Comment by clairity
3 years ago
no, an ad hominem need not be literal. do you really not understand nuance in language? we're not computers operating only on singular data and deterministic instructions.
see how those three sentences go together? that's a line of reasoning. the subject comment doesn't have that throughline. it's disjointed; the parts are only tangentially connected.
> no, an ad hominem need not be literal
What on earth do you mean by "literal" here? Ad hominem refers to a specific fallacious style of argumentation. Being ignorant of the definition and then too stubborn to admit it is not pushing back against "overliteralism".
Especially because the rest of your comment (dismissing the rest of the argument due to "ad hominem") only makes sense if one assumes the correct definition!
But an ad hominem requires that the argument is thrown out solely based on the attack against the person. Laying out a logical argument against someone's belief, and then _additionally_ insulting him based on his beliefs is not an ad hominem.