Abstract
Threatening the other discussion party with negative, unpleasant consequences—for instance, by threatening him with physical violence or (more subtly) by threatening him implicitly with sanctions—if that party is not willing to refrain from advancing a particular standpoint or from casting doubt on a particular standpoint, is an outspoken example of a fallacy (“Of course, you can hold that view, but then you should realize that it will very hard for me to control my men in response to you”).
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Notes
- 1.
In the experiments pertaining to the unreasonableness of different forms of ad baculum fallacies (such as threatening with physical consequences vs. threatening with non-physical consequences; and threatening in a direct way vs. threatening in an indirect way) it was found that threatening with physical consequences was judged most strictly, while indirect threatening was deemed to be the least unreasonable move (see van Eemeren et al. 1999). So, by making use of only indirect forms of straightforward ad baculum fallacies in the present experiment, a far too easy confirmation of our hypothesis is avoided.
- 2.
That the circumstantial as well as the you too variants tend to be judged as reasonable moves is only the case when participants have to judge the reasonableness of these fallacies presented in unspecified contexts. When these two types of fallacies are presented in a scientific context, these variants of ad hominem are deemed to be unreasonable, like the abusive variant.
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van Eemeren, F.H., Garssen, B., Meuffels, B. (2015). The Disguised ad baculum Fallacy Empirically Investigated. Strategic Maneuvering with Threats. In: Reasonableness and Effectiveness in Argumentative Discourse. Argumentation Library, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20955-5_44
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