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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 16 2018, @02:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the character-assassination-for-dummies dept.

Argumentum ad hominem, a well-known fallacy that involves attacking the character or motive of the person making the argument rather than arguing their claims on their merits, is frequently encountered, and despite being fallacious, it is disturbingly effective. A new study in PLOS One (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192025) sheds some further light on just how effective the various types of ad hominem attacks are in the context of scientific claims. An article from Psypost reports on the findings:

Ad hominem arguments — attacking a person to disprove his or her claims — is considered a logical fallacy. But a new study published in PLOS One suggests that some ad hominem attacks can effectively erode people's trust in scientific claims.

The research found that attacking the motives of scientists undermines the belief in a scientific claim just as much as attacking the science itself.

[...] "One key finding is that if members of the general public are aware of a conflict of interest connected to a scientific finding, then this will seriously undermine their faith in that finding," Barnes told PsyPost. "What the study does is allow us to quantitatively compare the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of conflict of interest to the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of outright research fraud and misconduct (such as faking the data)."

"What we see is that knowledge of conflict of interest is just as powerful as knowledge of research fraud."

Further commentary on the study by Orac at Respectful Insolence.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by schad on Friday February 16 2018, @03:00PM (8 children)

    by schad (2398) on Friday February 16 2018, @03:00PM (#638821)

    It's true that some fallacies aren't always. An appeal to authority, for instance. If you don't know whether to use "who" or "whom" in a sentence, and you say "I'll ask Professor Bob and just do whatever he says," that's an appeal to authority. If Professor Bob is an English prof, it's a valid one. If he's a physics prof, it's not.

    However, ad hominem is always a fallacy. Consider these two statements:

    1. You can't trust Professor Bob's research, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.
    2. Professor Bob's research is bogus, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.

    See the difference? The former is not an ad hominem, but the latter is. The difference is your subject. In #1, your subject is Bob. You're saying that Bob isn't trustworthy. That makes his financial connections extremely relevant. Basically, this is an attack on attempts to appeal to Bob's authority. In #2, your subject is Bob's research. But Bob's character does not necessarily have anything to do with his research. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; there is no information in the argument either way.

    Fundamentally, pretty much all logical fallacies are variations on the theme of non sequitur: "The things you are saying have nothing to do with each other." The specific name of a given fallacy usually just denotes which particular rhetorical trickery is being used to disguise the irrelevance.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 16 2018, @03:39PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 16 2018, @03:39PM (#638841) Journal

    because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.

    That's Evil Corp.

    1. Nobody can trust you, because you try to protect Evil Corp from being named.
    2. Nobody can trust your post, because you try to protect Evil Corp from being named.

    And it depends on which episode that Bob got onto their payroll.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 16 2018, @06:59PM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday February 16 2018, @06:59PM (#638945) Journal

    However, ad hominem is always a fallacy.

    No.
    Its not!

    Here, let me appeal to authority for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy [wikipedia.org]

    You seem to have fallen victim the "bad analogy guy" [fallacyfiles.org] fallacy,

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @09:45PM (#639061)

    If you don't know whether to use "who" or "whom" in a sentence, and you say "I'll ask Professor Bob and just do whatever he says," that's an appeal to authority. If Professor Bob is an English prof, it's a valid one. If he's a physics prof, it's not.

    An "appeal to authority" fallacy also comes into play when you assert that X is true simply because authority figure Y says so, regardless of what kind of credentials they have. You can say that it's more likely to be right because a relevant authority figure said so, but absolute truth doesn't come into play here.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday February 16 2018, @10:30PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:30PM (#639085)

      In some cases appeal to authority is correct by definition, for example when NIST sets a standard, it is the standard because they say it is.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:00AM (#639129)

    A physics prof. who is a native speaker would have enough brain cells to know the difference between who and whom.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:34AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:34AM (#639138)

    You are very correct, the direct attack on Bob's research is inappropriate, the more appropriate statement is to distrust Bob with respect to the topic in general - which would include discounting Bob's research unless it is corroborated extensively by non-biased investigators.

    However, most people are not nearly so pedantic and would draw little distinction between the two statements.

    Recently, our fearless orange leader tweeted about how the US SouthEast could "use a little more of that Global Warming that we just refused to pay to stop." Nevermind that the excessive winter cold is actually caused by global warming increasing the latitudinal oscillations of the jet stream, that's too much detail and too complicated for him to communicate to "his base" - they take the issue as presented "warming" and it's unseasonably cold, so we should get more warming, and saving money to get that warming is another simple bonus... and if you can't communicate it in 140 characters or less, you're likely exceeding the attention span of the majority.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:59PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:59PM (#639335) Homepage
    My view, as someone who's fairly Bayesian, is that Appeal to Authority gives you a posterior probability which you can use as your prior probability for the matter in question.

    With such a stance, automatically rejecting appeals to authority is the same mistake as giving no more weight to a second opinion on a medical condition.

    The reason that Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy is because there's no agreement on what the new prior should be. For some parties, P(truth) increases, but for others, who reject that "authority" as being biased or a loon, P(truth) decreases. If the reliability of the authority isn't known, then P(truth) should stay the same. In the latter two cases, there's no progress towards the conclusion, it is a pointless and unnecessary step in the argument.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @02:43AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @02:43AM (#639929) Journal

    However, ad hominem is always a fallacy. Consider these two statements:

    • You can't trust Professor Bob's research, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.
    • Professor Bob's research is bogus, because he's on the payroll of Evil Industry.

    See the difference? The former is not an ad hominem, but the latter is. The difference is your subject. In #1, your subject is Bob. You're saying that Bob isn't trustworthy. That makes his financial connections extremely relevant. Basically, this is an attack on attempts to appeal to Bob's authority. In #2, your subject is Bob's research. But Bob's character does not necessarily have anything to do with his research. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; there is no information in the argument either way.

    No, the only difference is the level of distrust expressed. There is no difference in subject between the two. The sentences have a slightly different structure, but not enough to affect meaning. They both attack the research via a context of Bob, not of his research. The real difference is in the degree to which the research is being attacked. In the first case, it is merely being "distrusted" which is a rather weak assertion. That still allows for the research to be correct.

    The second claim is far more severe an attack. It outright rules out any research by parties funded by Evil Corp. Under normal conditions, that's an ad hominem because business research can and usually is valid research, even when biased by the funding source.

    But it is possible that Evil Corp has legitimately acquired a particularly bad reputation for falsification of research (for example, say it's a well-known and blatantly dishonest propaganda mouthpiece for some ideology or cult). in which case that can make even this strong an attack a valid non-fallacy.

    For example, if North Korean researchers have determined that Kim Jong-un's shit smells like cherry blossoms, I'm not going to give them any benefit of the doubt - because of the well-known and way over-the-top exaggerations concerning this leader of North Korea. Sure, it could still be true - perhaps they have come up with a variety of chemical additives to his diet that make it so. It's just not rational to devote brain power to those sorts of claims without independent verification in the works.