From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Apr 02 2003 - 16:50:56 MST
John Clark writes
> "gts" <gts_2000@yahoo.com>
>
> > We can say without drawing much objection that a
> > member of the KKK is "scum" for the reason that White
> > Supremacist has been widely discredited by intelligent
> > thoughtful people with *valid logical arguments*.
I don't agree with gts here. Whether or not saying that
a member of the KKK "is scum" draws objections or not is
not the point. As gts and Harvey have explained, there
is simply no content to such name calling.
> I couldn't agree with you more. Just screaming "Your momma wears army
> boots!" adds nothing to a discussion but if you present valid logical
> arguments that a certain opinion is idiotic and if you show valid logical
> augments that a certain person holds that opinion then it is perfectly
> reasonable to make a deduction about that person from the above information.
I'm not even sure that it's possible to prove that some
position is "idiotic". Perhaps you have an example?
Well, here's one just in case you don't. Person A says
"It logically follows that since Hitler was a vegetarian
and Hitler was totally evil, vegetarianism is totally
evil." Can we prove that A's opinion is idiotic?
I don't think that we can come to agree on what the term
"idiotic" means as an adjective modifying "opinion" beyond
"we disagree with that opinion". We can prove that the
speaker is committing logical fallacies (he asked for it,
since he used the word "logically"), and we can maintain
with great credibility (among sensible people) that he's
wrong.
> > However such statements are not themselves part of any
> > valid logical argument.
>
> I couldn't disagree with you more. Saying they are scum
> is PART of a valid logical argument, it is the conclusion.
This is very weird. How is it that how one "should feel"
is part of an argument? What if one happens to have no
feelings, like certain autistic but highly intelligent
people I know? Or how could we ever get an expert system
(that flawlessly evaluates logical arguments) to ever
agree to such a conclusion?
Harvey wrote
> As an argument [ad hominem or name calling] fails. It is content
> free. This is not to say that it is rude or politically incorrect.
> It simply does not give any evidence for the conclusion. That is
> the root reason why ad hominem is invalid evidence.
While completely true, I think that this understates the
harm done by statements such as "a member of the KKK is
scum". By substituting for good argument, we have a
discourse version of Gresham's Law: bad argument drives
out good. Silly statements like that supplant the rightful
place of effective statements.
But it's even worse than that! A statement such as "X
is idiotic", or "X is scum" carries a much more sinister
implication. The hidden implication is that the speaker
resorted to such statements because no logical or valid
arguments were available to the speaker. And, ugly as it
is, one possible inference from that is that logical or
valid arguments against X either don't exist or are
awkward. Hence the appeal to emotion and group prejudice.
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 02 2003 - 16:51:25 MST