On the transition to personalities: when it is possible and when it is impossible

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The modern interpretation of the Ad hominem problem and its solution are far from reality and should be reconsidered to some extent. Here I offer a preliminary version of my reflections on this topic, my answer to the question of when it is possible and when not to be personal in discussions.

In modern descriptions of the so-called "correct" or "ethical" methods of conducting a discussion, the method of argumentation Ad hominem is considered a priori incorrect and is prohibited. Usually, on normal forums, moderators follow the progress of the discussion and delete posts, or even ban those who use this technique in the discussion, arguing that the technique is prohibited. This is the wrong position, because this technique is justified in some cases.

In short, use personalization it is forbidden, if such a transition is a logical error, or among the purposes of its use there is no purpose to solve the problem discussed in the discussion or to find its cause.

Transition to personal use can, if this technique is not a logical error and very likely can help solve the problem under discussion or identify its cause.

That's all. If this is understandable, then you can not read further, because further there is a projection of this rule on my personal experience, examples and special cases of the described rule will be given, which, perhaps, will help clarify the picture for those to whom the above rule seems too vague. First, let's take a look at when it should be prohibited.

When you can't

The logical error that often accompanies the application of the Ad hominem method is as follows: a certain person expressed the thesis “ X", Something bad is reliably known about this person or that he himself does not follow the thesis" X", Therefore, the thesis" X »False. Example: a person smokes, but he says to another that smoking is harmful and that smoking kills, and the other responds to him: “you yourself smoke like a steam locomotive - and you tell me stories.” In this case, it is clear that the transition to personalities is not justified and is, indeed, a false method of argumentation. The truth or falsity of the thesis about the dangers of smoking has nothing to do with the fact that the person who expressed it is a heavy smoker himself or that something unpleasant is known about him.

In simpler cases, the transition to personalities can be a banal insult that does not contain any useful information, but is designed to humiliate the interlocutor and, thereby, reduce the strength of his arguments in the eyes of observers of the discussion. For example, a person in a written debate on the Internet writes “we must stop the degradation of education”, and in response to him “and this is said by some sucker who cannot even write the word“stop”without mistakes” or when one cannot dig into such mistakes, just "you have a muzzle on your avatar, as if you were held with your head in the toilet." And that's all, it kind of reduces the value of the statements and arguments of the offended in the eyes of typical ordinary people, because they think: "Indeed, he is such a sucker, how can he say anything correct or clever on the topic."

More complex techniques for unreasonable transition to personalities are, for example, referring to other people who expressed similar thoughts, but became known in a bad or good light. For example, “Hitler didn’t eat meat either,” “Look, Jobs dropped out of university and still did more than you did with three honors,” etc.

An even more difficult case is an indication that someone is interested in something. That is, if, say, a store manager wants to shove you a good soft case along with the phone, arguing his position with beautiful stories about screen damage, drops and splashes, then it seems that he is simply interested in selling as many goods as possible and you can think, "Well, these traders just want to shake off a little more", but this is not necessarily the case, it is quite possible that the person would like to help you use the product more correctly and protect it from typical cases of damage (he might just know them better than you) and abandoning the cover just because it is compulsively crammed into you - this is a false argument based on an attempt to analyze the behavior and personality of the manager. This logical error occurs due to the fact that in most cases the buyer really wants to bend, so it seems that this is happening downright always. Sometimes the error is corrected after the owner of the touchscreen phone learns that the cost of a new screen with repair exceeds two-thirds of the cost of the phone itself, but more often the phone manufacturer is accused of being interested in such screens that break when dropped from half a meter so that hand users pay as much as possible for their handshake. Such an accusation of the reasons for low-quality products (regardless of whether it is true or false) is also a variant of the logical error of Ad hominem, because quality not necessarily depends on whether the company has intent or not, and may depend on a number of other factors (for example, on the cost of the final product and on studies that confirm that there are only one in a thousand hand-held users, so there is no point in making all products shock-resistant).

And a very difficult case, which is practically inaccessible for thorough analysis by the overwhelming majority of people, is the projection of their personal motives and values onto the motives and values of the interlocutor, or even ascribing certain qualities to the interlocutor based on social stereotypes. For example, if you strongly quarreled with a person, and then a thing to which he had free access disappeared or was damaged, then it is quite possible that you will (perhaps mentally) blame him for everything, since in his place you allow that could have done the same, or the average person with a similar character would have done the same. And in a significant part of the everyday scandals I have observed among ordinary people, everything looks exactly like this: one person begins to treat another with prejudice, considering his behavior deliberate, because he himself admits such behavior in his place or so imagines the behavior characteristic of a person who occupies such and such social status or having such and such a life history. For example, "how can this criminal be a good person?" More typical examples: one, two (even if these particular stories on links are fictions, it does not matter, since they fully reflect the modern way of thinking of most ordinary people, if, of course, you throw out the emotional part of them, designed to make the text more artistic and interesting).

