The Fallacy Of Personal Attack Essay, Research Paper

Fallacy of Personal Attack

The fallacy of personal attack involves assaulting the arguer rather than the

argument. This fallacy is very common. Personal attack is like not accepting a argument

because of the way one looks or because they eat seafood any you do not. This form of

rejection is not logical. There are three forms of personal attack, character assassination,

circumstantial and tu quoque.

Character assassination is a personal attack where the arguer’s reputation is

considered evidence that his argument is false. For example, if a convicted felon out of jail

has an argument, most people will not believe him because of his prior involvement with

illegal matters. By rejecting his argument only because he was in jail, a personal attack

has occurred.

Circumstantial personal attack is another form of the fallacy. If a person thinks

that university professors teach better that community college professors, then that person

as made the circumstantial personal attack fallacy.

The last type of personal attack is tu quoque. Tu quoque is like hypocrisy. For

example, who If a person who is in jail because of drug charges tell a teenager not to do

drugs and the teen says “Don’t tell me not to do drugs…you did!” then the fallacy of tu

quoque has occurred.