USE OF AD HOMINEM ARGUMENT IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE: THE BATTALINO CASE FROM THE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL OF PRESIDENT CLINTON.

• Author: Walton, Douglas

The ad hominem argument is not a new phenomenon in American political discourse. A pamphlet was circulated telling of Andrew Jackson's "youthful indiscretions." Newspapers attacked Abraham Lincoln's policies using the words, "drunk," "too slow" and "foolish." What is new is the greatly increased and much more visible use of negative campaign tactics, and the accepted relevance of the character issue. Personal matters that were once "off limits" for media reporting are now probed into, using opposition research, and routinely used in attack ads. The abundance of these ad hominem arguments in current political discourse provides much interesting material for studying how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this type of argument. In this paper, one specimen that poses some interesting problems has been selected for study.

Prior to the evaluation problem, in dealing with ad hominem arguments, there is an identification or classification problem. Many different subtypes of ad hominem argument have been shown to have distinctively different forms as arguments (Walton, 1998). There are also many other kinds of arguments that are associated with ad hominem arguments, but are not themselves ad hominem arguments. These arguments are easily confused with ad hominem arguments, or misclassified as ad hominem arguments. The lack of any standard system of classifying all these various forms of arguments has stood in the way of any serious study of the ad hominem argument. Now that problem, at least to some encouraging extent, has been solved. But the problem of refining and extending the systems of classification (Lagerspetz, 1995; Walton, 1998) still exists.

Since each different type of ad hominem argument needs to be evaluated differently, the question of how to identify the type of an argument, when confronting any argument used in a given case, is highly significant. But reality being what it is, there are borderline cases where it is very difficult or even impossible to tell whether a given argument used in a text of discourse is one type of ad hominem or another. Or it may even be hard to tell whether it is a genuine ad hominem argument or not. This is the problem Hamblin (1970) called "pinning down" the fallacy in a given case. The problem posed by the case studied in this paper is that the argument looks like an ad hominem argument, but on closer inspection, doubts are raised. It is arguable that it is not an ad hominem argument at all. The case in question is a fairly short and relatively self-contained segment of dialogue from the televised impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in February, 1999. Before turning to the presentation of this case, an introduction to the viewpoint of informal logic is given, and a summary of the various forms of argument at issue is given. Once getting past these preliminary matters; the reader can proceed straight to this case.

THE VIEWPOINT OF INFORMAL LOGIC

When it comes to studying arguments, there are two points of view, or ways of analyzing and evaluating an argument, that need to be distinguished. First, you can study the argument empirically to try to judge what effect it had, or will be likely to have, on an audience. This viewpoint would seem to be one that would fit the kind of approach and methods of the social sciences. The other point of view is logical. You can classify the argument as being of a particular type--meaning, in logic, that you fit it as an instance of some abstract form of argument--and then you can determine whether the argument is correct or incorrect (valid or invalid, reasonable or fallacious)--according to the normative standards of correctness that this type of argument is supposed to meet. It has been thought, since the end of the nineteenth century, that these two tasks were entirely independent of each other, and that they should be carefully separated, and never mixed in together. But recently, the feeling is that this separa tion is not as clean as we thought.

The following thumbnail sketch of the history of logic will amplify the point of the above remarks. Aristotle's syllogistic, along with the Stoic logic of propositions, developed into the science of deductive logic which, in the twentieth century, became mathematical logic. On the other hand Aristotle's practical logic--which comprised the study of "sophistical refutations" or fallacies, which comes under the heading of "dialectical reasoning," in which two parties reason with each other--fell into obscurity and neglect. Something approximating it was attempted to be resurrected in the nineteenth century, most notably, when idealist philosophers wrote about so-called "laws of thought." With the ascendancy of formal (mathematical) logic, however, the whole idealist vision of laws of thought was sharply repudiated, and called "psychologism"--a pejorative term, as then used in logic. A sharp separation was made between how people actually think (psychologically) and how they ought to think (logically) if they are to be rational.

Now to return from this thumbnail sketch, it can be seen why in logic there is though to be a sharp separation between the empirical and normative viewpoints. Recent developments, however, have started to indicate that this separation is not as clean or sharp as it was thought to be. One recent development is the return to the quest, originating in Aristotle's older logic of the Topics and On Sophistical Refutations, to study informal fallacies. It has been found that to study the fallacies with any hope of success, attention must be paid to realistic cases in which arguments are used for various conversational purposes in different contexts. Such an approach requires getting beyond simplistic one-liner examples of fallacies, and looking at individual cases in some detail on their merits. Needless to say, such a pragmatic case-oriented approach to realistic argumentation introduces something of an empirical component. While the abstract form of the argument (the so-called argumentation scheme) is still very important, one also has to look seriously at how an argument has been used for some conversational purpose (supposedly, from what can be judged from the given text of discourse). The pragmatic study of arguments use in a given case is no longer purely formal and abstract. It becomes contextual. Much depends on how you interpret a given text of discourse as expressing an argument or some other speech act. This pragmatic approach seems to make the traditional separation of abstract form and contextual content much more difficult to cleanly make.

This pragmatic approach to taking actual cases seriously is characteristic of the schools of thought now called informal logic and argumentation theory. The general theoretical approach can be described briefly as follows. The goals are the identification, analysis, and evaluation of argumentation. The field of argumentation is centrally concerned with arguments, but must also take account of related things, like explanations and the asking of question, that are not themselves arguments, but nevertheless occur in an important way in the course of sequences of argumentation. The ultimate goal is to evaluate arguments--that is, to judge in given a given instance of its use how strong or weak an argument is. What is meant is to judge whether the premises support the conclusions as good reasons for accepting the conclusion.

The typical kind of case dealt with is a case in which an argument of some sort has supposedly been put forward in a text of discourse in a given case. In this typical kind of case, the proponent is not around to defend her argument. The argument is expressed in some fairly short text of discourse presented in the logic classroom. The source of the text is known. It may be a magazine or newspaper article, a book, a transcript of a political speech, a transcript of a legal case, or any sort of text of discourse that appears to contain an interesting argument of some sort. The critics, usually a professor and a group of students, then undertake the task of identifying, analyzing and evaluating the argument. Usually a particular argument is selected out because it is interesting or controversial for some reason. In many cases, it is selected out because it fits the format of one of the famous informal fallacies. However, such arguments can be quite reasonable in many instances, and are by no means necessarily f allacious. The game is to try to judge, in a given case, whether the given argument, as far as it can be analyzed and pinned down, should be evaluated--is it fallacious, or just weak in certain respects, but not so badly off that it should be called fallacious? Or is it reasonable--that is, should it be judged to be basically correct from a structural point of view, even though it may have parts that are missing, or that are not very well backed up, as far as can be judged from what is known from the given text of discourse and its presumed context. In many cases, there simply isn't enough context given to support a definitive evaluation. Even so, in such cases what is called a conditional evaluation can be very informative and even enlightening.

The viewpoint of informal logic is typically from a backwards perspective. That is, you are typically confronted with a "dead specimen"--an argument that has already been put forward and is now embedded in some text of discourse that is being examined. The argument, presumably, is already over, and you are looking it at retrospectively. For example, the case you are studying may be from a political debate in a parliament or legislative assembly. The debate has already been concluded, perhaps long ago. So you are looking at it with all the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

CLASSIFYING THE TYPES OF AD HOMINEM ARGUMENT

The ad hominem argument has a long history of being treated as a fallacy in logic textbooks. Hardly anyone questioned the...