Are You Using Ad Hominems?

It's become very fashionable these days to have uh debates, arguments, castigations online, one group criticizing another. And okay, fine. You know, there's nothing inherently wrong about one group criticizing another or one um you know, position, right? One sort of argument crit or one viewpoint, right? criticizing another viewpoint that that's fine. We need this open discourse in order to continually refine our uh knowledge. Even more importantly, just how to be human, right? We need to be able to express ourselves and our beliefs in order to maintain our humanity. And we become increasingly less human and less humane when we at once, you know, either restrict somebody else from being able to speak or uh restrict ourselves. Okay. And that's fine, right? I'm not saying we need to discontinue this sort of uh discussion online. In fact, there's a lot of useful things about having it online. Is available to a wide variety of people that would never get a chance to hear each other. All right. Having said that, I've noticed a number of practices that are not good, right? That are not the use of reason and frankly just tend to divide us more. I mean, the the thought is the supposition is that if we express ourselves to each other, then we're going to have greater understanding of each other and we could have greater civility and and grow as an individual, as a culture, and as a species. And yes, that that's wonderful. That's the ideal. But how we've actually been carrying that out is less than ideal. We are not using good standards of communication or reason. So, one thing in particular um I want to talk about is the ad hominemum argument. And the ad hominemum argument is one something that happens a lot online and is not useful. So, probably need a brief at least a brief explanation of ad hominemum argument. You've probably heard the phrase the ad homonym argument before. uh you've yeah you I'm sure you've you know either people just talking about it especially if you heard it online there's a number of people online who are talking about various arguments and they'll mention the ad hominemum argument as a fallacy uh and yeah maybe heard it in a logic course an English course speech and a variety of courses where uh reason is at least supposed to be at the forefront or one of the most important considerations of of that discipline. So an ad hom argument you know literally translated as you know argumentum ad homum argument against the the man argument against the person. Now what the essence of this is is that you're criticizing the argument by criticizing the person. Yeah. Criticizing the argument by criticizing the person. And these criticisms range from ridiculous to even somewhat plausible. So, I don't know. Uh, an example would be something like, um, I I your conclusion's all wrong because, uh, you know, you can't think like, okay. Uh, your conclusion is all wrong because you are incapable of reasoning. All right. Now, there there's more or less polite versions of this sort of thing. I I just gave us probably a more polite version. The impolite version would be something like you can't your conclusion is false because you're an idiot or because you're dumb. All right. Now, on on its surface, it seems plausible, right? The idea being that if the person presenting the argument is not intelligent, that they haven't used enough intelligence to reach the conclusion. All right. Sure. That's a degree of plausibility. Um, there also range from like highly implausible, ridiculous versions of this, right? Your conclusion is all wrong because your nose is too big. Not a real one, right? Or uh your conclusion is all wrong because uh uh I hate you. It's really what a lot of these ad hom arguments amount to is conclusions all wrong because I hate you. Um or uh uh your conclusion is all wrong because uh you know you only care about yourself. All right. So there's a variety of ways to criticize the person. Some of these are plausible sort of right. We're talking about intelligence. Sure. Somebody's not that intelligent. That that loses credibility for the conclusion. Um some are just absolutely stupid. You know, your eyes are the wrong color. You're stupid. Uh, I hate you. Your nose is too big. You've got the wrong clothes on. What are those? Or something like that. These are all criticis criticisms of the person. But, and you know, I don't care whether how plausible the ad hominemum is. None of this is useful for reason. None of this is useful for determining what is wrong with the reasoning. When you use at home and you're criticizing the person, not the argument. Well, at this point you might ask me or ask yourself, well, if there are plausible versions of the argument ad homonym, the ad hominemum argument, um, why is it a problem, right? Let's just use the plausible versions of the argument ad homonym instead of the implausible ones. Let's forget about people's big noses and instead pay attention to the fact that they're idiots. Okay. Well, I mean, I I get the plausibility. The minute that I think, and sure, I'm guilty of this, too. I'm I wager not many people aren't guilty of this. But the second I reach the conclusion that the person I'm talking to doesn't know what they're talking about, uh or is uh you know, angry, emotional, or uh I don't know, um you know, just plain small-minded. And it happens. Sure. I talk to somebody like, "Yeah, this is not going to be a fruitful conversation." Yeah, I I I get the the intuitive appeal against immediately dismissing whatever that person has to say. Well, the thing is if you do that, if you dismiss what somebody says because you don't like the person or you think they have some kind of character failing, um