Re: OT fallacies
Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:58:58 GMT
Message-ID: <m95gg.223572$P01.8422_at_pd7tw3no>
mAsterdam wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
>
>> Keith H Duggar wrote: >> >>> What BB wrote may be called an /insult/ but it is not ad hominem >>> since it is not even an argument.
>
>
> Some selective snipping gives:
>
> >>> What BB wrote ... is not even an argument.
> True. No logic, no fallacy, just ad hominem.
>
> Nah. Not my style. I do not like it. I won't proceed that way.
>
>
>>> Ad hominem refers to a fallacious >>> form of /argumentation/. BB's argumentation followed that >>> insult. The insult was not his argument. Do you understand? >>> You are not alone in this increasingly common misconception >>> that insult = ad hominem. >> >> >> >> Exactly. >> >> Some examples: >> >> "What you wrote is wrong, therefore you suck." Not ad-hominem. >> >> "You suck, therefore what you wrote is wrong." Ad-hominem. >> >> "You suck." Not ad-hominem. >> >> >> That is all.
>
>
> All three utterances are not by themselves
> examples of the "ad-hominem" logical fallacy.
> All of them are ad hominem (=personal) attacks,
> though.
>
> Stuff like "[X], you are an idiot." and "With all
> due respect, what on earth makes you think anything
> you write is the least bit interesting?" does not
> qualify as the "ad-hominem" logical fallacy when
> not used as premisse.
>
> True, but that does not make it right.
> ...
No, at least not for a generation that will soon die off, but I'm happy
to see that at least one trifler, ie. time waster (not you) has
departed, at least for the time being. Maybe that's coincidence but the
content since has been more stimulating for me, much less tiresome. MH
and BB and a few others on the dbt side of the fence have brought up a
couple of intriguing angles/notions to do with relational api's that I
thought were long-lost.
Once worked with a very capable guy (in his own area, not mine) who
regularly went behind my back to the boss. Various polite tactics
couldn't stop him. Finally couldn't help myself, blew my top and cursed
him up and down in front of plenty of people. For some months after, he
kept his mind on his own affairs. I eventually realized that the only
way to prevent his pointless trouble-making was to chew him out in
public as profanely as my imagination allowed every six months. That
suited him too, as long as I remembered to blow my top twice a year, he
avoided the skullduggery and was friendly and polite to me, plus
reasonable when our components needed to cooperate. I'm not claiming to
understand how personalities work, just noting one I observed.
No idea what makes some people tick, maybe that's why I like machines,
but I come here looking for food for thought, not friends, and will put
up with any personality that can put certain ideas I'm interested in
better than I can, in fact the best teachers/bosses I've had all called
me an idiot at some time or other. I could care less if they liked me,
even less if the poorer ones called me names. Also no idea whether I'm
on BB's plonk list but here's an idea for somebody who isn't. Buy it
The only reason I don't like to call people idiots in newsgroups is that my father would have thought it cowardly. To my discredit, I must repeat that's the only reason. But my father was from another time, a generation that thought sex education consisted of advising never to punch a girl in the stomach. Face to face is more courageous and I've taken my lumps for that in a bar or two, but because I was stupid, not brave. As much as I admired my father, he thought a disk buffer was something you polish disks with and I would say for sure the polite approach is often a dismal failure in computer newsgroups where most participants (probably including me) have an inflated opinion of themselves (as a result of the naivete/illiteracy of the general public aka customers/employers), so instead of ignoring the stuff that doesn't make sense, they feel compelled to reply.
m Received on Sat Jun 03 2006 - 02:58:58 CEST