Is an ad hominem argument a legitimate form of philosophical argument?
Hi That’s a really interesting question. I guess we’d need to establish in what we’re taking legitimacy to consist – what, in other words, is it for a form if argument to be legitimate/illegitimate? How would we determine what is, and what is not, a legitimate form of argument? If we suppose that the purpose of philosophizing is to arrive at the truth – or at least a consistent set of beliefs – then we’re going to want to measure the strength of an argument in relation to the degree of support that it affords its conclusions, and, in general, to measure the stength of an argument-form in relation to the degree of support that arguments of that form typically afford their respective conclusions. On this proposal, we’d always find that ad hominem arguments are philosophically weak. For example, take the following: “Fred Goodwin, that incompetent, shameless b*astard, believes that the Government should take control of this bank, so we can safely conclude that the last thing that the Gover