What do all these examples have in common? The common thing is that the personality traits of the subject are absolutely not connected with the arguments expressed by him or with the actions he performed. In other words, if a moron told you that you are a moron, then the truth or falsity of this thesis does NOT depend on the fact that it was the moron who told you it. It depends only on your actual state, so answers like “he’s like that” do not make sense. And here is the reason that you were called that, maybe be that your interlocutor is a moron, and then it may already make sense to explain to him who he is, since he allows himself such statements. And that is not always the case. This is where I come to the second part - about when it is possible (and often even necessary) to get personal.

When you can

It happens that the interlocutor has a poor command of logic and is immune to logical arguments. For example, in one of the so-called proofs of Fermat's Theorem, a person (such people are called “fermatists” - they are looking for short and beautiful proofs of the famous Theorem, but have not yet found) argued that “the product of a trigonometric function of a transcendental number by an irrational number is not at all may be whole”, which, in his opinion, proved one of the auxiliary statements in his“proof”of Fermat's Theorem. As a counterargument, he was immediately offered to multiply the sine of pi divided by four by the square root of two.

The result is 1, that is, an integer, while the person argued that an integer cannot be exactly obtained. However, the fermatist was not at a loss and said that his formula has a different form than the usual product of a sine by a number, here he had two sines, not one.

As a result, the poor fellow, of course, was whipped in the comments, but that's not the point. The bottom line is that he never understood the error. He came to the conclusion that the scientific community is a sect whose purpose is to protect their interests, why they are scientists - and they pounced on him in a crowd to denigrate and destroy his ingenious idea, which puts an end to the very long-lasting real proof of the Theorem, which is at the moment, the property of academic science.

What is the fermatist's mistake? The fact that he has extreme problems with logic and exactly this is the reason for the theses put forward by him and the behavior that he demonstrated. By themselves, his theses, of course, were refuted by pure mathematics, but he did not understand these denials due to some defects in my head. The essence of this discussion was no longer to prove to a person the falsity of his beliefs, but in the fact that he understood counterarguments given to him by his mind. So, here a reference to the lack of intelligence of the interlocutor will be completely legal and fair. The interlocutor must accept this argument, even though it is a form of Ad hominem. Due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, this fermatist cannot understand the falsity of his theses, because to understand logical errors one needs to be able to think logically. However, if a person thinks carefully about the defects of his thinking and corrects them, he will immediately understand the rest of the errors in his logic and in his "proof", and even himself. But for this he needs to accept the "you devil" addressed to him and draw the right conclusions. You can find a lot of similar examples if you look through the scientific forum dxdy.ru, or, more precisely, the branch of "blizzards" of the section with mathematics and similar ones in other sections, especially in the humanities, and it is especially interesting when a humanities student climbs into higher mathematics, not having absolutely no knowledge and abilities (while he himself does not understand this).

Look, here is an important point: in such a discussion, it is not the falsity of the thesis that is proved, but the erroneous behavior of one of the participants in the discussion. And since behavior is a personal process, it cannot be fully disclosed in a relatively simple way otherwise than by a transition to a discussion of personality.

If even in mathematics there are people whose personal qualities discredit science and are the cause of stupidity and absurdity, then what can we say about the humanities, in which often people do not even know the basics of logical thinking, but proceed from the emotional categories of describing reality?

There are a number of other examples from the field of relationship psychology, in which the transition to personalities is simply necessary.

One of these examples was told by my relative - a literature teacher. In his lesson, some kind of tough guy prevented him from teaching, did not accept arguments about the unworthiness of his behavior, continued to interfere and behave more and more insolently. Ultimately, the teacher watched him at a break in a lonely corridor - and dragged him by the collar (the transition to personalities here was expressed in physical impact, which entailed psychological pressure and implicit humiliation). As a result, the student stopped behaving badly, and after a few years he returned to school to say thank you to the teacher, because thanks to this influence all the nonsense came out, the person took up his mind and achieved success.

In my personal practice of relationships with boys and girls, it is often impossible to communicate normally with those who have an extremely high opinion of themselves at their age, even if they are really talented. A normal conversation with such young 18-year-old talents can begin only with words like "yes you mu #% la, sixth graders are solving this problem in my mind, and you have been looking at it like a ram for a minute." Oddly enough, other methods in my practice are powerless against arrogant people. If you just give a person a problem, he just disappears, so as not to show that he cannot solve it. Fortunately, with ordinary people, not particularly gifted, such problems do not arise.

Summarizing these two above-described examples, we can say this: when educating some personal qualities in a person, one inevitably has to criticize his other personal qualities, because of which he raises his problems in life. That is, there is no point in discussing the problems themselves and their solutions, you need to discuss their source - some bad personal qualities.

