.

Digital society is not a sci-fi idea. We are living it now – some scientists say that we are already more native to the virtual world, while in the physical world we are just guests from time to time. At least some of us are.