Publications

Publication details [#16260]

Eemeren, Frans H. Van, Bert Meuffels and Mariël Verburg. 2000. The (un)reasonableness of ad hominem fallacies. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 19 (4) : 416–435.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
SAGE Publications
ISBN
0261-927X

Annotation

Starting from a pragmadialectical concept of reasonableness, the judgments of ordinary arguers concerning the reasonableness of discussion moves were investigated, concentrating on argumentum ad hominem fallacies. Three variants of ad hominem were presented to the respondents: (a) the abusive direct personal attack, (b) the circumstantial indirect personal attack, and (c) the you too! tu quoque variant. These fallacies were incorporated in items of three types: (a) a scientific discussion, (b) a political debate, and (c) a domestic discussion. As predicted, the respondents regarded speech acts with an ad hominem fallacy as lacking in reasonableness. They considered the direct personal attack least reason-able, then the indirect personal attack, then the tu quoque fallacy. In a scientific discussion, ad hominem fallacies were viewed as less reasonable than in the other two types of discussion.