A few private clarifications and conclusion

A person who applies the Ad hominem method in his practice must understand well what he is doing and why. For example, he himself must know mathematics well in order to accuse another person of not understanding it and of personal reasons for not understanding it. Or, say, in order to criticize the behavior of another person, an international professional in his field, you need to have a pretty good idea of at least what motivates this person and why his actions are exactly the same. It is foolish, for example, while sitting in front of the TV to yell at a football player with a well-deserved international recognition that he kicked the ball incorrectly or missed the goal, because the sofa fan himself in exactly the same situation will most likely not kick even so. But if you yourself are such a football player, then, most likely, your criticism will be fair, but usually in most cases this criticism will not come from you at all, because you are well aware that you would have kicked no better, taking into account a hundred circumstances that are not visible an ordinary man in the street watching a game with a can of beer.

So, the ad hominem position is applicable and often mandatory to apply, if it was possible to reliably identify the initial causes of incorrect theses or incorrect behavior in the personality traits of the interlocutor, providedthat you yourself are well aware of the current situation and take responsibility for possible injustice towards the person, and only if In your opinion, this technique is really capable of enlightening a person and will correct a defect in his thinking.

For example, a person climbed onto the podium of political debates and accused the president of, to put it mildly, “crappy” correcting the situation in the country (this is, in short, the behavior of almost any modern Russian oppositionist). And in the course of the debate, the person was explained in a harsh manner how to change his own diapers and where to buy a portfolio in order to collect it and go to school. This transition to personalities in a significant part of cases is justified and fair, since almost certainly such a person really has little idea of the structure of the political system, the principles of work of the authorities and the situation in the world as far as the president understands it. Arguments are not available to him due to his low qualifications in management issues, so the emphasis should be on the personality traits that force him to talk nonsense. After all, you need to be well versed in politics in order to be able to give detailed assessments of the actions of the authorities (both good actions and bad ones). The "roughness" of some decisions of the authorities, which seems obvious to the layman, is far from always "roughness", just as the reason why, for example, a child is forced to eat porridge in the morning and go to school, and do homework during the day, is not it. After all, it is obvious to the child that porridge, lessons and school suck, and you can't argue (you can choose your example, instead of porridge, if this one does not suit you personally, but this will not change the essence). A person making a remark to a jerk on the podium must be well aware of what he is doing, and he must understand the principles of management well in order to see the delusions of another person at a glance. Otherwise, the transition to personalities is not justified.

Another example, if a certain group of people cannot understand what is working incorrectly (as, for example, in the second part of this article) and cannot even understand (realize) the problem that he faced in order to correctly pose it and solve it, then the team member, who sees all this from the position of deep experience (even if not always able to formalize it) can leave such a team, realizing the futility of his attempts to explain the error. Instead of seeing their mistake, team members will rather find a number of particular flaws that explain, in their opinion, the behavior of their former employee and, having calmed down from a satisfying "solution to the problem", they will go to hammer in nails with a microscope or draw a square further with a compass. If they accuse a former employee of incompetence, mental instability, or mental defects, they will think that by doing so they have solved their problem. Here we see a typical example of the wrong form of the transition to personalities. That is, here does not matter, what are the qualities of the employee (even if he even tucked a fur coat into his pants or has a certificate of registration in a mental hospital), but what is important is only what is the methodology of the team's activities. She, this methodology, not will change neither from the quantity, nor from the quality, nor from the volume, nor from the form of accusations of the personality of the employee who pointed out the systematic error to the team, fully realizing its presence. Even the discussion of the employee's personality behind his back, gossiping and recalling various stories in which he was wrong, will not even help. From the correct or incorrect behavior of the employee not the general inability of the team to do the right job depends, and attempts to lower a person to their level only postpone the solution of the problem.

Final conclusion according to my intermediate thoughts about the transition to personalities: it is possible to apply the Ad hominem method as an argument only when the wrong act committed by a person or the wrong thesis expressed by him is a close consequence of some quality of his personality. That is, when, for example, a mental defect, cognitive distortion, deliberate violation of logic, inability to understand what he read or just think logically led a person to a wrong action or thesis. At the same time, the condition must be met: the accuser understands that this transition to personalities, in principle, can help a person realize his mistake on his own. That is, it must be precisely his mistake and the accuser must be well versed in the topic in order to realize the presence of this error with the greatest possible reliability, in order to point out it correctly and not make a mistake himself.

In all other cases, the accuser goes into the forest with wide strides - and he himself looks for the shortcomings of his personality, corrects them, then the conversation continues in a more constructive manner.

By the way, the duality of people in relation to the ways of applying the “Ad hominem” argumentation is touching. When a person is praised, he will not yell “you are getting personal,” but the code will be scolded. For example, if you say “the author is probably a very well-read person, since he so well touched on the connection between the ideas of a number of writers in his review,” then the person will accept this argument without hesitation, but if you say “the author is probably a complete zero in the history of literature, since he confused the years of writing these two works”, here the offended author will not miss the opportunity to accuse the offender of using a prohibited method of argumentation. Why do you think?