you never figure out what's wrong with the argument. you know, if he just is simply attacking the person who's offering the argument, we never figure out what's wrong with the argument. And there's a number a short number of ways that an argument could go wrong that's really relevant to whether that conclusion is wellounded. Um, so for example, the evidence or purported evidence or the claims are supposed to justify the conclusion, right? Uh the evidence if we're dealing with deductive logic, right? One of the pieces of evidence offered could be false. Now, if you're just sitting there calling somebody stupid, you never tell me or never figure out which premise is false or if you're dealing with inductive arguments, same thing. Like maybe a purported piece of evidence is in fact false. But that that's not the really pernicious part with inductive arguments. And one of the seductive things about inductive arguments is all the premises can be true. Like two different people offering two different inductive arguments could be offering evidence and they're speaking truth through life. each offering ind you know evidence that they have seen and is true. Uh but they may not have enough evidence, right? So the really big problem with inductive arguments is what's called the fallacy of incomplete evidence. You haven't collected enough evidence. Uh so one really small way I know something like well I weighed myself today and uh my weight was within the prescribed norm for my you know for for you know my kind of persons know my gender my age activity levels the the weight was within range therefore I'm healthy no I mean weight's important but weight is not the only thing that's relevant for health and that's all inductive arguments there's there's blood pressure there's um uh uh pulse rate, there's the blood sugar levels, there's the how well your body absorbs oxygen, how well it absorbs nutrients. There's a long list of what's involved in whether somebody's healthy. So, if you got two people, somebody says, "Well, my my weight is is within range. I'm 180 pounds. I've been 180 pounds for a while. I've been 180 pounds. Therefore, I'm healthy." And somebody else says, "Well, okay, but your blood sugar is way high." you know, you got to, you know, your blood sugar is 150. I'm just pulling number out of here. I don't really know. Your blood sugar is 150. Both those claims can be true. And and by the way, that's still incomplete evidence, right? There's still a lot more to consider. Okay? I'm not going to go on this too much. Don't want to get into a long discussion what makes a good inductive argument. Maybe another video. But you if all you're doing is attacking the person, criticizing the person, even if they aren't dumb, that still doesn't tell me which piece of evidence is either false or whether there's enough. So far, all you're doing is calling somebody names. That's not reason. That's kindergarten. So the other way that an argument can go wrong, yeah, supposing there's nothing wrong with the evidence. Suppose the evidence is just fine in the sense that uh the evidence is either true. All the it's actually true and let's even suppose it's complete. Uh the other way an argument can go wrong is that the structure or the form of the argument goes wrong. All right, so there again there's a wide variety of ways this could happen. And with deductive logic, it's it's easier to start listing the ways that an argument could go wrong. You can affirm the consequ you can affirm the consequent. You can deny the antecedent. You can affirm a disjunct. Whole long ways that these are all formal fallacies, right? And again, if you've taken a logic course, you're probably familiar with at least a few of these. Uh but if you're critic with inductive arguments, excuse me, with inductive arguments, you could still have all relevant evidence and maybe even complete evidence, but you're using the wrong sort of argument with that evidence. So if you're dealing with an if you if you're offering evidence that's good for an analogy that's not necessarily going to be good for, you know, a survey or statistical probability. If you are conducting if you've got a lot of good evidence for uh logical possibility, right? So, if I've got a coin, I flip it twice in a row, chance it comes with heads 50/50. Uh, that's great, but that's not really good for plausibility. And plausibility is a kind of evidence, but I don't want to go again, different video. Maybe I'll go into that in a different video. So, suppose you have all the right evidence, but you're not using a good form of inductive argument for that evidence. Well, then yeah, the conclusion can be unsupported by that evidence. And again, if you're calling somebody an idiot, if you're saying that they're dumb, and let's say they are, suppose the person you're talking to, never had anything above a first grade education and um you know, stuck their nose in u social media all the time, and never bothered to look up from their iPhone or their iPad. Yeah, that that that person does not have great skills and and reason. Suppose that person's an idiot. That still doesn't tell us what's wrong with the argument. It could have a bad form, but simply calling somebody an idiot doesn't tell us what's where the error in the form is. So really, again, using an ad homonym doesn't tell us what's wrong with the argument, and most it tells us what you disapprove of with the person you're talking with. Well, maybe by now you're saying, "Okay, you're you haven't told me anything I don't know. I've heard about an homonyms before. Uh, I know fully well that calling somebody a dummy doesn't mean their conclusion is false or faulty or something like that." Okay, sure. But I'm not