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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @06:05PM (#638913)

    The law does not consider this to be a fallacy:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witness_impeachment [wikipedia.org]

    Well there you go. It's good enough for federal court.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 16 2018, @06:50PM (1 child)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday February 16 2018, @06:50PM (#638936) Journal

    Correct, because the matter of fact that you're determining is the credibility of the witness.

    It's when you claim something other than the direct matter at hand is wrong because of some unrelated issue with the speaker.

    E.g. those satellite measurements are wrong because the scientist is a communist

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @10:06PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @10:06PM (#639071)

      those satellite measurements are wrong because the scientist is a communist

      When the communist scientist is presenting pollution data on capitalist cities, and for whatever reasons has omitted data on communist cities, and the data is used to support the argument that capitalist cities are inherently polluting and should be put under communist rule to rectify the situation, then, yes, the satellite measurements themselves may not be "wrong" but the totality of the presentation is misleading and it is likely traceable to the limitations within which the communist scientist is operating.

      If the political limitations placed on the communist scientist are severe enough (e.g. falsify your data or your family will take a Siberian vacation), then the reasoning is completely sound.

      For fair and balanced presentation, the same can happen to capitalist scientists (e.g. falsify your data or you may lose your Harvard tenure appointment and find yourself teaching at a post in northern Mississippi.)

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]