{"id":5300,"date":"2021-10-22T16:33:42","date_gmt":"2021-10-22T14:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/?p=5300"},"modified":"2025-05-10T09:50:44","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T07:50:44","slug":"personal-attack-e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/personal-attack-e\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

PERSONAL ATTACK
\nAd Personam<\/em><\/span><\/h1>\n

Personal attacks<\/em> (Latin: ad personam<\/em> attack) may target any aspect of the person, public or private, including his or her human dignity. Such attacks violate basic rules of politeness,<\/a> courtesy and all ethical prohibitions that protect the individual, as a unique human being.
\nPersonal attacks are absolutely antinomic to argument.\u00a0 Argumentation<\/a> is not<\/em> war; personal attacks are private wars.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The personal attack on the opponent is quite different from the ad hominem<\/em><\/a> attack. The latter refers to a contradiction found between what the opponent says or between what he says\u00a0 and his behavior, whereas the personal attack bypasses the opponent’s positions and smears the opponent as a person in order to devalue the argument itself and exclude the person from the conversation.
\nNevertheless the label ad<\/em> hominem is<\/em> often used to refer to personal attacks.<\/p>\n

1. Overt and Covert Attacks<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Insult is the simplest form of attack ad personam<\/em>: \u201cSir, you are just a poorly educated dishonest person!<\/em>\u201d. Overt personal attacks can be a very effective strategy for undermining the debate and avoiding the issue at hand. The opponent will become agitated, he will lose track of the argument and eventually resort to personal attacks and insults. Third parties will then be tempted to let the arguers fight it our, or just enjoy the show.<\/p>\n

The personal attack may refer to the opponent’s personal life: \u201cYou better take care of your children!<\/em>\u201d said to an opponent whose children are badly behaved, is a personal attack that many would consider extremely offensive. In a debate, such a personal attack could be more subtly launched by introducing the issue of family policy, emphasizing the need for parents to give priority to their children’s education, without openly mentioning the opponent’s circumstances. The rumors and the media will explain the insinuations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He cannot rule his family, and he pretends to rule Syldavia!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

2. Relevance of the Attack<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Personal attacks can be more or less relevant to the issue at hand. Consider the negative descriptions of the opponent made in the context of the argumentative question, \u201cShould we go to war against Syldavia?<\/em>\u201d:<\/p>\n

S1 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0We must take military action against Syldavia!
\n<\/em>S21<\/sub> \u00a0 \u2014\u00a0Shut up, you stupid warmonger!
\n<\/em>S22<\/sub>\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014 Please, stop this nonsense!
\n<\/em>S23<\/sub>\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014 Poor fool, manipulated by the media!
\n<\/em>S24<\/sub>\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0Poor you, last week you couldn’t even find Syldavia on the map!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Considering the available context,\u00a0S21<\/sub><\/strong> and\u00a0S22<\/sub><\/strong> are unprovoked and irrelevant attacks against the person; that is, they have very little relevance to the argumentative question. But in the case of S23<\/sub><\/strong>, nothing is clear; S2<\/strong> is certainly wrong to insult the opponent, but he (S2<\/strong>) does provides an argument that invalidates S1<\/strong> because of his or her lack of basic geopolitical knowledge. If we apply the \u201cno argument without information<\/em>\u201d principle, the attack is certainly not irrelevant. There is a difference between calling a reasonable, upstanding citizen a fool, and calling a fool a fool. But, concretely, if this difference were accepted, all slander would be reinstated\u00a0 as well-suited literal descriptions of the person; hence the general prohibition of descriptive or performative insults.<\/p>\n

\n[1] Latin ad personam;<\/em> the term persona<\/em> refers to the actor’s mask in a play.
\nMetaphorically, it corresponds to the interactional face or social role of the person, not precisely to his or her personal identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PERSONAL ATTACK Ad Personam Personal attacks (Latin: ad personam attack) may target any aspect of the person, public or private, including his or her human dignity. Such attacks violate basic rules of politeness, courtesy and all ethical prohibitions that protect the individual, as a unique human being. Personal attacks are absolutely antinomic to argument.\u00a0 Argumentation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5300"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14221,"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5300\/revisions\/14221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icar.cnrs.fr\/dicoplantin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}