C'mon Everybody & Move Yo Feet
Holla.
Rockin' day at work. Mucho stresso. Good good stuff. Fear this man. Be embarassed by this one.
Some quick thoughts on the ad hominem fallacy, or as I like to call it the ad hominem excuse. I believe it was via this man that first got me thinking about this, but it was this guy who put it best (in my opinion), when he said "No theology without biography." It's where I got more interested in the idea of ideological systems/beliefs growing out of specific subjects in specific contexts that say, some kindof causal relation in the world of ideas. Ya, you know, anti-Hegel and all that.
Think about it on a personal level: say you're having a disagreement with your wife, most folks simply aren't going to response in a positive manner to your intense & rigorous rational analyzing of their position, especially when it's what we'd affectionately call a fight. What they will respond to is you listening and attempting to understand their position and why they feel a particular way about a particular matter. 'Cause heck, who's reason and which rationality? You'd gotta be a couple things to either have certainty about your system of rationality or to even think you have a coherent rational system: namely clueless or arrogantly uninformed. Like The Dude said, "No Walter, you're not wrong, you're just an asshole."
Ah, but to bring it back home to the "ad hominem fallacy", 9 times outta 10 its more helpful on a relational level to try to understand why a person believes what they do in terms of their life experience and core assumptions than it is to beat it around on a formal/abstract level. Sure, you can do that if you wanna, just you know, as a hobbie or something. Most folks have lives complete seperate from academic/formal discourse.
So I'd probably go so far as to claim that the ad hominem fallacy is really only helpful if you're thinking about a discussion in a purely formal sense. Since most folks, well, don't look at their conversations that way something more like a commital of a passive ad hominem fallacy might be in order. Tell me your ideas and tell me why you, personally in light of your life, believe them. Might help me both disarm your potentially offensive views and perhaps even value them because heck, through understand and trust comes a deeper value of that person.
Philo prof at Covenant once said, "we're all governed by our pathologies." I kinda think he nailed it, as far as I can tell.
Now, if you notice the time, it's about 8 o'clock on a Friday night. Why the heck am I blogging? I have no idea. Just so you know I'm not a completely looser, I've got a poker game tonight with some old friends. Now that I think about it, it was moving on Catacombs and started living with those guys that I started to detangle my self-identity from either how smart I was or what I thought I "knew."
F it Donnie, lets go bowling.
Josiah Q. Roe | By Josiah Roe | 07:58 PM
Comments
Good thoughts Josiah. Context is a lot, but I'd say that the ad hominem points towards the need to appreciate context. I still don't think that the ad hominem is itself valid.
Posted by: matt at February 20, 2004 09:27 PM
Nietzsche was a big fan of the ad-hominem attack. He felt very similar to you; each person's position, rationally speaking, stemmed from their perspective. Understand the perspective, understand where their argument is coming from.
More important that all this are your references to The Big Lebowski. If your use of it in this context was intentional, and not just quoting a good line, then we have much more to talk about.
Posted by: Greg at February 22, 2004 01:24 PM
I agree that it depends on the context, like you note. Ad hominem isn't valid if I'm trying to argue why some economic paper is wrong. I have to actually provide evidence to the contrary, or show how the reasoning of the paper is flawed.
But I think when we're talking about conversation amongst friends, it's different. There are certain economists that I try to distance myself from (for instance) because of the slightly religious overtones of their work. There's a certain amount of group solidarity that seems to lie behind their writings on economic theory. I used to see a lot of that in certain theological movements (as well as in myself) in the not too distant past.
If you say you can never, ever note those problems, for fear that it's ad hominem, then I don't understand how you can ever warn a person about potential dangers. There are certain theological movements which I don't feel particularly smart enough to analyze carefully. But once you've been around the block at least twice on these kinds of movements, you start to see similarities, and you know how the story's going to end. It's worth telling people, "look, I have been down that alley, and that's all it is - an alley. A blind alley, in fact. Trust me. Don't go there. Those guys sound smart and correct, but I think they are just insecure and want you to be one of their homeys."
My thoughts these days are, I'll tell you what I think about this stuff, but I'm not going to even waste anymore time getting into it with someone about it. If someone wants my opinion, I'll share it. But for the most part, people who are committed to a certain ideology really aren't going to be open to rational discourse anyway. So I figure the best I can do is stop rehearsing the arguments against it, and just be a friend to the guy, and allow them the freedom to figure out what they do and do not like about the movement.
Posted by: scott cunningham at February 23, 2004 07:23 AM
I do fear Mark C. You think he's scary now? Just imagine him as your landlord...who lives next door. I'm just glad we're friends.
Just for fun, I invite you to try to get him to tell you exactly what he was doing during the late 1980's (during the Cold War). He might tell you, but then he'd have to...well, you know the rest.
Posted by: paul at February 23, 2004 09:09 AM
I prefer the ad mominem fallcy -- appeal to someone's mother to attack an argument.
Example:
P: We are all bound by our pathologies.
Q: Your mom.
Posted by: Phil at February 23, 2004 01:23 PM
HA!
Posted by: ron at February 26, 2004 09:15 AM
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