system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it wrong to use pathos in an argument?

I have read up a bit on debating techniques and I am a bit confused, should I use pathos or not? While many sources claim that pathos is a very important part of an argument I have also read that pathos could be considered to be the same as appeal to emotion which is a logical fallacy. I  understand why appeal to emotion isn't valid since it is a method of manipulating your opponent without being logical, and from what I have understood that is exactly what pathos is. Have I just misunderstood what pathos and appeal to emotion means? Or is it a great debate whether or not you should use pathos in an argument.
gpt
The thing about formal validity is that it doesn't track *relevance*. Whether a thing is important or interesting or valuable isn't reflected as an aspect of its syntactic or logical structure. That's something we bring to the table when we're evaluating the facts. So using emotions in an argument doesn't make it invalid, just like it doesn't make it valid, in this formal sense.

Pathos or emotional spin are important parts of our communicative strategies, because they give cues and signals as to what the speaker thinks is relevant. And that's cognitively crucial to us. We're not robots, cranking through formal deductions all the time. Usually, evaluating what is relevant is an important aspect of any discussion.

The problem is when someone tries to use emotion to overwhelm reason. This is when it becomes disruptive. When someone stops listening or talking because they can't even, or uses overblown emotion to try to derail a discussion, that's when it's a problem. 

It's remarkable how fragile a thing discussion can be. It's so amazingly easy for a discussion to go off the rails because one party gets too worked up. So if you want a good talk, or a sporting debate, keeping yourself under emotional control is pretty important. But that's different from not having any feelings at all about the subject, or not expressing any.