Thursday, September 19, 2013

Logical Fallacy: Ad Hominem

As we continue our trek through proper thinking, our next stop is an easy and obviousone: The Ad Hominem fallacy. In the Latin it means, "to the man." What happens here is when a person directs their argument at the credibility or character of the other person rather than the subject being argued.
This can be done Abuseively or Cirsumstantially.

Abusive is pretty obvious: "Obviously you are wrong because you are a complete idiot." This calls the person's character into question, trying to discredit them so that others will not consider them trustworthy and therefore doubt their argument. We see this a lot in politics. Sometimes the claims are true, "My opponent spent time in jail. Do you really want to trust a criminal?" Maybe he did spend time in jail, but is that relevant to the issue? It may not even apply.

The Circumstantial Ad Hominem is when you use a person's circumstances to disqualify their argument. A common one is something like this, "You're only a Christian because you were raised that way. Christianity isn't true." They mau have been raised in a Christian home, but that doesn't have any relevance to the claims of Christianity.

Mostly we need to be sure that our basis for belief in anything is the actual ideas and not the person.

Another common one I hear is people who don't want to be a Christian because all the ones they know are hypocrites. That may be that you see some shady stuff done by Christians, but you're not following them. You're following Christ. Judge Christianity based on its teachings not on the imperfection of its followers.

No comments:

Post a Comment