Saiyidinal Firdaus
This study examines ad hominem argumentation in the 2024 Indonesian presidential and vice-presidential debates through a pragma-dialectical framework, with particular attention to strategic maneuvering at the boundary of argumentative reasonableness. While contemporary argumentation scholarship increasingly recognizes that personal attacks are not inherently fallacious, empirical analyses often lack detailed reconstructions showing precisely how ad hominem operates within institutional debate interaction. Addressing this gap, the study conceptualizes ad hominem as a context-sensitive argumentative practice whose reasonableness depends on its contribution to critical discussion within a mass-mediated political activity type. Methodologically, the analysis combines heuristic typological identification of ad hominem forms with normatively grounded pragma-dialectical evaluation. Using official debate transcripts from the 2024 Indonesian presidential campaign, the study reconstructs argumentative sequences through a turn-based contextual window and provides thick, step-by-step reconstructions of representative cases. Three recurrent configurations of ad hominem are examined in detail: abusive ad hominem, circumstantial ad hominem, and ethos delegitimation through poisoning the well. Each case is analyzed across the dimensions of topical potential, audience demand, and presentational devices in order to identify points at which strategic maneuvering becomes derailed. The findings show that ad hominem becomes fallacious not through personal reference as such, but through systematic distortions of strategic maneuvering that displace policy deliberation with judgments of personal or institutional legitimacy. Ideological polarization emerges as an internal resource of strategic maneuvering, shaping audience uptake through moral narratives of seriousness, integrity, and ethical leadership. The study contributes to argumentation theory by demonstrating the analytical necessity of thick reconstruction for empirical evaluation of fallacies and by advancing a context-sensitive account of ad hominem at the boundary between reasonable strategic maneuvering and fallacious derailment in institutional political debates. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2026.
State University of Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia
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