Hi,
On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:51:42PM +0000, John E Drake wrote:
But you use the phrase "the way people have been" and then you list all of
the terrible things of which these people have been guilty.
As I tried to show in my previous note, the key point about _ad
hominem_ is that it's about relevance, not just about the person.
Suppose Andrew offers testimony that he saw Green Humpty Dumpty on the
wall this morning, and says it explains the green stain on the wall.
John says, "Andrew is a liar, because I have this secret letter from
him that I intercepted and that says he used green paint in his
graffiti on that wall; and also, I have this video capture from the
period in question that shows the wall with no Humpty Dumpty on it,
but shows Andrew painting the wall," that is not an _ad hominem_ no
matter how it impugns Andrew's integrity. The counter-argument is
directly relevant to testing the truth of the testimony, and therefore
to undermining Andrew's conclusion.
The term "_ad hominem_" is not a four-dollar way to say "makes me feel
bad". It is a particular kind of fallacy in which the fallacious
argument attacks the person speaking instead of the propositions in
question. Saying, "John Sullivan is bald; you shouldn't believe his
hair tips," is a fallacy, because my father's manifest baldness is
just not related to whether his hair tips would be good for you. (As
it happens, they wouldn't be. But his baldness is not the reason you
should think that. There are successful bald hairdressers.)
Whether a given bad argument is an _ad hominem_ or an appeal to
popularity or a (phony) appeal to authority -- or even a circular
argument ("begging the question") -- is just about the least
interesting question I can think to answer. The issue when we are
having these kinds of discussion is whether a given argument is a good
one, and part of that evaluation has to be relevance, but getting the
classification just so is only fun for students of rhetoric.
All of that is, as John says elsewhere, also unrelated to whether we are
creating a chilly environment, harassing people, or welcoming people
into our standards-making activities. I can -- and I bet you can too
-- construct a perfectly valid, relevant, and devastating argument
that is delivered in such a way as to wound the person whose argument
I am attacking. And I can produce -- I bet you can too -- an argument
that is lousy, but that makes everyone in the room feel warm and
fuzzy. These issues are very loosely coupled to whether something is
an _ad hominem_. I think we ought to focus less on the classification
of boorish or ill-reasoned utterances and much more on the quality of
the reasoning and the openness of the presentation.
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com