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Correcting Your Miseducation, Part 5: “Ad Hominem” and “Appeal to Authority” Are Not the Names of Fallacies
Unlike earlier posts in this series, I don’t know that I can blame any particular philosopher here for these errors, although it’s safe to say that Augustine is one who’s useful at correcting one of them.
Here’s the deal: There’s a whole list of things called “logical fallacies” that aren’t. What they actually are is patterns of reasoning that can be used fallaciously, and sometimes are.
Two Examples
An appeal to pity is a fallacy if it’s given as a reason to not conclude that someone committed a crime. But reasons for pitying him might be relevant to how harshly the criminal is punished.
Ad hominem arguments attack a person. An attack on a person’s character is a fallacy if it’s used as an excuse for ignoring his theories in physics, but an attack on Che Guevara’s character is a solid objection against quoting him as some sort of moral authority.
A More Bullet-Pointy Explanation
A fallacy is an error in reasoning.
Some fallacies depend ONLY on the structure–on the form, or the pattern of reasoning–of an argument. The pattern itself is bad! (“All X are Y, and all Z are Y, so all X are Z.”)
We call these formal fallacies.
But some fallacies depend on structure/form/pattern AND on content, i.e., what the argument is about.
These are called informal fallacies.
Formal fallacies depend only on the way we reason about things; informal fallacies depend in part on the things we’re reasoning about.
Some argument patterns are easy to use fallaciously, but . . . it depends on what we’re reasoning about.
These argument patterns are given names, like “appeal to the people” or “attack on the person” or “appeal to authority” or “appeal to pity” or “slippery slope” or “false dilemma” or “false dichotomy” or “false cause” or “appeal to ignorance” or “loaded question.”
But they are not inherently fallacious. With these argument patterns, the details of what the argument is about make a difference to whether it is a good argument.
So What’s the Point of All This?
People talk about fallacies a lot, but usually not very accurately. One of the worst offenses is when people identify an argument as a slippery slope argument or an appeal to authority or what-have-you as if that settles the matter–as if slippery slope arguments and appeals to authority are all bad arguments. They aren’t all bad.
Finding out that an argument has one of these patterns is only the first step. The second step is thinking carefully about what details fill out that pattern, and whether they give us a good argument or not.
And the rest–the rest is examples, I reckon. I recently heard someone suggest that it was an ad hominem fallacy to object to someone’s moral position on the grounds that he was a total weirdo and loser, but I don’t think that’s a fallacy. Maybe some slippery slope arguments used by conservatives were fallacious, but they weren’t all. Some arguments from ignorance are ok too.
And the rest is–lots more examples. There’s probably no end of them. But this post needs an end, so here it is.
Published in General
In this general ballpark, I’ve always stopped short while reading the academic-sounding phrase, “logic dictates”. Logic might suggest, even strongly suggest, but it doesn’t “dictate”. I’ve seen examples on both left and right. “Paying gang members to stay home and not be criminals is smart policy, and logic dictates that we blah blah…” A lower rent example of this is “it stands to reason”. Yeah? Prove it. Make an argument.
Quite right! Standards of diction and rhetoric have fallen drastically. Perhaps Kamela can be enlisted to right the ship on this critical issue.
Hitler liked Halbfester Schnittkäse.
You have not proven that you don’t like Halbfester Schnittkäse.
Therefore, you are Hitler.
Victims do not have agency
Persons without agency cannot be culpable
It is OK if I kill you because I identify as a victim
Newspapers often print a lot of stuff on paper
The Washington Post prints some stuff on paper
Therefore, it must all be true.
This statement is probably true
This marginally related statement may or may not be true
Therefore whatever I say next must be true because of Science or Victimhood.
Clearly, you are on the right side of history.
It may have been the first conversation I posted on Ricochet, but when I started teaching math in 1996 I was surprised at how many young math teachers would tell me that they didn’t understand proofs. Some of them were decent Algebra teachers, and one of the better ones told me “I never got those geometry proofs”. Most high school geometry curricula nowadays treat proofs like a secondary topic that they try to squeeze in. Some of these teachers could work their way through a proof but didn’t understand the point.
As an undergrad I took a symbolic logic class that was great fun for the handful of engineering and math majors in the class but appeared to be torture for everyone else. I believe that a significant cohort of Americans would not understand the erroneous syllogism you made in the main post. And maybe even after explanation would still not see what was wrong with it.
It’s so meta (my personal Word of the Year — use sparingly) to argue a point by labelling the logical fallacy when you could simply make the counter argument, or quoting an author when you can make the point as well yourself.
The counterexample method is great for this sort of thing.
All puppies are fuzzy. All kittens are fuzzy. So all puppies are kittens.
The Arc of History is usually twisted.
In the nineties, I remember talking with a journalist, not a generally bad guy, really, who earnestly asked me, and I think this was the precise wording, “Would you consider yourself a throne-and-altar, or a blood-and-soil kind of conservative?” Those were the only categories he could imagine.
An actual false dilemma fallacy. Sheesh.
I saw that, SA. I would have said that there were more than two major kinds of conservatives, and I myself am a principled Constitutional conservative.
Today, I’d say I was a practical-minded, throne-and-soil conservative, like my childhood hero, Cardinal Richelieu. A blood-and-altar Catholic conservative in today’s world would be Sohrab Ahmari.
I’m more of a blood-and-throne kind of guy. I see a throne, I want to usurp it. That’s just who I am.
There are two kinds of rhetoricians, those who divide the world into two categories and those that know way better than that.
Here is one man’s opinion*.
*(Disclaimer: As Regis Philbin used to say, “I’m only one man!”)