sure you're aware of all the ways that you can commit an ad homonym. If you are paying attention to anything besides the evidence and the argument, you're not dealing with reason. If you're paying if you're criticizing the person, if you're saying something that that is bad about the person, you're using an ad homo. You're not paying attention to the argument that way, right? And you know, one of the ways that I see this happening, and I am not taking sides here on the political spectrum, but you have conservatives are saying, "Oh, those stupid libtards." Or you have, you know, Democrats and liberals saying, "Oh, all those Nazi conservatives. That's criticizing the person." Now, I want to be clear about something. I am not saying we should start listening to one group or the other because it's that group or and I'm not saying that we can start listening to uh I don't know. I'm not saying we seriously start, you know, checking out isuh issues of mine comp in order to figure out good. I'm not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that if you are criticizing the person, you're not criticizing the argument. Even if your criticisms of the person are completely legitimate, like, okay, fine. All right. Say that person's bad. They got some serious failing in terms of their character. You still haven't told me what's wrong with the argument. You just told me what's wrong with that person. At least you know what you don't like about the person. Maybe maybe there's something wrong with them too, but what you don't like about the person. You need more than that. Telling me what's wrong with the person doesn't tell me what's wrong with the argument. So yeah, if you're going to criticize the argument, criticize the argument. Don't criticize the person. If you start calling somebody names, even if the names are completely legitimate, that's still an ad homonym and that's still not using reason. So like I said, criticizing the person at homminum arguments are not the proper use of reason. They don't tell us what's wrong with the evidence or even the form of the argument. Now, I uh I don't know if this I don't know if this is necessarily a version of the ad homonym, but it it's got a similar sort of problem uh is what I call criticizing the psychological states. You might say, well, what's that? That just seems weird. Well, we do it all the time. Uh one of the most common ways that we're criticiz psychological states is we say somebody has a bias. All right? And you know, having a bias is not a good thing. It's not and whether you don't have one is another question. I'm pretty sure everybody's got biases, but let's leave that alone for a second. Uh, you know, if you have a bias and you're trying to offer some sort of argument. Yeah, the pro might be a problem there. Sure. Going to accept it. By the way, it's possible to have a bias towards the truth. Whatever the truth is. Sure, that happens. People have this inclination to believe maybe one sort of position over another and they can't escape it. Yeah, that'd be a bias. They're not willing to listen to evidence for any other contrary position. That's a bias. It absolutely is. Doesn't mean their conclusion is faulty. Doesn't even mean their reasoning is faulty. Not because they could have a bias towards all the right evidence and the right form of the argument. you know, saying that somebody has a bias, I mean, it's not a great thing that somebody has a bias, and you know, it's not a a mark in favor of them properly using reason, but if you just simply claim that somebody has a bias, you still have not shown me where there's an error in reason. You still haven't shown me whether one of the premises are false or whether the form of the argument is in bad shape or whether it's you got incomplete evidence, right? appealing, you know, saying that somebody has a bias explains where they made an error, not that. Oh, sorry, excuse me. Saying that somebody has a bias might explain that somebody has an error, but it doesn't explain where the error is. And if you can't tell me where the error is, simply pointing out a bias doesn't do it. That is not a reason in and of itself to reject a conclusion. If uh what someone's close-minded, which is guess another way of saying bias, yeah, sure, that limits the evidence that they have, but that doesn't mean they reached a false conclusion or that there's something wrong with their argument, right? That um what somebody's raised uh in a culture that can't see beyond its own boundaries. All right, sure. You know, you you've got this sort of um oh, I just blanked on the word, centrism around one's own culture. Cultural anthroentrism, is that the word? Anyway, you know, this the centism around one's culture. I grew up in this culture. I can't think any other way. They might still have true conclusions and still use reason well or maybe not use reason well, but maybe the argument is is put together perfectly fine. Sure, that is possible even if you have a bias. So pointing out a bias, pointing out prejudice, pointing out uh you know some sort of cultural centism, pointing out I mean I don't know there's a whole list of ways, right, that somebody could have this psychological state that interferes with reason. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the argument. If you're going to point out a bias, cool. But you got to tell me where there went where something went wrong. either a piece of evidence is false, not enough evidence, or the form of the argument is in bad shape. So just sitting there calling people names, accusing people of various shortcomings is not going to do it. These are not the good forms of inference. You got to show me what's wrong with the evidence or the argument.