Everyone knows that ad hominem rebuttal--attacking the person making an argument, rather than the argument made--is a rhetorical fallacy.
Pests in many long-running discussions--I'd say online discussions, but it is also common in the greater world of controversy--find it very easy to game the recognition of this fallacy.
The first step is come up with a superficially appealing argument that you can express in a calm and measured prose style. Put forth this argument, and spend a little time in polite discussion as your opponents pick apart the holes in it.
Then abruptly drop out of sight for a while. When you return, repeat your original argument in the identical calm, measured tone, without acknowledging that the rest of the debate ever happened.
Do this four or five times in succession. It helps if your thesis is a little unnerving, so everyone is a bit taken aback from the start.
In the later iterations, the presumption against ad hominem argument is on your side. Anyone who was around for the previous rounds will go nuts, and the reason they're going nuts will largely be that it's you again. You just put forth the same calm, measured argument as if the previous rounds never happened. Anyone new to the discussion will see a sane-sounding guy being hounded by an enraged establishment for no apparent good reason. You may even pick up some followers who will repeat your act with the sincerity that comes from being genuinely naive.
Countering this is hard. It even makes me think that, while ad hominem is a fallacy in a purely logical sense, insisting on this too strongly in an extended debate stretching over several years can be counterproductive. I think that recognition of the ad hominem fallacy was the reason the sci.physics.research charter had no provision for permanently banning a poster--and we paid for that. Oh, how we paid.
2007-11-22 08:27 pm (UTC)
The objective for putting forward the argument is not to persuade its audience of the proposition. The objective is to discredit the participants in the debate and leave the audience with . Like other, forms of terrorism— e.g. the physically violent forms— attempts to counter these tactics are fraught with peril. Just about the only method with any history of success is low-intensity counter-insurgency techniques, which have to be designed specifically for the population in which they'll be applied.
2007-11-23 02:15 am (UTC)
What brought all this up is that, increasingly, I think that the pro-hereditarian side in the race/IQ debate is actually playing this game, not just on blogs and Usenet but in national media.
They've got a story that is in some ways superficially appealing, especially if one imagines oneself to be a sober-minded investigator of cruel facts that may violate the received pieties of nice people. Their basic thesis, that the less fortunate social status of black people stems to some degree from a genetic mental handicap, is sufficiently disturbing to put opponents emotionally off balance (while proponents continue to play the rationalist), get discussions mixed up in moral meta-issues and derail comment threads. And even though the major hereditarian arguments were all debunked in great detail long ago, the proponents still keep putting them forth with surprisingly little modification and claiming that the aforementioned visceral emotional response of anti-racists is the only reason they're not generally accepted.
And it works. Watson embarrasses himself with this same old stuff, there's a big tiff, and the upshot is that William Saletan gets sufficiently convinced to write a whole series on Slate that leans on Rushton's poorly-controlled studies of racial variations in head size. People then spend days fighting about this on Crooked Timber, get all het up, and yet other people conclude that it's just lefties being crazy because they can't face the horrible facts. And none of it is any different in substance from what happened when The Bell Curve came out; there are blogs now and Gould is dead, but the song remains the same. It was an old song then.
As Cosma Shalizi said after a couple of his long, mathematically detailed eviscerations of this stuff failed to change anyone's mind, it never ends--it's enough to remind him of Nietzsche on eternal recurrence. And even if you start out trying to treat this touchiest of subjects with Olympian detachment, you can't stay that way, which just feeds the problem.
2007-11-23 05:59 am (UTC)
I'll just add that I think a fair portion of the phenomenon you're observing is the result of deliberate efforts at tactical syntax for the express purpose of defending irrational prejudices— those which support the more authoritarian elements of our social establishment— against the destabilizing advances of science and technology, by discrediting the process by which these prejudices are worn down. It's rhetorical sabotage to defend the otherwise rationally indefensible.
I think I agree with Atrios and Bradrocket for how to respond appropriately to practitioners of this particular dark art. PZ Myers has adopted a similar pose when dealing with evolutionary biology denialists.
2007-11-30 05:29 am (UTC)