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Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments that are usually fallacious.Often currently this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
Circumstantial ad hominem – stating that the arguer's personal situation or perceived benefit from advancing a conclusion means that their conclusion is wrong. [73] Poisoning the well – a subtype of ad hominem presenting adverse information about a target person with the intention of discrediting everything that the target person says. [74]
The example above was worded in a way to make it amenable to the template given above. However, in colloquial language, the tu quoque technique more often makes an appearance in more subtle and less explicit ways, such as in the following example in which Person B is driving a car with Person A as a passenger:
Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say.
For example, a fallacious arguer may claim that "bears are animals, and bears are dangerous; therefore your dog, which is also an animal, must be dangerous." When it is an attempt to win favor by exploiting the audience's preexisting spite or disdain for something else, it is called guilt by association or an appeal to spite ( Latin ...
A tone argument (also called tone policing) is a type of ad hominem aimed at the tone of an argument instead of its factual or logical content in order to dismiss a person's argument. Ignoring the truth or falsity of a statement, a tone argument instead focuses on the emotion with which it is expressed.
[26] [12] [8] [20] [1] Rejecting a theory in physics because its author is Jewish, which was common in the German physics community in the early 1930s, is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. But not all ad hominem arguments constitute fallacies. It is a common and reasonable practice in court, for example, to defend oneself against an ...
Examples of this include the speaker or writer: [48] Diverting the argument to unrelated issues with a red herring (Ignoratio elenchi) Insulting someone's character (argumentum ad hominem) Assuming the conclusion of an argument, a kind of circular reasoning, also called "begging the question" (petitio principii) Making jumps in logic (non sequitur)