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The Persuasive Force Of The Ad Baculum, John P. Casey
The Persuasive Force Of The Ad Baculum, John P. Casey
OSSA Conference Archive
Standard accounts of the ad baculum locate its fallaciousness either in irrelevance or dialogue shift. Such accounts, however, fail to explain its persuasiveness. This paper offers a new account where the real target of an ad baculum is an audience downstream from the initial ad baculum exchange. This means that the ad baculum consists in misrepresenting the quality of evidence by means of the forced adoption of a particular standpoint.