On 25 nov, 14:30, m_mom...@yahoo.com (Mario S. Mommer) wrote: > Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...@pas.despam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> > writes: > > > On 2010-11-24 16:19:49 -0500, toby said: > > >> And furthermore, he has cooties. > > > Once again, not all ad hominem arguments are ad hominem > > fallacies. Financial conflict of interest is a prime example of a > > perfectly valid ad hominem argument. > > It has limited validity. People are way more complicated than the > simplistic "follow your own selfish egoistic interests to the letter > without taking prisoners" model of human behavior that seems > (unfortunately) so prevalent nowadays. > > > People who parse patterns but not semantics are apt to fall into the > > error of believing that "ad hominem" automatically means "logically > > invalid." This is not the case. > > In the realm of pure logic, ad hominems are logically invalid, > period. However, if the question cannot be resolved by its own merits, > simple logic has little to say, and you may include additional > information in a sort-of Bayesian fashion. > > Saying that a conflict of interest means that nothing this person says > makes any sense at all is in a way an admission that the subject of > discussion is not very amenable to rational argument.
I have to say I'm always amazed how ad hominens can generate quite strong responses to the point of making a lot of new faces (or mail accounts) suddenly appear... ;) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
