The traditional fallacy labels, such as ad hominem or appeal to authority (Locke's ad verecundiam), describe forms of argument which are often perfectly reasonable. Quite a lot of careful and valuable research has been done in informal logic on identifying the conditions under which a given argumentative move is legitimate and the conditions under which it is fallacious. Secondly, from a pedagogical point of view, organizing the teaching of practical skills of argument evaluation around a taxonomy of fallacies encourages unduly negative attitudes to argument, tends to substitute name-calling for substantive engagement with the content of an argument, and runs into the problem that the exercise of pinning a particular fallacy label on a particular argument is fraught with controversy, even among experts.
- David Hitchcock
No comments:
Post a Comment