Ah, baculum, is there anything it can't solve?
I love this. We're all attacking the children, really, when Kicky doesn't even mention that as the case. It is still so fun though, isn't it?
Joe, you forgot the sock if that doesn't work. Let 'im know how that works.
"You don't have kids, so you don't know what you are talking about".
Now, the implication of that statement is that all parents do know what they are talking about; hence, all parents are good parents. Demonstratively, an untrue statement.
May I add that you needn't be a butcher to recognize balogna?
I'd say... Well I was a kid once, so I'd have to have a pretty indepth understanding of children wouldn't I??? Aside from that, I'd give 'em a smack upside the head. I like a lot of the other responses too. You should have some good ammo for the next time.
I thought bologna was made by aliens...are you actually insinuating there is real meat in there, roger?
Wow, these are all so good. I think Joe's response C was my favorite though. I really only used that children thing as an example. I was hoping to get a better understanding of these kinds of appeal to authority fallacies, and I was not disappointed at all. You are all so damn helpful! She's always ready with an argumentum ad verecundiam or an ad hominem argument, and I will kill her with this stuff next time. Hee hee hee.
Thanks for helping a fellow human being make an ass out of another fellow human being.
And by the way, what is the sock thing that Craven was talking about?
Let me play devil's advocate, here.
You can refer to it as "ad hominem or an appeal to pity " if you'd like, but it does hold some water! If you haven't experienced something, you have a limited knowledge of the subject, and the person who has experienced it has first-hand knowledge of certain situations around that. It doesn't mean you're not qualified to comment or have an opinion, and it doesn't mean that the person who DOES have kids knows more than you do about everything. But chances are good that they know more than you do about raising kids, and chances are also very good that there is a whole world of things you can't understand until you're in a position where you have to. Who can really say that they know what it's like to be homeless if they never have been? You may think you can imagine it, but there are little ins and outs you'll never know unless you have been in the situation. It is the same with being poor, or being rich, or being black, or being president. We can't really KNOW what the experience is unless we've been there. We can have a basic knowledge, and we can tell other people that, based on what we know of the situation, we have a different opinion, but if you don't have kids, you can't truly KNOW what it's like to have kids. You can only imagine what it's like and what you think it should be like. For example, when I was young, I studied early childhood for years. When my sister had a baby, she would drive me nuts with her lack of consistency! From my book-learning and limited (and controlled) experience with kids in a classroom, I had learned that it's so very important to be consistent with children. What I did not learn is that when you have a child, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, sometimes what is important is not the same as what gets you through the day. I used to constantly chide my sister for her lack of consistency, and she would say "I can't wait until you have a kid". I wasn't worried, because I knew that a good parent is consistent. Well, what I didn't know is that like most things, it's easier said than done. You can't know that until you have sole responsibility for a child. Yes, I was more consistent than she was as a parent, but I was stunned to realize just how difficult the whole parenting thing was. It was much easier when I didn't have any kids and knew everything about them!
If somebody has bratty kids and that's what you want to address, that doesn't mean that the parent can get out of considering that, just on the basis of already being a parent. We all learn from others, even if (and probably especially) their experience or knowlege is vastly different from our own. That is not to say that just because one is a parent, they know best how to be a parent. If that were the case, I doubt we'd have all these child-rearing books and child psychologists, etc.
Sometimes, what a phrase like that is amounts to is a copout, the person either doesn't want to deal with your comments or truly feels that you have no idea what you're talking about. When you do have kids (or whatever) you will see this as well.
I am not trying to be disagreeable, just showing the other side of the coin, which Sozobe touched on.
I'd love to know what the story is! Good luck!
Experience can provide bias and prejudice just as well as it can provide insight. People are prone to thinking their own experiences lend them special perspective about as often as people like to think they are right.
kickycan wrote:And by the way, what is the sock thing that Craven was talking about?
I'm sure he's referring to
this particular debating technique.
If you plan to use it, remember: the sock is
nothing without the lugnuts. Without the lugnuts, a sock is
just a sock!
Changing the subject abit here on television they said that they took lower ranking classes and taught them how to debate or subjected them to it. Once some semblence of the skill of debating was developed, those students marks went up as well. Eventually the class became one of the top competeing high school classes. All because debating teaches you things and helps you communicate. There weresome amazing transitions even among shy less spoken students all because of debating.
I think I'm gonna go with the sock thing.
That is great. Thanks for the laugh.
I'm curious. Why is an appeal to authority a fallacy? I'm going by the definition of the word authority, involving experience and knowledge on a subject. Don't opinions hold up in court if they are considered to come from an authority on the subject? Is the only fallacy when one assumes themself to be an authority?
Appeals to authority in debate are usually on the character of "just take my word for it," or "cause i said so, that's why." It means purporting something to be true without either presenting the reasoning behind one's statement, nor a reference to someone who can reasonably be described as an authority on a subject. In this example, claiming to be an expert on child rearing simply because one was able to fornicate and thereby produce offspring is not valid, because without other evidence, there is no justification for assuming that one is good at child rearing just because one is good at screwing without contraception.
And to add to that, there isn't even any justification that they are good at screwing without contraception, actually. Just that they in fact did screw without contraception.
So the basis to the fallacy is that they are not established as an authority, otherwise it would not be a fallacy?
