(July 29, 2015 at 9:08 am)lkingpinl Wrote: Not sure why the citation didn't copy over but most know this is C.S. Lewis. I never claimed it to be my own
When you post something without quotation marks and do not say that it is from someone else, you are implicitly stating it is yours. Like this sentence, by not putting quotation marks around it, and by not attributing it to someone else, it is implicit that this is my sentence and not someone else's. You either already know that fact, or you are pretty clueless about writing generally.
If you already know it, then it means you are trying to weasel out of responsibility for having done what you have done, which would make you an asshole. But if you don't already know it, you need to learn it to keep you from having problems in the future. It is not only dishonest, it is illegal in many jurisdictions as well. For quotes, always use some method of indicating it is a quotation, and always give the correct attribution for it.
(July 29, 2015 at 9:08 am)lkingpinl Wrote: and asked for thoughts and opinions on it. I don't find ad hominum attacks against the author to be rebuttals. But again did not ask for rebuttals, just thoughts and opinions.
Everything on this forum has been done to death and while necroposting is against the rules, if I just wanted to read, I would (and have) but I want to engage together.
Rob, thanks for the video I will check it out.
I gave you a real response, yet you say nothing about that and complain about my comments about C.S. Lewis being an idiot. That, of course, was not an argumentum ad hominem, for two reasons. First, it was not presented as an argument at all. In order for something to be a fallacious argument, it must be an argument. Second, it was inferred from the argument presented above it. When someone writes stupid things, and one shows that they are stupid things, concluding that the person was being stupid who wrote those stupid things is drawing a proper conclusion. If you can't distinguish between such things and an argumentum ad hominem, you need to study what an argumentum ad hominem is. Here are a couple of links to articles that help explain this fact, that not all insults are examples of argumentum ad hominem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_hominem
Indeed, calling my statement an argumentum ad hominem is itself committing a fallacy known as "false equivalence":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
Just because there is an insult in common with examples of the fallacy, that does not mean that my comment is equivalent to the fallacy.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
