I’m not talking about calling your opponent an idiot at the drop of a hat (if they aren’t an idiot, doing so will probably backfire). I’m talking about when your opponent is making such idiotic arguments that they discredit themselves and in turn other people on their side of that issue. To people who agree with you, you’re saying, “Don’t be shy about expressing your views. This is what you’re up against.”
Wendell, I am not trying to get at good or bad rhetorical strategy, I am specifically trying to learn and understand the actual term ad hominem. I want to make sure that I am using it in the right contexts. If someone says that I am using an ad hominem, I want to show them how I am not. More importantly, I want to use it without looking foolish. If people start throwing around Latin words they don’t understand, it makes good rhetoric to point it out.
A: You are an idiot.
B: OMG! Ad hominem!
A: That goes to demonstrate that you are indeed an idiot.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but these would not be ad hominem?
A single statement like “You are an idiot” cannot be a logical fallacy. Fallacies have to be arguments.
If I say . . .
*Anyone who buys this product is an idiot.
You have bought this product.
Therefore, you are an idiot.
*. . . then that is an argument, but still not ad hominem. In order to make it *ad hominem, * it would have to be something like . . .
John Smith is very famous and tells it like it is.
John Smith says that you’re an idiot.
Therefore, you’re an idiot.
But just calling someone an idiot is merely a statement, not an argument.
I thought an ad hominem needs to be in the form of disputing someone else’s argument. You are attacking the person and not their logic.
It is not an ad hominem if all I want to do is slander you (e.g. “you’re a dick”).
[sub]I am not really calling panache45 a “dick”…just an example.[/sub]
If someone says that mercury is safe to drink, and you respond “you’re an idiot”, that is not an effective rebuttal of their argument. They could be an idiot who happens to be right about the potability of mercury. You have not said anything about the argument. Instead you have commented on the person. If your intent is to comment on the person (and it sounds like it is), then you have achieved that. If your intent is to rebut the argument, you have failed, because you didn’t address the argument, you attacked the person (an ad hominem)
You could say:
Them: Mercury is an excellent restorative if drunk three times a day.
You: You’re an idiot.
Them: Ad hominem fail!
You: I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying you are an idiot.
Is it an ad hominem to note someone is unreliable?
Seems to me if someone is a proven liar then that is fair comment.
For instance Glenn Beck cannot be trusted so it seems worthy to note that.
What’s the argument? Is Glenn Beck being offered as an authority? You could debate his trustworthiness as a source. If Glenn Beck says that the Sun is the nearest star to the Earth, is he automatically wrong, just because he is Glenn Beck? You need to address the argument.
This is incorrect. Not every portion of an argument is always stated. In fact, every statement used in an argument has an implied or stated premise and an implied or stated conclusion.
The rest of my argument was wiped out by Weedy’s statement. I’ll have to revise.
Okay, here’s a more detailed version of what an ad hominem is.
A logical fallacy is always about an unstated premise being false but accepted as true because it’s left unstated. In the case of ad hominem, the false premise is “Any statement from [negative statement about person] is always wrong.”
In the Glen Beck offering above, The full argument is:
Premise 1: Glen Beck is an untrustworthy source.
Premise 2 (unstated): Any statement from an untrustworthy source is always wrong.
Premise 3: Glen Beck says the Sun is the closest star to the Earth.
Conclusion: The statement “the Sun is the closest star to the Earth” is wrong.
It gets worse when the attack is not even remotely relevant.
Premise 1: Tea Partiers are racist.
Premise 2 (unstated): Any statement from a racist is inherently wrong.
Premise 3: Tea Partiers claim that the bailout was bad.
Conclusion: The bailout must’ve been good.
You might even agree with the conclusion, but the second premise should be considered invalid by anyone with a brain. And, yet, because it is left unstated, many people who agree that that premise invalid would think the argument is valid.
The problem with saying that a simple statement is not an argument (and therefore not ad hominem) is that, if you are in a debate, people will assume you are making an argument. Thus my statement in my previous post applies. Seeing as different people can come up with different ideas about what the unstated premise/conclusion is, nearly all personal attacks can be seen as ad hominem. Thus the confusion on the definition.
That’s an appeal to authority, not an ad hominem.
I think that what one has to start with is the point of arguing. The point is for the two people who are arguing (and any interested third parties who may be listening) to come closer to truth when they finish talking. They may still disagree on major points, but they (and any third parties) will have learned new things from listening to other viewpoints.
