Constant2 comments on The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ad Hominem - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 November 2008 09:47PM

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Comment author: Constant2 26 November 2008 02:41:05PM 1 point [-]

Two separate issues:

1) Is it a good (legitimately persuasive) argument?

2) If not then after all the hairsplitting is done, what sort of bad argument is it?

The more important issue is (a). A few points:

a) Quibbling over the categorization of the fallacy is sometimes used to mask the fact that it's a bad argument.

b) There are plenty of people who can recognize bad arguments without knowing anything about the names of the fallacies, which leads to

c) We learn the names of the fallacies, not in order to learn to spot bad arguments, but as a convenience so that we don't have to explain at length to the other guy why the argument is bad.

d) Often perfectly legitimate arguments technically fall into one of the categories of fallacy. Technically being a classical fallacy is no guaranteed that an argument is actually fallacious. Some counterexamples.

In short, the classical fallacies are a convenient timesaver. But you don't need to have learned them to avoid being an idiot, and learning them will not stop you from being an idiot, and taking them too seriously can make you into an idiot.