Person(often a newb) starts a thread, making a rather unreasonable assertion, supporting it with flawed argument or misapplied/false data etc.
A considerable number of people refute it in broadly similar ways.
OP then complains something along the lines of:
Everyone is picking on him because he isn’t part of the ‘clique’ or ‘hive mind’ and that they are disagreeing simply because they are closed-minded and more interested in maintaining the status quo than they are in knowing the truth, or that they simply don’t like the OP because he is a newbie or because of some personal reason.
Kind of like an ad-hominem in reverse (or the perception that one is on the receiving end of ad hominem), or the accusation that a chorus of disagreement automatically validates his assertion.
Argumentum ad misericordiam or the appeal to pity. ‘You’re all picking on me!’ It could also be a kind of red herring. Assuming the opponents have addressed the newb’s premises, inferences and/or conclusion, the flustered newb will counter their objections with completely irrelevant details such as their own newb status. This enables said newb to then shift the burden of proof.
Informal fallacies are often difficult to classify, often fall under more than one category, and often don’t neatly fit it any of the standard fallacies. The type of fallacy depends on whether you are looking at it from the newbs defense of his own original argument or his attack on the opponents counter argument. If he is defending his original argument by claiming that his opponent’s counter argument is fallacious (by virtue of a perceived Ad Hominem) then he is Arguing from Logic (The Fallacist’s Fallacy). If he is attacking his opponent’s counter argument on the basis that the opponent has a vested interest in making the newb look bad then he is guilty of Ad Hominem Circumstantial.
As I understand it, this is fallaciously accusing your opponent of committing a fallacy. If the OP says “You’re rejecting my argument just because I’m new!” he’s accusing his opponents of committing the ad hominem fallacy, but they have not committed that fallacy, so the OP is actually the one committing the fallacy.
Ha-ha…“O.J. must be innocent because there is too much evidence against him.” I’m going to make one up, and call it the “4 out of 5 dentists” fallacy. I say this because your hypothesis suggests that people will illogically reject a result simply because the results are too one-sided. Nobody would believe a claim of 5 out of 5 dentists, right?
If you are interested in the OP’s flawed reasoning as far as human behavior goes, you might consider How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich. I’m sort of new here. So, I’ll apologize in advance if recommending books is a no-no.
I wonder what you would call the fallacy of thinking whereby a person insists that a statement made by someone with an insufficiently high post count must be fallacious, even though you cannot identify which fallacy he or she is committing.
I don’t consider it an Appeal to Pity because he’s not asking for acceptance of his views because he is a newb, but is instead attacking his opponent’s capacity for objectivity based on the idea that they have a vested interest in proving a newb wrong. That is an Ad Hominem Circumstantial fallacy.
Diceman, The Fallacy Fallacy (Argumentum ad Logicam) is when you claim that a conclusion is false just because the argument that arrives to that conclusion is fallacious. Let’s say someone makes the following argument:
I am a man
I am a mortal
All men are mortal
If you claim that men aren’t mortal because the argument above is not valid then you are committing the Fallacy Fallacy (aka Fallacists’s Fallacy, Argument from Logic, Argumentum ad Logicam). Just because someone makes a bad argument doesn’t necessarily mean that their conclusion isn’t true.
In the case of the newb, he/she may claim the conclusion of the “cliques” argument is false because he believes they are committing an ad hominem fallacy by disagreeing with him just because he’s a newb.
Surreal, how about writing a new fallacy - The Newbie Fallacy (or “Appeal to Youth;” I don’t know). It could go along the lines of “assuming the poster’s post count has any effect on their argument whatsoever, whether pro or con.” It could certainly be more elegantly phrased than I’ve done here, though.
I hate to point it out Mangetout, but sometimes the OP is right. I’ve often read threads where nobody seems to have read the entire thing. They think “this guy is beating that dead horse from the thread yesterday” and go about attacking the old thread’s arguments. No that you do, but enough to make the OP justifiably cranky about it.