The point is not to beat your opponent. I don’t even like the term “opponent.” The war metaphor is not useful in an argument. You shouldn’t be trying to win a battle. You should be jointly aiming at coming closer to the truth. If all you wanted to do was somehow force your ideas into other people’s heads, you could just take them captive, pump them full of some drug that makes them believe that anything you say is true, and then tell them what you believe on the subject. This would win the argument in the sense that they now agree with what you say, but it wouldn’t get anywhere in jointly coming closer to the truth.
Calling someone an idiot is just ending the argument. At that point, no one is going to learn anything new. The person you called an idiot and anyone who agrees with them is going to quit listening to you. You won’t have shown the people who agree with you that they should speak out more on the subject. You will have shown them that it’s not necessary to try to convince anyone, since anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot by definition.
There’s one more problem with calling someone an idiot. It’s used to mean several quite different things. Seldom when an argument ends with someone calling someone else an idiot do they mean that the other person has a low I.Q. It’s rare for someone to argue a point with someone else when they know that the other person is really too stupid to understand the arguments. They might act patronizing to such a person, but they are unlikely to try to argue with them, and if they discovered in the middle of an argument that the person was simply stupid they would just quit arguing.
Sometimes it’s used to mean that the other person is ignorant of key facts relevant to the argument. I don’t think that this is what’s meant in most cases when someone ends an argument by saying that the other person is an idiot. In such cases the first person would try to explain those key facts to the other person and sometimes the other person might even come to understand those facts.
Sometimes it’s used to mean that the other person is crazy. I don’t think that this is really true in most cases. If the other person were actually crazy, the first person might be afraid that the other person might harm them or harm themselves, but they wouldn’t be worried that the other person was unable to understand their points in the argument.
Sometimes it means that the other person, although smart and well informed, has no idea how to marshal their arguments and convince other people. Talking with such people is very frustrating. They seem able to handle any ordinary intellectual task, but in an argument they repeat points and go off on tangents. Telling such a person that they are an idiot is no help. I think the best thing to do is to tell them to think about what you’ve said, just as you’ll think about they’ve said.
Sometimes it means that the other person has wildly different basic assumptions about how the world works. After all, in most arguments, the two people arguing aren’t trying to go completely back to basics in understanding the world. If they get into an argument, they probably agree about the most basic assumptions about the world, and the argument involves them trying to show what the consequences of those assumptions are. If, in the middle of the argument, someone discovers that the other person makes basically different assumptions about the world, out of frustration they could call that person an idiot. In this case, it’s better to simply walk away from the argument.
Finally, sometimes what someone means by calling someone else an idiot is that they believe different things than they do. What they are saying is that anyone that disagrees with them is an idiot by definition, since their ideas are the only correct ones in the world and any other ideas can’t possibly be correct. In such a case, if someone calls the other person an idiot, it may well get some cheers from the crowd, but no one has learned anything new from the argument.
You’re contradicting yourself there. The term ‘ad hominem’ is only relevant in the context of rhetorical strategy and rules. Just like “grand slam” might be used as a euphemism for other things, but it only officially makes sense within the context of a baseball game.
Of course calling someone an idiot is ad hominem, within the context of an argument or debate of some kind. I mean, you can get nitpicky about it:
First off, “Idiot” doesn’t usually mean anything useful. Generally people are just using it as a meaningless insult. But, you can break it down into different situations.
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“You are an idiot therefore your argument is wrong” if idiot is just an insult, is definitely ad hominem. You are basically saying “I don’t like you and therefore I don’t agree with you”, which is meaningless in terms of the debate.
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“You actually have been proven to lie or to have Down’s Syndrome or be too young to understand things properly, and therefore you are wrong” - here you are actually making an argument about the reliability of the person. I’m not sure if this is ad hominem, but it’s not rhetorically useful, so whatever it’s called, you shouldn’t do it. I mean you can if it gets your rocks off, but it has no place in a fair and legitimate debate. There’s not a lot of useful difference between someone who can’t understand something or refuses to listen to cogent arguments, and someone who just happens to be wrong. In either case all you can do is argue the facts of the topic. The person’s reliability only matters if they are presenting original research, which generally isn’t part of a formal debate even if it’s legitimate, and certainly not when it’s merely anecdotal.
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“You are wrong and therefore you are an idiot”. Might not be ad hominem per se, but it’s not an argument either. It’s just an insult. And insults, whether or not they are technically ad hominem, still have no place in legitimate arguments.
In other words, if you are just talking shit with your friends, it doesn’t matter if something is ad hominem, because you aren’t having an honest, fair, and legitimate debate/argument. You are either really in the game, or you aren’t.
What the OP is saying is that he’s not trying to figure out when it’s okay to call someone an idiot–he’s asking a technical question about the definition of a particular fallacy.
As has been explained by myself and others in this thread, the quoted passage does not contain an example of the Ad Hominem fallacy.