On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 11:12:59PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 03:26:48AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > This page is wrong.
> However, to be fair, I can find pages which agree with your
> position. Unfortunately, they seem to also be pure assertion,
> with no reasoning to back up those assertions.
It's a definitional disagreement, which always ends up as a battle
of assertions.
But "You suck, therefore your arguments are worthless" is a fallacy
because even people that suck can stumble across good arguments sometimes,
even if only by a "million monkeys" process. By contrast, "Your arguments
are worthless, therefore you're an idiot" is a valid deductive argument
(if incoherence is the defining factor of being an idiot), or a valid
inductive argument (if incoherence is one of a number of related factors).
But Andrew's original post was an assertion, not an argument. I can't see
why it'd convince anyone of anything they weren't already convinced of,
and I doubt Andrew would've expected it to; so there's not much point
worrying if it had any argumentative fallacies in it [0].
(If you want to call him on it, call him on it for being needlessly
rude; but if you're going to start doing that, you've got a big job
ahead of you)
Cheers,
aj
[0] But what the hell. His aside was basically "You're an idiot, therefore
you're usually wrong"; which isn't a fallacy, presuming being usually
wrong is the defining property of being an idiot. The fallacy comes
when you generalise from the average case (usually wrong), to the
specific (wrong in this particular instance), which wasn't the case
here: we went straight from the general case to the specific case
with no claim of connection at all.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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