The disguised abusive ad hominem empirically investigated: Strategic maneuvering with direct personal attacks

When people are confronted with clear cases of violations of rules for critical discussion they consistently judge these discussion moves as unreasonable. This is the main conclusion of a comprehensive empirical project on the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical rules for critical discussion carried out by van Eemeren et al. (Fallacies and judgments of reasonableness: Empirical research concerning the pragma-dialectical discussion rules. Springer, Dordrecht, 2009). Overall, the respondents participating in this project judged fallacious discussion moves indeed as unreasonable when they were confronted with such moves in the experiments while they regarded non-fallacious discussion moves as reasonable.