Abstract

Abusive ad hominem is an informal fallacy held to be "sometimes valid." I provide an analysis of AAH and apply it to the question, "Are Freudian and Skinnerian psychological criticisms of religious experience arguments cases of fallacious ad hominem?" ;AAH is explicated in terms of rules of thumb that relate persons to the credibility of their utterances, assuming the targets and tactics of the arguments under consideration. Appropriateness of application marks healthy instances. Unhealthy instances are characterized by prescriptive inferences from descriptive origins alone. ;I reconstruct a careful religious experience argument on the basis of William James's works. This argument depicts religious experience as one basis for embarking on a faith journey. It grounds its value claims for religious experiences on their pragmatic consequences. A contrasting unsophisticated argument that a divine source is the only or best account of religious experience is also sketched. ;I reconstruct and examine Freudian and Skinnerian criticisms countering religious experience arguments. Both level two-pronged attacks against such arguments: an aetiological prong focusing on the historical pathology of the experiences; a pragmatic prong focusing on the future consequences of these experiences. Some criticisms of religious experience arguments focus exclusively on the aetiological prong. Such criticisms defeat the popular argument but are inadequate to the Jamesian, since they do not address its pragmatic appeal. In terms of AAH, Freud and Skinner provide effective criticism of the Jamesian agrument: they do not inappropriately over-extend descriptive aetiology but buttress it with pragmatic considerations. This is not to claim general adequacy for Freud's and Skinner's criticisms--only that they are healthy regarding AAH. ;In an epilogue I present some criticisms of Freud's and Skinner's psychological theories and offer suggestions for developing better religious experience arguments and analyses. Further investigation is recommended concerning James's Kantian sources. I sketch a constructionalist approach towards understanding some distinctions and relations between psychological schools, and recommend developing a multi-paradigmatic methodological realism based on pragmatic grounds