Appeal to Ridicule

Gregory L. Bock

Criticize Donald Trump? Sure. Question his sanity? That’s nuts.

Title of Howard Kurtz’s article in Fox News Politics Online

To ridicule a point of view is to disparage or make fun of it.

When someone uses ridicule as part of an argument, she commits an appeal to ridicule, which is a fallacy of relevance. According to Stan Baronett in Logic (2013), a fallacy of relevance is one that attempts to support a conclusion using an irrelevant premise. Premises that contain ridicule are irrelevant because making fun of a claim does not make it false, and a point of view may still be true even if it sounds ridiculous.

An appeal to ridicule is closely related to an ad hominem argument because both attack the person. An ad hominem argument usually attacks the person directly - for example, “You’re an idiot!” - while an appeal to ridicule attacks the person indirectly by mocking her point of view - for example, “That is the most asinine thing I’ve heard all week!” There is little difference between saying someone is a fool and calling her opinions foolish. It is difficult to ridicule a point of view without implying that the same descriptor applies to the person herself.

There is also a similarity between an appeal to ridicule and an appeal to emotion in that both attempt to bypass rational assessment of a point of view and elicit an emotional reaction from the audience. An appeal to

ridicule may be an attempt to elicit humor at another’s expense, or it may be an attempt to elicit enmity, playing on the fears and prejudices of the group. Insofar as it promotes group prejudices, it may also be related to an appeal to the people.

Perhaps the most common instance of this fallacy occurs when someone says, “That’s crazy!” This is not problematic when it is simply intended to communicate surprise or amazement, as in “I can’t believe he just won the lottery! That’s crazy!” However, it is a fallacy when a speaker uses it to dismiss an argument without taking it seriously.

This expression is so common that there are probably few circumstances in which one has not heard it used, and I have heard it many times in the classroom. For example, when I was a graduate student, one of my professors dismissed a moral theory regarding the sanctity of life with “That’s crazy!” I remember it well because the theory that was so quickly dismissed was one I held - although my professor did not know this at the time. In addition, I frequently hear my students use the expression in my world religions classes when we encounter very unusual religious practices. For example, we may be talking about snake-handling churches in Appalachia and watching videos of these folks dancing with venomous snakes and drinking strychnine. Inevitably, someone will say, “That’s crazy!” and means for the craziness of the belief to constitute a sufficient reason for rejecting it. If we were to reconstruct the argument with its implied premises, it would look something like this:

(1) Any point of view that seems crazy to me is false.

(2) This point of view seems crazy to me.

(3) So, this point of view is false.

The trouble is that just because a belief sounds crazy to us does not mean that it is false. In fact, many crazy-sounding beliefs turn out to be true. For example, the wave-particle duality theory of light sounds crazy, but it is well confirmed by modern physics. Also, certain Christian beliefs sound crazy to non-Christians, but this does not mean these beliefs are false. The Christian example works well with my students in the Bible Belt who hold a Christian worldview. What is important is to recognize that crazy-soundingness is not proof that a claim is false.

One way to avoid this fallacy is to recognize and employ its non-specious counterpart: a reductio ad absurdum, or reduction to absurdity. This argument refutes a claim by showing that it is absurd. In Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic (2010), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin show how to use a reductio to refute the claim that there is a largest integer: “Suppose there is a largest integer.

Call it N. Since N is an integer, N +1 is also an integer. Moreover, N +1 is larger than N. But it is absurd to think that any integer is larger than the largest integer. Therefore, our supposition - that there is a largest integer - must be false.” This argument assumes a claim is true for the sake of argument and continues to show that such an assumption leads to a contradiction (or absurdity) and hence is false. The difference between a reductio ad absurdum and an appeal to ridicule is that the former uses good evidence while the latter does not.

Perhaps the best way to avoid this fallacy is to cultivate an attitude of respect for other points of view. This kind of respect does not mean agreeing with everyone, which is impossible. It does, however, mean recognizing that people often have good reasons for believing what they do and that very different (even contradictory) beliefs can be rationally justified. A good example of this is William Rowe’s “friendly atheism,” according to which Rowe thinks that both atheism and theism are equally justified, although theism, on his view, is false. A friendly theist, on the other hand, would acknowledge that an atheist’s beliefs may be justified even though they are false.

This attitude of respect is connected to the virtue of intellectual humility. A person is intellectually humble when he has an accurate assessment of his epistemic position, thinking neither too highly nor too lowly of himself. Humility is a virtue because as epistemic agents we are limited and must rely on others in our epistemic communities for knowledge. Humility facilitates the acquisition of truth and requires taking other points of view seriously no matter how silly they sound, recognizing all the while that we (or others) could be mistaken. To ridicule a point of view fails to show respect to others as epistemic agents and is incompatible with the virtuous life of the mind.

References

Baronett, Stan. 2015. Logic, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, and Robert Fogelin. 2010. Understanding Arguments:

An Introduction to Informal Logic. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

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Source: Arp R., Barbone S., Bruce M. (eds.). Bad arguments: 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. New York: Wiley-Blackwell,2018. — 450 p.. 2018

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