[Buddha-l] Prominent Neobuddhist proposes religion based blacklisting for government jobs

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 1, 2009, at 8:23 AM, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> How about we just don't define it as a fallacy to start with?

I think a step in this direction has been made for centuries by  
calling it an informal fallacy. Everyone acknowledges that informal  
fallacies are not anywhere nearly as serious as formal fallacies. They  
tend to be regarded more as stylistic infelicities in presentation  
than as errors in logic.

> Let's just
> say that it is a type of argument which is regularly abused. So there
> are fallacious ad hominems and non-fallacious ad hominems.

That is pretty much what Copi (following centuries of predecessors in  
the field of logic) said.

There is, incidentally, quite a nice entry by Leo Graorke on informal  
logic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He goes through  
several of the standard informal fallacies. On argumentam ad hominem  
he has a lot to say, including this:

\begin{quotation}
Though dialogical approaches to argument assume a different  
theoretical structure than fallacy theory, they invite a very similar  
analysis of this example. According to Van Eemeren and Grootendorst  
[1992], an instance of ad hominem is a violation of the first rule for  
critical discussion, which maintains that "Parties [to a dispute] must  
not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubts on  
arguments." Different kinds of ad hominem (abusive, tu quoque, and  
circumstantial ad hominem) are different violations of this rule. In  
this case, it suffices to say that the debater's attack on his  
opponent can be seen as an illegitimate attempt to deny him his right  
to make a case for his position.\end{quotation} See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/

If anyone is interested is seeing how disputes involving ad hominem  
argumentation have been discussed in the past, you might be amused to  
read the entry on Anthony Collins (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collins/ 
) This fellow Collins was a freethinker who wrote a treatise on  
freethinking. It was stridently attacked by one Richard Bently, who  
said that Collins was an incompetent scholar who should not be taken  
seriously because he was an atheist. Most people who have written  
about this exchange have agree that Bently produced almost nothing but  
ad hominem attacks on Collins's credentials. It is also widely agreed  
that the ad hominem attacks were ruinous to Collins's reputation,  
because people took them seriously. People were on the whole ready to  
dismiss Collins, because he challenged the prevailing dogmas of his  
age. Collins, it seems, was the Sam Harris of his day. DOD YOU NEED  
ANY FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT THE BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF REBIRTH IS TRUE?


Richard