Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

694 Russell Wahl
Someone else said it, it is therefore false: it wasn’t I who wrote this
book, therefore it is bad. (266)
These fallacies are attributed to amour propre, or love of self, a sin of great concern
to the Jansenists of Port Royal. It might be thought natural to include in this
section an account of ad hominem arguments or arguments from authority, as the
difficulty with these forms of reasoning seem related. However, while some of these
examples border on ad hominem arguments, the concern here is strictly with forms
of thinking which will lead to accepting false conclusions and which come from an
inflated sense of self and one’s own situation. Ad hominem arguments are treated
instead in the second section, although not explicitly. That section, concerning
fallacies arising from “the objects themselves”, is where the Port-Royal authors
treat the argument from authority and cases which would best be classified as ad
hominem. This section also deals with, among other things, weak inductions.
It may seem curious to include examples of ad hominem and arguments from
authority in a section on fallacies arising from “the objects themselves”, but the
connection is their view that such fallacies have as their root a reliance on appearance.
While the Cartesians were always on guard against taking features of
appearance (such as color, heat, etc.) to be features of genuine objects, this is
not the concern of this section, as this problem was addressed in the first section,
on ideas. The “object” of concern in most of this section appears to be the very
words or circumstances of an argument or statement. Thus the manner of presentation
of something and who is presenting it, will influence a mind into thinking
the statement true. These are the “objects” whose appearances are in question.
Authority and ad hominem are thus treated in a like manner, and not as a way of
countering an argument but as a way people are lead astray by appearance:
It isn’t that anyone expressly reasons this way: He has a hundred
thousand pounds income, therefore he is right: he is of noble birth,
therefore what he states must be believed as true: this is a man with no
wealth, therefore he is wrong: nevertheless something like this occurs
in the mind of most people and influences their judgment without them
being aware of it. (284)
We can perhaps characterize the concern here not with simply taking someone who
is not an authority as an authority, but the concern is with what we might call a
circumstantial ad verecundiam to complement the circumstantial ad hominem. 29
10 METHOD
The discussion of method in the Logic is a curious amalgamation of original material
and material taken from various works by Descartes and Pascal. To logicians
29 There is also a very brief discussion of misplaced authority. The passage quoted here actually
is classified as a fallacy of manner. [Woods, 2000, 40–41] points out that Locke characterized the
reasoning here as ad verecundiam, although he did not also classify it as a fallacy.