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

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 27 June 2007 07:58, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> Allegedly, the contemporary,
> standard understanding of ad hominem arguments arose in the 19th
> century.

Unlike the formal fallacies, which are quite straightforward, the descriptions 
of informal fallacies seem to change with time. There is no standard list of 
them, and people divide them into subclasses or lump fallacies together in a 
superclass. In India, of course, there are various lists of fouls that one 
can call on an opponent in debate, some of which have counterparts in lists 
of informal fallacies in Western works on logic.

Irving Copi, whose introduction to logic has gone through many editions, has a 
broad class of informal fallacies that he calls fallacies of relevance. What 
they all have in common is avoidance of addressing the premises of an 
opponent's argument by some form of subterfuge that diverts attention from 
the main issue. Under fallacies of relevance he names two kinds of ad 
hominem, which he calls abusive and circumstantial. The abusive ad hominem 
consists in impugning the character of the person who made a claim rather 
than responding directly to the claim. (We see quite a lot of this in 
American political discourse.) The circumstantial ad hominem consists in 
trying to explain away a person's beliefs rather than directly assessing the 
validity of those beliefs. (We also see plenty of this in American discourse. 
Indeed, if all fallacies were removed from American political discourse, 
there might not be any political discourse left.)

> 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?

Yes, it seems so. The prasanga argument, as you rightly point out, does not 
usually show that a claim is absurd, but rather that it leads to conclusions 
that the person making the claim would not accept. I've never heard that 
called ad hominem. I've never been sure what to call a prasanga; it's one of 
the many Sanskrit terms that I remain unsure how best to translate. I have a 
feeling that if it were described as an ad hominem, that characterization 
would be misunderstood by most people these days.

> 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.

David's mistake was not entirely unreasonable. I responded to all the claims 
he made and then went on to say that someone holding such views was not 
likely to make much progress in reaching the goals of Buddhism. That was not 
meant to be a personal attack as much as it was meant to be a summary of the 
implications of the views he had advanced and that I had tried to question. 
Still, I can see how someone might feel the attack was personal. 

Where David's response to me failed to be persuasive is that he did not 
address the points I had made about his views but instead brought up a number 
of irrelevant points, such as the fact that I am an academic (true but 
completely irrelevant) and am twice his age (perhaps true and perhaps 
false--I have no way of knowing--but whether true or false, irrelevant) and 
that I had attacked him personally (simply false). So, yes, David did make a 
mistake, but so do we all. (I am quite sure that if there is a heaven, I will 
be met at the pearly gates by the ghost of Aristotle or Gautama the 
Naiyaayika, who will show me the long list of fallacious arguments I have 
produced during my lifetime. We'll all have a good laugh and go drink some 
soma together.)

Thanks for the reference to Finocchiaro. (Until recently, I thought he was a 
wooden puppet made by a kindly old man named Giuseppe.)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico