BrutalAntipathy
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Joined: 7/8/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Noah
quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy
Noah,
I was not redefining the word ad hominem. You were attempting to discredit my statements by mustering personal attacks rather than addressing the issues. But if I have still somehow managed to misinterprit the usage, I suppose this puts us even due to your misuse of analogy as a tool for debate. Guess that makes us about even in our understanding of logic tools, or perhaps lack of knowledge.
Well I would pay good money to know with whom you did your graduate work in logic. Two of my kids have yet to choose a university and information helpful in weeding out even one institutions is appreciated.
For heaven's sake, BA. Howsabout you trundle down to the nearest college and borrow any textbook employed in any course in Critical Thinking or whatever they call the indiginous introductory Inductive Logic course. Alternatively you could visit any authoritative source on the web. Then you could try to engineer some relatively face-saving way of backing out of these howling errors to do with reasoning that you choose to amuse us with, including these vocabulary errors.
By "us I mean me and my alter egos of course And by the way, SusanofO whom I invented to say nice things about me earlier in the thread is just cut to the quick that you would expose Rule as my Doppelganger without exposing her as my Doppelganger too; Aren't you, Susan?
Now watch carefully as I drink a glass of water while Susan posts her reply.
If you'd like to apologize to her, BA, just lean out the window; she's in that black helicopter hovering over your bedroom
Once again, and for the last time from me, I was attacking your reasoning, giving objective evidence to point to where it has been lazy, careless and/or dishonest. The (explicitly provisional) conclusion was that your reasoning is lazy, careless and/or dishonest. The negative statements about you were conclusions, not premises. An ad hominem argument relies upon negative claims about the speaker as premises. That is precisely what makes an ad hominem argument ad hominem and nothing else, no degree of desultory-ness can make a comment into an ad hominem attack unless the insult is used as a premise to justify the negation of a truth claim uttered by the insulted party.
This is just plain first year stuff, BA. Utterly uncontroversial. That is what the term ad hominem argument means. You can blather on about how for you it means something else and that for you roofing nails are pretzels and more power to you, lad. But to misuse the basic vocabularly of critical thinking as a key part of your apologia for science, and then to make a little tree fort with a flag that says "Analogy and ad hominem mean what I say they mean, Darn it!" and then to try to piss down on passersby but only manage to soil your pants every time, well I'm not sure what motivates that kind of project.
Are you into humiliation play, maybe?
There are people here who get this stuff, BA. They got it Freshman year and it was clear as a bell then just as it is now. Among them you are a laughingstock. Right now, today. I'm not fooling. These aren't disputed points or fine shadings of meaning which you are trying to overthrow. You are just wrong as wrong can be, sport.
Be kind to yourself and just take a minute to look it up because as things stand, even before you begin flogging your conspiracy theories you just make yourself look like a total yutz.
I've said stupid things in these forums before, had their stupidity pointed out to me and with what grace I could muster owned up to my stupidity, in a least one case it was to IronBear of all people. Of course you may point out that IronBear is just another "person" I created ex nihilo to make me look good by comparison but the point still holds, doesn't it? Your steadfast refusal to even admit what dictionaries and textbooks say about key terms is ... well I don't even know what to call it and I am seldom at a loss for words. Maybe my ghost-runenr on second base will post with a suggestion.
If you'd like to discuss something reasonably, and hope to be treated as someone worthy of respect, go look up these terms you keep disputing the meaning of, or talk to some flesh-and-blood authority about them, and come back here are demonstrate that you have at least achieved mastery of the terms of the debate.
Absent that I can't think of any good reasons to converse with you. That is insofar as shooting fish in a barrel is only diverting for a short while. I can get a little kick out of exposing a puffed-up gasbag for what he is but at the end of the day I would really rather talk about ideas in the hope of increased clarity of intelelctual vision.
I actually believe that you have managed to ask some questions worth answering recently but I'm not in a hurry to take them up with someone who holds his breath and stamps his foot in the expectation that it will make grown men and women revise the textbook definitions of terms like "analogy" and "ad hominem" just to suit his petulant little mood.
By the way, please note that I am still ridiculing you but I have still not engaged in ad hominem attack. I have not said "BA is an intellectually immature gasbag; intellectually immature gasbags say false things therefore what BA has said is false." That would be an ad hominem attack. Instead I have pointed to the voluminous and ever-more-forthcoming evidence that you are not the sort of person who will own up to an error, learn from his mistake and move on. Rather you are the sort who will cling to the patently ridiculous rather than admit an error.
So without any good reason to take this up with you I will try to proceed in subsequent posts proceed to take up your issues for the benefit of whomever may be tuning in with a goal of contributing to progress toward some collective clarity on these matters and a willingness to proceed with integrity. I will be grateful to anyone who chimes in to point out weakness, flaws, alternative views, etc, in what I offer, insofar as they are willing to either use the English language in conventional ways or else qualify their proposed alternative usages as such. Also insofar as they will proceed with a reasonable degree of intellectual honesty.
I disagree with lots of things said by a lot of people in this thread (including several people who I myself formed from the clay of the earth and inspirited with my own breath, by some accounts) but so far I have been very pleased to hear most of those things said in what seems like a spirit of intellectual integrity.
All this and a lesson in logic from a man that knows so little about the subject that he was unaware that an analogy could be misapplied. Truly astounding! I would suggest that whatever university you choose for your children, that you avoid sending them to the one you attended, as they obviously failed you at introductory logic. But I suppose that is all we can expect from someone so insecure that he has to attack others in order to make his sad little life seem brighter. It is remarkable that you write volumes yet say nothing, but shallow minds often produce an abundance of hot air. So, if you can muster the integrity to try tackling my questions, perhaps you can save what little face you have left by doing so. Your efforts thus far have only served to belittle yourself and prove that you are all hot air with no substance. No foot stamping here. Just a person that is pointing out a rather humerous little troller. So come ,little troller, show us what you got.
Mine is not paranoia, but when I run into someone so obviously full of themselves as you are, I would not put past them the creation of an imaginary cheerleader , as their egos need constant inflation. A person actually schooled in debate and logic would address the issues, and would do so in less verbose fashion.
Oh, and here are a couple of links to introductory logic. I hope that you will pay special attention to the parts about false analogy. I am truly sorry that your poor education did not introduce this to you, but better late than never, hey? Now shall we stop insulting one another? It gets old fast, especially when I am the only one adding anything of substance.
http://members.tripod.com/AttitudeAdjustment/Books/Logic.htm
http://www.starlinesw.com/product/Guides/MESGuide-Logic.html
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