On Monday 06 Jul 2009 12:38:16 pm lukhman_khan wrote: > > This is a list full of educated people saying only educated people > > should be allowed to vote.
> A Circumstantial ad Hominem is a fallacy because a person's interests and > circumstances have no bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being > made. While a person's interests will provide them with motives to support > certain claims, the claims stand or fall on their own. <snip> > > People on the list being educated or otherwise cannot be a basis for > rejecting the argument against letting ignorant and illiterate voters to > vote. > > Lukhman :D The truth or falsity of the idea being a circumstantial ad hominem has no bearing on the fact that this happens to be a list of educated people asking that only educated people shoould be allowed to vote. That much is a given and remains undeniably true notwithstanding the particular classification that is sought to be applied to the (wholly true) statement. It was never sought to be stated that the claim that only educated should be allowed to vote would be proven false by the circumstantial fact that everyone on this list is educated. What was however sought to be claimed, but left unsaid, was that: 1) The uneducated may or may not have a difference of opinion on this issue 2) The uneducated were unrepresented in this debate. The truth of the above two postulates stands for itself. Extrapolating from here we get the following possibilities *We do not know if uneducated people will agree or disagree that they should be unrepresented among voters *We could opt not to poll the uneducated at all for their views, since they are conveniently absent on this list, and reach any conclusion that we might reach. But that conclusion will be unrepresentative of the views of everyone. *We could opt to somehow poll the uneducated about their views on the matter and be ready either beat them down if they disagree, or alternatively, we could opt to back down graciously. Since there are too many unresolvable uncertainties in this debate - I personally do not think it worth debating. shiv
