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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (70515)	6/3/2008 8:26:22 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542838

I get the man's point Apparently. Congratulations. I get your example. Thank you. Except, I always thought that an ad hominem was, by definition, irrelevant to the argument, a distraction. If it's relevant, then it's a logical and appropriate piece of the argument even if it's about the person's character and isn't an ad hominem. So, of course, I had to look it up. From Webster: " marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made" I'm going with option B--baloney.

To: Cogito who wrote (70515)	6/9/2008 6:52:32 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542838

I see what he means. If person A comes out and says, "Wind power is the only reasonable choice for electricity generation," then person B says, "Well, person A owns a factory that makes wind turbines," then person B's comment could be said to be ad hominem. But because it directly speaks to person A's motivations in making his remarks, it is legitimate. When narrowly considering the actual issue this, like other ad-hominem's woudl be irrelevant. If person A owns a factory that will benefit if the policy is put in place, it doesn't make his arguments false, or mean the policy would be bad. OTOH in the real world people are often not just focusing on the logic of the issue. We often won't understand all the details of "Person A's" argument and to an extent we are relying on the opinion of someone who seems to understand the issue. To the extent the issue becomes not "should we develop more wind power?", but "should we defer to person A's opinion about windpower", than the knowledge and biases of person A, are on topic more than they are ad-hominem. And in the real world you don't have time to read and fully digest all arguments from everyone, and its reasonable to not spend as much (or sometimes any) time listening to people you think have a good reason to be heavily biased. This isn't saying "A is wrong because of this source of bias", or even the assertion that "no one should pay attention to A's argument because he has a reason to be biased", both of those would be ad-hominem fallacies. Its just a mental filter about how you want to spend your limited time.