--On Friday, February 28, 2014 15:52 -0800 "Murray S. Kucherawy"
<superuser(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
I am fully on board with efforts to make participation by
relative newcomers more smooth and comfortable. However, I
feel the idea of creating an RFC merely to define "ad hominem"
and suggest ways to prevent it is just a bit silly. For
example, I can imagine a citation like "Your comment is an ad
hominem, as defined in RFCxxxx. Please don't do that, or
rephrase your question." And I can imagine both veterans and
newcomers alike thinking that's just a bizarre thing to do, or
to have to do.
While agreeing with Barry's recent note, let me take the above a
half-step further for the next time this comes up as experience
indicates that it will. As others have pointed out, "ad
hominem" is not a synonym for "personal attack", "general bad
behavior that mentions an individual's name", or anything like
that. "ad hominem argument" is simply one of a fairly large
number of logic fallacies. Others will have references readily
at hand, but my memory is that a catalog of those already
exists, is over 2000 years old, and has been _very_ widely
translated. Why, in that context, we would need an RFC to do
anything more than reference that catalog, I don't know
(although an RFC with two lines or content and a normative
reference entry would be amusing). For the reasons Murray and
Barry suggest, I can't even understand why we would want to do
that
Ultimately, if "behave like professionals and adults" and "be
nice" guidelines are insufficient, I have serious doubts that
trying to define and categorize particular types of misbehavior
will improve things significantly. And, while many of us need
periodic reminders, those two guidelines are in RFC 3184 (BCP
54) in only slightly different form (and that document is now
13+ years old).
john