By Yiler Huang
Ad Hominem fallacy is a thinking error many people make when they are arguing with people. It describes a situation where someone is accused or attacked in an argument based on facts that might not be relevant to the reason why they were accused.
For example, I think people who wear the Nike Panda Dunk sneakers are shallow (and I still do now), because it was so popular and made me think people who wear them have no personality and only follow the majority. In this case, I attacked the Panda Dunk owners by stating that they are shallow without providing any reasons or arguments. Another example is a case I saw from my father. He told me that people from Hong Kong are rude and loud, only because he’s seen a few rude Hong Kongese people during one of his trips there. In this case, he attacked the Hong Kongese people by saying that they are loud and rude only because they are from Hong Kong. As we can see in the two examples above, these two arguments are not really addressing the argument directly (why people with Panda Dunks are shallow, and why Hong Kongese people are rude). Instead, they focused on attacking the subjects in the argument for who they are.
To use an Ad Hominem fallacy against someone, you’ll need to accuse someone with information about themselves instead of the topic you are arguing about. This could be their personality, things they did in the past, their personal background, their race, etc. This information can be vaguely relevant to the topic or even completely unrelated. It is dangerous to fall into this fallacy because it often leads you to believe a person is bad or wrong based on irrelevant information. It neglects logic in arguments and sometimes makes you think illogically.