Re:With Windows Phone 7, Did Microsoft Actually Bring A Gun ...
by chc on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @11:14AM
(#1783666)
No, the village people drew a logically strong inference from their analysis of the available data. They would be right in the vast majority of cases. By the thinking in your "boy who cried wolf" analogy, it's ad hominem to observe that a clock is broken, because the clock tells the time correctly twice every day. The fact is that when a meter is known to have a strong bias, it is rational to be skeptical when it gives a result in line with that bias.
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Re:With Windows Phone 7, Did Microsoft Actually Bring A Gun ...
by loewenskind on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @11:56AM
(#1783816)
>No, the village people drew a logically strong inference from their analysis of the available data.
Wrong. They engaged in a logical fallacy, full stop. The correct response would have been for them to replace the boy with someone who wasn't so prone to lying (and for your clock example, replace or fix the clock). They must check every alarm raised from their designated "wolf watcher".
Interestingly, a good usage of an ad hominem would have been the argument for replacing the boy (e.g. "It's too inefficient to use him as the watcher because he's a liar").