***URGENT*** Skeptic Exchange will close down very soon unless you visit Area 51 and vote for it!
1

There is a tendency of people to use 'ad hominem' as a defence, when in fact it isn't an actual ad hominem.

Example: "Your 9-11 Truther beliefs are garbage because you are an idiot." IS an ad hominem. but "You are a jerk, and your 9-11 Truther beliefs are garbage." is not an ad hominem.

The difference being that being wrong consequent to being what ever the alleged attack is is not using a logical fallacy; whereas being wrong because of the implications of the attack is a logical fallacy.

In fact, decrying 'ad hominem' when in fact there is no causal chain between being wrong and the personal attack is in a sense a logical fallacy in it's own right.

Is there a name for this? Does it fit cleanly into one of the other common established fallacies? Or is it it's own (or a subset of another) fallacy?

flag

1 Answer

2

There's an excellent short essay on this point called "The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy;" see http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html.

Ad hominem is unrelated to sarcasm or personal abuse. Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument. The mere presence of a personal attack does not indicate ad hominem: the attack must be used for the purpose of undermining the argument, or otherwise the logical fallacy isn't there. It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments.

link|flag

Your Answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.