[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Alberto Todeschini]

David Kotschessa wrote:

 > > It's sad really, to witness a grown academic, twice my
 > > age, result to ad hominem after only 3 posts.

Richard Hayes replied:

 >Sorry, but I can't find any ad hominem arguments in my post. An ad 
hominem
argument is one that avoids addressing an issue by launching an attack 
on the
character of the person making the argument or by accusing the person 
making
the argument of having affiliation with a disreputable. I did not avoid
addressing any of the issues in your post. I made no attacks on your
character, and I did not allege that you belong to a disreputable group. In
the future, before you start accusing others of fallacious 
argumentation, you
might study up on what the formal and informal fallacies are. (Don't 
worry, I
didn't know several of them myself when I was 31 years old, half my current
age.) <


Dear Richard,

Please allow me to pick your brain on the following matter.
Your description of ad hominem arguments corresponds exactly to how I 
understand them. Recently however, I have been reading Maurice 
Finocchiaro's _Arguments about Arguments_. Allegedly, the contemporary, 
standard understanding of ad hominem arguments arose in the 19th 
century. Finocchiaro says about ad hominem as used by Galileo and Locke 
for example: "This kind of ad hominem argument does not seek to 
establish the truth of its conclusion but rather the fact that its 
conclusion follows from certain propositions, which are either 
unacceptable or not accepted by the arguer, but accepted by the person 
against whom the argument is directed." (p.333) Galileo used it to infer 
  undesired conclusions from the premises accepted by his opponent.
Isn't this a better characterization of prasanga as used by Madhyamikas 
than reductio ad absurdum?

By the way, a few years back I read a book on critical thinking that 
mentioned the "it's a fallacy" fallacy. This happens when in an argument 
one mistakenly accuses the other of having committed a fallacy, thereby 
herself committing a fallacy. This is what David did.

Regards,

Alberto Todeschini