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Reductio ad Hitlerum is a type of association fallacy. [5] [6] The argument is that a policy leads to—or is the same as—one advocated or implemented by Adolf Hitler or Nazi Germany and so "proves" that the original policy is undesirable.
[4] [5] Later, it was applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and social-media comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric [6] [7] where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs. In 2012, Godwin's law became an entry in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. [8]
Circumstantial ad hominem – stating that the arguer's personal situation or perceived benefit from advancing a conclusion means that their conclusion is wrong. [73] Poisoning the well – a subtype of ad hominem presenting adverse information about a target person with the intention of discrediting everything that the target person says. [74]
Reductio ad Hitlerum, first coined in 1951 by Leo Strauss, is a logical fallacy which discounts an idea because it was promoted by Hitler or Nazis. [12] Godwin's law, coined in 1990 by Mike Godwin, asserts that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". [13]
The association fallacy is a formal fallacy that asserts that properties of one thing must also be properties of another thing if both things belong to the same group. For example, a fallacious arguer may claim that "bears are animals, and bears are dangerous; therefore your dog, which is also an animal, must be dangerous."
Reductio ad absurdum, painting by John Pettie exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884. In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as argumentum ad absurdum (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or apagogical argument, is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.
Because mainstream scholars argue that gun laws in Germany were already strict prior to Hitler, [2] [5] [3] [26] gun-control advocates may view the hypothesis as a form of reductio ad Hitlerum. [7]
In 1953, Strauss coined the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum, a play on reductio ad absurdum, suggesting that comparing an argument to one of Hitler's, or "playing the Nazi card", is often a fallacy of irrelevance. [8] In 1954, he met Karl Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg and delivered a public speech on Socrates.