F020 • Informal - Relevance
Also known as: Attacking the Person, Personal Attack
We size people up constantly -- their credibility, their motives, their track record -- and most of the time this serves us well. But sometimes that assessment of the person quietly takes the place of any assessment of what they actually said. Ad hominem is what happens when our feelings about the messenger become our entire response to the message.
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Evaluating sources is one of the most useful heuristics we have. When you do not have time to research every claim, knowing who tends to be reliable is genuinely valuable. The failure mode is subtle: instead of using source evaluation as one input alongside evidence and logic, we let it become the only input. The person's character, motives, or circumstances become the reason to accept or reject the argument, and the argument itself never gets examined. We rarely notice the substitution because it feels like we are being appropriately skeptical. But skepticism about a person and skepticism about an argument are different things, and one cannot do the other's job.
| Assessing witness credibility in legal contexts |
| Evaluating expert trustworthiness |
| When person's character is the subject of discussion |
| When pointing out conflicts of interest (though this doesn't refute the argument itself) |
| You catch yourself thinking 'well, they would say that' -- and realize you have not actually considered what they said |
| Your first response to an argument is about the person making it rather than the claims they are offering |
| You notice that the same point feels more or less convincing depending on who delivers it, and you cannot point to a difference in the reasoning itself |
| You find yourself dismissing something and, when pressed, your reasons are about the speaker rather than the substance |
| You feel a rush of satisfaction when finding something wrong with a person whose argument made you uncomfortable |
| Thinking that all character criticism is ad hominem -- sometimes a person's character is genuinely the topic of discussion, and evaluating it is appropriate |
| Forgetting that source evaluation can be a legitimate starting point, as long as it does not become the ending point. Noting that someone has a conflict of interest is not fallacious; refusing to engage with their argument because of it is. |
| Confusing ad hominem with simply being rude. An insult during an argument is not automatically an ad hominem unless the insult is being used as a reason to reject the argument. |
| Ad Hominem |
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| Attacking the person making an argument rather than addressing the argument itself. |
| The character, circumstances, or actions of a person are generally irrelevant to the truth or falsity of their claims. |
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