Abstract
In IV, xvii, 19–22 of his Essay, Locke employs Latin labels for four kinds of argument, of which one (ad hominem) was already in circulation and one (ad judicium) has never had much currency. The present proposal seeks to locate and clarify what Locke was aiming to describe, and to contrast what he says with some subsequent uses that have been made of these labels as if they named fallacies. Though three of the four kinds of argument that Locke picks out are often less than decisive, he casts no aspersion on the legitimacy of their use in debate.
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Notes
For instance, the only two references to Essay, IV, xvii in The Cambridge Companion to Locke (ed. Chappell 1994) are (on pp. 180 and 182) to the final, transitional §24, on questions of religious faith, with which we shall have nothing more to do. For all that it gave to the world a vocabulary that has a certain currency, the chapter is excised from some editions of the Essay (as cited by Hamblin in a note to his 1970, p. 159); nor is it included in the anthology The Locke Reader (ed. Yolton1977).
Though the editors properly note that Locke himself does not use the word “fallacy” for these argument-types (p. 12) exactly the same passage of Locke that Hamblin quotes in full appears in Hansen and Pinto 1995, a very influential book collecting readings on fallacies (pp. 55–6).
Aristotle’s Topics (I, 14, 105b19-29) comes to mind; but others might cite standard Stoic subdivisions as relayed by Diogenes Laertius (VII, 39–41). Even Kant allows in the first sentences of the “Preface” to the Grundlagen, that there is no need to improve on the scheme: Metaphysics-Ethics-Logic.
As Aristotle puts it, “ouk syllogismos”, for instance at AnPr., I, iv, 26a8, 11–12, 32, and 37, 26b3, 10–11, and 17–18; v, 27a19, 27b3, 13, 23, and 36–7, vi, 28a32, 28b3-4, 22–3, 32, and 36–7, not to mention 29a9.
Cf. van Eemeren (et al. 2002), on “the Validity rule” with a capital “v” (p. 132). In conversation with the author (December 2007), van Eemeren confirms that, by “validity”, he and his colleagues mean “deductive validity”.
A curious sidelight: in the selection of Aubrey’s Brief Lives made by R. Barber for the Folio Society (1975), the life of Hooke is not included on the rather arbitrary grounds there is no extant portrait of him (and none can be found among the 55 illustrations in Bennett et al. 2003), a perhaps incidental social marker.
They refer to the “ad verecundiam fallacy” only on p. 29 of their 2008, where it is understood as an improper blocking off of questions.
Places where Locke does appear by name include (Watts 1725) pp. 112, 179 and 326.
A little further on in the same passage, Watts contrasts “human Faith” with “divine Faith” (p. 312), each being a species of which faith is the genus.
A certain folklore would have it that the book was published the very same day as the work by De Morgan’s friend George Boole on the Mathematical Analysis of Logic, one of the first logic books not to include any discussion of fallacies, perhaps because Boole believed that all valid arguments could be expressed with his formalism so that any that cannot are just beyond the pale.
I withold reference to the source so as not to besmirch the memory of the author.
This is a point brought to my attention by one of the readers for this journal for which I am particularly grateful.
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Davies, R. Locke and “ad”. Argumentation 37, 473–492 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-023-09594-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-023-09594-w