Case Study of the Use of a Circumstantial Ad Hominem in Political Argumentation

In the 1860s, Northern newspapers attacked Lincoln's policies by attacking his character, using the terms drunk, baboon, too slow, foolish, and dishonest. Steadily on the increase in political argumentation since then, the argumentum ad hominem has been carefully refined as an instrument of "oppo tactics" and "going negative" by the public relations experts who now craft political campaigns at the national level. It has been so prominently used in the major political campaigns, debates, and advertisements of the past few years that there has even been a reaction against it--a feeling that we have gone too far in this direction and that some kind of restraint is needed. ¹ But there has been no evidence of such restraint in the argumentation used in recent campaigns. Perhaps what might be helpful is a better understanding on the part of voters and campaigners of how to evaluate ad hominem arguments critically.

How does the ad hominem argument really work as a way of molding public opinion, why is it so often so effective, and how can it be defended against? How can it be evaluated as a clearly identifiable type of argument, by some kind of objective standards, in a way that can be applied to particular cases? These appear to be tough questions, but recent research has made some not inconsiderable progress toward answering them.

The purpose of this article is to present a new case study of a type of argument commonly used in political discourse, a case study that makes use of the dialectical normative framework for identifying and evaluating personal attack (ad hominem) arguments that is developed in a series of works by Henry W. Johnstone Jr. (1952); Alan Brinton (1985, 1995); Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1984, 1995); Erik C. W. Krabbe and Douglas N. Walton (1993), Walton (1989, chap. 6; 1998); and van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Francisca Snoeck Henkemans et al. (1996). This particular case, although typical of so many ad hominem arguments currently in use in political discourse, has some special features that turn out to be quite interesting not only in showing how the dialectical framework applies to cases, but also in advancing our knowledge of how the ad hominem type of argument works in political argumentation in a democratic system for which the media reportage of events is a big factor in influencing voting.

1. Framework for analysis and evaluation

Although the argumentum ad hominem, or personal attack argument, has been traditionally treated as a fallacy in logic, recent research in argumentation (as cited above) shows that, in many cases,--including cases in political argumentation--ad hominem arguments, as used in conversational arguments, are not fallacious. Research has shown that, while some personal attack arguments can definitely be judged fallacious, many others are quite reasonable (when evaluated in the appropriate context), while still others should be evaluated as weak (insufficiently supported) but not fallacious. As shown in this case study, the real function of an ad hominem argument (when properly used) is to attack an arguer's credibility in order to criticize the argument she advocates.

Before going any further, it is necessary to define some terminology brought to use in the research cited above. An ad hominem argument is the use of personal attack in a dialogue exchange between two parties, where the one party attacks the character of the other party as bad, in some respect, and then uses this attack as a basis for criticizing the other party's argument. An argument is fallacious if it is a special baptizable (Johnson 1987) type of argument that is used by one party in a dialogue exchange in such a way that it blocks or interferes with the collaborative realization of the goal of the type of dialogue in which the two participants are supposed to be engaged (Walton 1995). Thus, there is a difference between a weak...