Kieran Healy

Argumentum ad…

Glenn Reynolds says

THE SADDAM / AL QAEDA LINK: Why are so many anxious to deny it? Perhaps because having missed it for so long would be embarrassing:

Someone teaching a rhetoric class could probably mine Instapundit for examples of
logical fallacies. He seems especially prone to begging the question, ambiguity and (as in this case) attacking the motive.

Incidentally, the reason (rather than the motive) for denying a Saddam/Al Qaeda link till now was lack of evidence. If the article Glenn links to offers new evidence (and it’s not very encouraging to have to depend on This is London for your hard data, as opposed to, say, the White House), then that’ll be a reason for people to change their minds. But you don’t have to search for bad motives to explain why people didn’t (or don’t) believe there’s a connection there. Besides, not wanting to believe something until there’s good evidence for it is a good motive, not an embarrassing one.

Good point, though I would also warn against the “fallacy fallacy” where one person tries to discredit the argument of another by pointing out that the first person has engaged in a form of reasoning that occurs somewhere on a list of logical fallacies. Many so-called “fallacies” (I think particularly of the naturalistic fallacy and the genetic fallacy) are arguable not fallacies at all.

Sure—- but it’s not as if I make a habit of this kind of thing, so maybe I can be forgiven my snippiness this once :-) And whereas the naturalistic and genetic fallacies are tricky ones, begging the question and suchlike are real problems.