"The president and I have concluded that there's no value in making that ad hominem argument," he told me of Obama.
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Tu quoque is a subset of the so-called ad hominem argument: a strike against the character, not the position, of one's opponent.
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The ad hominem argument is rightly regarded as a logical fallacy because it substitutes personal attacks for a discussion of the argument someone is making.
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This is a combination of the straw man fallacy and the ad hominem argument. It is often used to incriminate someone in order to argument the innocence of someone else.
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In 2016, the act of posting modified Wojak faces of ridiculed or deformed nature (referred to as "brainlet" Wojaks or Slowjaks) emerged as a way to criticize the intelligence of a poster as a form of ad hominem argument. A common variation of Wojak-derived images posted in this trend are heads with disproportionately large, wrinkled brains, meant to depict high intelligence.
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CA may involve exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person. It is a form of defamation and can be a form of ad hominem argument. The phrase "character assassination" became popular from around 1930. This concept, as a subject of scholarly study, was originally introduced by Davis (1950) in his collection of essays revealing the dangers of political smear campaigns.
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A common criticism is of hypocrisy, i.e. that people rejecting civilization typically maintain a civilized lifestyle themselves, often while still using the very industrial technology that they oppose in order to spread their message. Jensen counters that this criticism merely resorts to an ad hominem argument, attacking individuals but not the actual validity of their beliefs. He further responds that working to entirely avoid such hypocrisy is ineffective, self-serving, and a convenient misdirection of activist energies.
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Edward Wilson (1995) suggested that Lewontin's political beliefs affected his scientific view. Robert Trivers described Lewontin as "...a man with great talents who often wasted them on foolishness, on preening and showing off, on shallow political thinking and on useless philosophical rumination while limiting his genetic work by assumptions congenial to his politics." Others such as Kitcher (1985) have countered that Lewontin's criticisms of sociobiology are genuine scientific concerns about the discipline. He wrote that attacking Lewontin's motives amounts to an ad hominem argument.
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An ad hominem argument from commitment is a type of valid argument that employs, as a dialectical strategy, the exclusive utilization of the beliefs, convictions, and assumptions of those holding the position being argued against, i.e., arguments constructed on the basis of what other people hold to be true. This usage is generally only encountered in specialist philosophical usage or in pre-20th century usages. This type of argument is also known as the ex concessis argument (Latin for "from what has been conceded already").
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Taylor responds to this objection by discussing identity. It is not simply an ad hominem argument that the reductive naturalist cannot avoid making qualitative distinctions among moral goods. Rather, the qualitative distinctions that the reductive naturalist, or anyone else, makes are constitutive of that person's identity; an identity that involves one's understandings of self as a person within a particular family, religion, profession, nation and so on. Taylor argues that the qualitative distinctions we make are intrinsic to the way we conduct our lives, they constitute an orientation towards the world.
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In a detailed work, he suggested that the inclusion of a statement against a person in an argument does not necessarily make it a fallacious argument since that particular phrase is not a premise that leads to a conclusion. While Hablin's criticism was not widely accepted, Canadian philosopher Douglas N. Walton examined the fallaciousness of the ad hominem argument even further. Nowadays, except within specialized philosophical usages, the usage of the term ad hominem signifies a straight attack at the character and ethos of a person, in an attempt to refute their argument.
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An example of the fallacy of appealing to an authority in an unrelated field would be citing Albert Einstein as an authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics. It is also a fallacious ad hominem argument to argue that a person presenting statements lacks authority and thus their arguments do not need to be considered. As appeals to a perceived lack of authority, these types of argument are fallacious for much the same reasons as an appeal to authority. Other related fallacious arguments assume that a person without status or authority is inherently reliable.
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Fallacious ad hominem reasoning is categorized among informal fallacies, more precisely as a genetic fallacy, a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance. Ad hominem fallacies can be separated in various different types, among others are tu quoque, circumstantial, guilt by association, and abusive ad hominem. All of them are similar to the general scheme of ad hominem argument, that is instead of dealing with the essence of someone's argument or trying to refute it, the interlocutor is attacking the character of the proponent of the argument and concluding that it is a sufficient reason to drop the initial argument.
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Teignmouth Shore, Ellicott's Commentary for Modern Readers on 1 Corinthians 15, accessed 12 April 2017 The Jerusalem Bible states that "What this practice was is unknown. Paul does not say if he approved of it or not: he uses it merely for an ad hominem argument".Jerusalem Bible (1966), note at 1 Corinthians 15:29 The Latter Day Saint movement interprets this passage to support the practice of baptism for the dead. This principle of vicarious work for the dead is an important work of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the dispensation of the fulness of times.
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In these arguments, the concepts and assumptions of the opponents are used as part of a dialectical strategy against the opponents to demonstrate the unsoundness of their own arguments and assumptions. In this way, the arguments are to the person (ad hominem), but without attacking the properties of the individuals making the arguments. This kind of argument is also known as "argument from commitment". Italian polymath Galileo Galilei and British philosopher John Locke also examined the argument from commitment, a form of the ad hominem argument, meaning examining an argument on the basis of whether it stands true to the principles of the person carrying the argument.
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The schemes connect arguments together into sequences, often called chaining, by taking the conclusion of one argument as a premise in a subsequent argument. Some common schemes are argument from goal-based reasoning, argument from negative consequences, argument from positive consequences, inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning), argument from sign, argument from analogy, argument from precedent, argument from an established rule, argument from evidence to a hypothesis, argument from cause to effect, argument from correlation to cause, argument from sunk costs, argument from threat, argument from perception, argument from witness testimony, argument from expert opinion, argument from ignorance, argument from commitment, direct ad hominem argument, argument from inconsistency of commitments, slippery slope argument.
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There is the > accepting will, yielding will, the dedicated will. You might say that there > is a feminine polarity to the will – the willing surrender, the joyful > acceptance of the other functions of the personality. At the end of the interview, Keen himself concluded: > It is hard to know what counts as evidence for the validity of a world view > and the therapeutic it entails. Every form of therapy has dramatic successes > and just as dramatic failures. Enter as evidence in the case for > psychosynthesis an ad hominem argument: in speaking about death there was no > change in the tone or intensity of Assagioli’s voice and the light still > played in his dark eyes, and his mouth was never very far from a smile.
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In response to reductive naturalism, Taylor first notes the ad hominem argument that those who espouse some form of reductive naturalism nonetheless make, and cannot avoid but to make, qualitative distinctions as to the goods by which they live their lives. At the same time, Taylor recognizes that the moral frameworks of past generations, frameworks such as those that understood man as God's creature, have become fractured and that countless other moral frameworks have emerged. The reductive naturalist may object that these frameworks are simply interpretations or re-interpretations of contemporary understandings of the natural world and man's place in it. Moreover, all such moral frameworks are no more than passing modes of interpretation that have no true bearing on man's existence.
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Abusive Ad hominem lies near the bottom end of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement Abusive ad hominem argument (or direct ad hominem) is associated with an attack to the character of the person carrying an argument. This kind of argument, besides usually being fallacious, is also counterproductive, as a proper dialogue is hard to achieve after such an attack. Key issues in examining an argument to determine whether it is an ad hominem fallacy or not are whether the accusation against the person stands true or not, and whether the accusation is relevant to the argument. An example is a dialogue at the court, where the attorney cross-examines an eyewitness, bringing to light the fact that the witness was convicted in the past for lying.
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