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Avoiding Logical Fallacies: Ad hominem

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This is one entry in a long series of discussions in my “Skeptical Nomenclature” Series, Avoiding Logical Fallacies. I’m studying, in my own casual and roundabout way, the levels of ILLOGIC in society and how it relates to mass misunderstanding in the culture of religion and paranoia.

This entry is Ad hominem, wherein (simply) something is refuted based SOLELY on the character of the person presenting the argument. This is ranked very high in a long list of logical fallacies, and follows the general breakdown (equation, if you like) as presented in bold below.

Person A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Person A
Therefore claim X is false

That is to say, irregardless of the evidence, we assume the argument presented is FALSE because and only because we do not like the person presenting the argument. This is Ad hominem.

As a caution I should note that I struggled with the subtle difference between “poor credibility” and Ad hominem while investigating this fallacy. It is easy to fall into the trap of saying “she has been known to lie, thus the argument is false” which is a logical fallacy as opposed to “she has been known to lie, therefore her evidence is suspect and requires further investigation.” It is a small gap in semantics, but a large gap in logic.

Three strong public examples of this kind of logical fallacy in common use are (a) Political Smearing, (b) Bad Skepticism, and (c) Religious Disagreement:

Political Smearing

We often encounter the use of Ad hominem in political smear campaigns simply because it works. We want our leaders to be strong, upright citizens. Opponents and oppositions often take advantage of the character flaws of leaders and potential leaders by attacking their ideas via their other personal attributes. Likely, we can all think of at least one example of when an otherwise good idea was brought to an end because the person presenting it was questioned “as an individual” beyond the scope of the idea itself. This is a kind of logic fallacy if the idea is rejected beyond the scope of its own evidence.

Bad Skepticism

People with skeptical intentions — but poor logic — often commit this logical fallacy. It is easy to TRY to debunk a claim of “paranormal activity” (for example) by saying that anyone who says that they’ve “been abducted by aliens” therefore must be “crazy and wrong.” This, of course, is not evidence. It is again Ad hominem and contributes zero evidence to the claim and its ultimate proof or debunking.

Religious Disagreement

While I don’t want to get into some kind of “flamewar” in this blog regarding religion, it has been my PERSONAL experience that arguments in favor of religion versus science (creation versus evolution, only for example) are often waged on the moral character of those presenting the argument. Whichever side you may take, it is a logical fallacy, again Ad hominem, to state that either side is wrong based on the character of the person presenting the argument.

There are, of course, a number of sub-classes of Ad hominem that explore the nuances and degrees of this fallacy, but I will not explore those in THIS post.

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