It appears that you are introducing a novel definition of informal fallacy that I have never heard of being used, and that, if adopted, would destroy our ability to make a critical distinction (between valid and invalid inferences) in English that is perfectly served today by the word fallacy.
When used precisely in conventional English-language writing, the term fallacy always refers to an argument that is logically invalid, irrespective of what it is about, and irrespective of whether or not it is true. Consistent with ordinary language, all informal fallacies are fallacies.
That is to say, fallacy (e.g., informal fallacy) is never used to refer to a form of argument that may or may not be valid, depending on what the argument is about.
Example from the OP:
Let’s express the supposed ad hominem fallacy argument formally in Categorical Logic. By one interpretation of on the grounds that, it is this:
(Major Premise) Proposition_1: If Person_1 is a total weirdo and loser AND Person_1 makes an argument Argument_1, then the conclusion of the Argument_1 is False.
(Minor Premise) Proposition_2: My opponent made the above argument.
(Conclusion) Proposition_3: The opposing Resolution is False.
This is clearly an argument, clearly a fallacious argument (because the conclusion does not follow from the premises. It IS a fallacy.
It is true that Proposition_1 is an attack on a person. But no proposition is an argument, so no proposition is a fallacious argument, so Proposition_1 is not an ad hominem argument and not a fallacious argument and therefore not an instance of an informal fallacy.
I got it from the logic textbooks.
All fallacies are invalid. An invalid argument is one whose premises don’t guarantee their conclusion.
But “valid” is just a technical term for an argument whose premises do guarantee their conclusion, and not all invalid arguments are bad. Good probabilistic arguments are not bad.
No, that’s not the premise.
The premise is more along the lines of “Total weirdos and losers are unreliable in their moral opinions.”
Note that it’s probability, not certainty.
Note that it’s about moral opinions, not opinions about just anything.
And note that it only makes sense when the weirdo loser is giving opinions without giving his own argument. If he gives an argument, then this objection won’t work. If he had given an argument, then we really would have an ad hominem fallacy.
The argument you mistakenly reconstructed would have been valid if you’d also included in the minor premises the part about him being a total weirdo and loser. But the first premise would still have been false.
I’m a get-off-my-property-until-you-have-a-warrant conservative.
You say: “An attack on a person’s character is a fallacy if it’s used as an excuse for ignoring his theories in physics, but an attack on Che Guevara’s character is a solid objection against quoting him as some sort of moral authority.”
Guevara was an eloquent writer and not every point that he made in his writings or speeches was a false idea.
Taking this one step further, many current day personalities have their blind spots. Certainly none of them are as dangerous as Guevara was, but still, it is now possible to see ad hominem attacks that set out to destroy all of Donald Trump’s statements because of whatever insult is chosen to throw at this individual. (“Trump’s unethical business transactions in the 1980’s indicate he is a narcissistic guy with criminal tendencies, who deserves to face 91 indictments.”)
Same with Ben Shapiro, or Dave Rubin. Or Candace Owens, etc.
An ad hominem attack is most certainly a logical fallacy if it is used as some sort of universal disqualifier based on only one aspect of a human’s life activities. This should be especially considered the case if we have to dredge through decades of someone’s past history to come up with a disqualifier.
As the women’s group I was in was booting me out over a sentence and a half statement about infra structure, their biggest moral drive was in trying to get people to quit buying and reading Dr Seuss.
Why? Because of a 1924 cartoon which he had gotten published that was a charicature of Japanese citizens. This cartoon was brought forth to indicate that he is a total unredeemable racist.
The universal ad hominem remains a popular item.
Oh, well. I guess you didn’t claim it was a complete list.
Yes and no.
There’s no perfect list. If anyone ever made a complete one, it was too long and unwieldy.
X is false.
Proof:
In both strict and probabilistic or fuzzy logic, all arguments, whether formally valid, formally fallacious (“invalid”), or informally fallacious, state that “Y: the following proposition follows logically from the above premises…”
In all fallacious arguments, Y is false.
All false statements are bad.
Therefore X is false.
If by “follows logically” you mean something like “is guaranteed by,” then no—
Y is falsenot all arguments state Y.In probabilistic reasoning we have premises that render their conclusion probable but do not guarantee it. (https://ricochet.com/1386188/2-the-basics-of-logic/)
More importantly, though, I don’t actually know what you mean, and that was only a guess. My other guess is that you missed the part where I gave the technical definition of “valid.”
Let’s consider only strict logic first, and only when we’ve reached agreement, consider probabilistic logic.
I think that virtually every logician using English to <teach> or <write a textbook for> an undergraduate course in Logic mentally assigns the same meaning to the verb “follows logically from“ in…
Am I correct? If so, then that is also the definition I’m using.
Ok. Sounds fine so far.
HCOL!* BTW, WYBA recently?**
* * *
*Hearty Chortle Out Loud!
**Werr YooBinnAt?
The castle Zenda.
So you say: “I think that virtually every logician using English to <teach> or <write a textbook for> an undergraduate course in Logic mentally assigns the same meaning to the verb “follows logically from“ in…”
That is a subset of “follows logically” as it is deduction according to syllogism.
But induction is fine too, if the data base from which we humans operate is a large data base.
That is why we humans can safely point out “The sun rises in the east” with nary a moment of hesitation.
As graphic diarist Allie Brosh literally illustrates, many people with dogs notice that their fur baby does not have this attitude to a large data base.
No matter how many bees that Allie’s dog eats to then experience unfortunate consequences, her dog still thinks “Well most likely the next bee I eat will act differently!”
One more plug for Allie–
Hyperbole and a half is great for a laugh: hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com
Hyperbole and a Half is a webcomic and blog written and illustrated by Allie Brosh.
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Do you agree that every invalid argument makes a false assertion?
No.