Ad hominem tu quoque (‘you too”) is an attempt to rebut a claim by attacking its proponent on the grounds that they uphold a double standard or that they don’t practice what they preach. For example, someone is telling you that you should drive slowly otherwise you’ll get a speeding ticket one of these days, and you reply “but you used to get them all the time!”
Ad hominem is a persuasive technique where someone tries to undermine the opponent’s argument by personally attacking them.
In this way, one can redirect the discussion away from the main topic and to the opponent’s personality without engaging with their viewpoint. When the opponent’s personality is irrelevant to the discussion, we call it an ad hominem fallacy.
An ad hominem (Latin for “to the person”) is a type of informal logical fallacy. Instead of arguing against a person’s position, an ad hominem argument attacks the person’s character or actions in an effort to discredit them.
This rhetorical strategy is fallacious because a person’s character, motive, education, or other personal trait is logically irrelevant to whether their argument is true or false.
Name-calling is common in ad hominem fallacy (e.g., “environmental activists are ineffective because they’re all lazy tree-huggers”).
An appeal to ignorance (ignorance here meaning lack of evidence) is a type of informal logical fallacy.
It asserts that something must be true because it hasn’t been proven false—or that something must be false because it has not yet been proven true.
For example, “unicorns exist because there is no evidence that they don’t.” The appeal to ignorance is also called the burden of proof fallacy.
People sometimes confuse cognitive bias and logical fallacies because they both relate to flawed thinking. However, they are not the same:
In other words, cognitive bias refers to an ongoing predisposition, while logical fallacy refers to mistakes of reasoning that occur in the moment.
There are a number of ways you can deal with slippery slope arguments especially when you suspect these are fallacious:
A slippery slope argument is not always a fallacy.
When you are faced with a straw man argument, the best way to respond is to draw attention to the fallacy and ask your discussion partner to show how your original statement and their distorted version are the same. Since these are different, your partner will either have to admit that their argument is invalid or try to justify it by using more flawed reasoning, which you can then attack.
The straw man argument is a problem because it occurs when we fail to take an opposing point of view seriously. Instead, we intentionally misrepresent our opponent’s ideas and avoid genuinely engaging with them. Due to this, resorting to straw man fallacy lowers the standard of constructive debate.
A straw man argument is a distorted (and weaker) version of another person’s argument that can easily be refuted (e.g., when a teacher proposes that the class spend more time on math exercises, a parent complains that the teacher doesn’t care about reading and writing).
This is a straw man argument because it misrepresents the teacher’s position, which didn’t mention anything about cutting down on reading and writing. The straw man argument is also known as the straw man fallacy.