At one point I considered having any arbitrary tag for a quote. However, this was too open-ended. I thought it made sense to constrain the meaning of the tags to the tactics used to persuade. I then started thinking about categories of such tactics, and realized that the instances of persuasive tactics didn’t neatly neatly fall into categories. I found many tactics weren’t clearly classified as an argument or a rhetorical device, but somewhere in-between. Furthermore, I realized: what value is there in even deliberating over that choice? It seemed sufficient to simply have a term that captured the general case: a persuasive tactic. Now, I could have chosen the term “argument” but then some people will complain that they’re not all arguments. That’s how the new term came about.
At one point I considered having any arbitrary tag for a quote. However, this was too open-ended. I thought it made sense to constrain the meaning of the tags to the tactics used to persuade. I then started thinking about categories of such tactics, and realized that the instances of persuasive tactics didn’t neatly neatly fall into categories. I found many tactics weren’t clearly classified as an argument or a rhetorical device, but somewhere in-between. Furthermore, I realized: what value is there in even deliberating over that choice? It seemed sufficient to simply have a term that captured the general case: a persuasive tactic. Now, I could have chosen the term “argument” but then some people will complain that they’re not all arguments. That’s how the new term came about.