The Ad Hominem fallacy is when you attack your opponent with unrelated personal jabs in an effort to undermine them and come out on top. In the cartoon above, because Candidate B does not have an argument to counter Candidate A’s argument in favor of raising minimum wage, they resort to personal attacks on Candidate A’s intelligence. This shows that their argument is based on logical fallacies rather than facts.
5 thoughts on “Jamila Vasi_DB 7- Ad Hominem Fallacy”
The explanation of the definition was the best way to understand it. The example was good as well but I think it would make more sense if you had used an example where A is personally attacked by the appearance in other ways instead of judging them.
This example of fallacy is often seen in political races, where each oponent try to disclose an aspect of their rival life which is not generally relevant in order to get more vote and more popularity from the population.
Hi Jamila, your explanation is very nice and easy to understand. This is a political and Real-Life Example. Ad hominem fallacy is a straight attack on the person. As we can see in the picture, candidate B personally attacked candidate A instead of providing any factual argument.
That’s a funny cartoon and I get the fallacy. It’s a logical fallacy, for sure, because the logic comes from, say “A” is in fact terrible at running a business. There’s no relation in “B’s” argument to her opinion. It doesn’t take away from her opinion on minimum wage. A person that runs a great business may have the same opinion on minimum wage as “A”. So, what does it mean? Nothing! “B’s” sole purpose to use any negative fact about “A” to taint her credibility and discount her opinion. You’re totally correct. This was definitely meant to be a jab.
I chose appeal to emotion because I think it means to manipulate a person’s response during an argument so they can have a better understanding of what you’re saying. It’s used to take the person’s mind off the logic points and have them think about how this can affect them emotionally.