--On Tuesday, February 25, 2014 12:57 -0500 Noel Chiappa
<jnc(_at_)mercury(_dot_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu> wrote:
...
I think there are different thresholds for 'ad hominem' -
loosely interpreted as '_inappropriately_ about the speaker
rather than about what they say' - depending on the area.
Noel,
See Andrew's careful explanation for a better definition, but an
ad hominem argument is not about the speaker or necessarily
addressed to the speaker. "Joe is a meat eater, and therefore
his position on BGP is obviously incorrect" is an example,
albeit an extreme one: some property is attributed to Joe that
some members of the community might find unattractive and Joe's
association with that property is then used as a argument
against accepting Joe's view on something completely irrelevant
to that property. Whether that is also a personal attack on Joe
is irrelevant to the ad hominem argument.
The only thing I can think of that would affect the "threshold"
is the degree of relevancy between the property being asserted
and the proposed conclusion.
...
On the other hand, for discussions of group governance, I
think the person's experience/knowledge/etc _are_ relevant,
because when it comes to managing human groups, there are no
'right' answers. (Which is why the Law of Unintended
Consequences often comes into play in human governance
decisions.) That kind of information about someone has some
real utility in evaluating their thoughts about such topics,
so _some_ questioning is legitimate.
It seems to me that we keep getting distracted by two things:
(1) The difference between a personal attack on someone (direct
or indirect) and an ad hominem argument. They actually have
very little to do with each other. Certainly there are
instances of the former that are not instances of the latter and
vice versa.
(2) The relationship between whether a question or other form of
challenge to an idea is appropriate and/or politically correct
in form and personal attacks. I can ask a question that is
perfectly in order and phrase it with the intent that the person
being asked feels personally attacked, I can ask inappropriate
questions so that they are not... and the other cases exist too.
And in these latter case, I suspect there's also a grey area -
'you're an idiot' is pretty clearly over the line, 'how much
experience have you had running large groups' is probably
relevant, and 'how old are you' (as a quick example off the
top of my head, not necessarily the greyest I could come up
with if I spent more time thinking about it) is somewhere in
the middle..
Whatever those are, they are not ad hominem arguments because
there is, in non-philosopher language, no "and therefore"
construction. Those are all assertions that, again, may be true
or false and may or may not be appropriate in polite company
whether or not they are personal attacks and regardless of their
truth status. You are talking about more or less appropriate
questions and statements above, not ad hominem anything.
Under normal circumstances, I'd mutter something about
terminology errors about a logic fallacy into my beard and move
on rather than commenting on this at all. But we seem to be
stepping into policy arguments about what constitutes
harassment. There I think these distinctions become important
because ad hominem arguments, while they reflect badly on the
person who tries to make them and may reflect badly on anyone
who doesn't see the logic fallacy, are rarely considered
harassing even if repeated to the point of silliness. Personal
attacks, whether separate or the first, "Melvin is an idiot",
part of an ad hominem or other argument, are another matter
entirely. And I think it is important to be clear about what we
are talking about.
john