Further down, regarding the alcoholic neighbor’s warning about giant spiders…
Maybe I’m missing something, but these two statements appear to contradict each other. If you were to address only the argument, not the arguer, the fact that he is drunk would be irrelevant. By your standards, you’d be required to investigate the claim itself, without regard to the claimant - you’d have to go out looking for giant spiders, wouldn’t you? The neighbor’s drunkenness is not part of the claim.
Or are you saying that you can disregard the neighbor’s warning, because he’s drunk? How is that different from disregarding something Art Bell says, because he’s a moron?
If your assertions all follow as inferences from each other, then your argument is valid. If in addition to that, your assertions are all true, then your argument is sound.
Correct. If I cared to know whether the spiders were there, I’d go myself or turn on the TV. Just because he’s drunk does not make his assertion false; it simply makes me not care whether it is false or not.
Giant spiders in one’s neighborhood would certainly be something to worry about. You say that you don’t care whether there really are giant spiders, simply because the guy who’s warning you about them is drunk. If a tea-totalling, always rational, alway reliable neighbor came to your door with the same dire warning, would you then care whether it was false or not?
Sure sounds to me like you’re making at least some judgment about the quality of the information based on the nature of the source of the information. The fact that your neighbor is a booze hound leads you to believe that his information is inherently less reliable. It doesn’t prove that his info is false, but it certainly tips the balance in that direction.
Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you - it’s what normal people do every day of their lives. We do so because it’s a very effective (though not infallible) way of quickly assessing the probable truth of information we receive, but can’t immediately verify with our own senses.
Without that approach, we probably wouldn’t have survived beyond the Australopithecus stage (Og indicates to me that there’s a leopard coming. Instead of running away, I insist upon verifying the information for myself, since, even though Og’s never been wrong before, I stubbornly insist that truth can only be determined by checking it out myself. I am eaten).
At the end of the day, I have to conclude that stpauler was absolutely on target back in this thread. The source of the information in question was someone who’s never right about much of anything, so one shouldn’t pay much attention to his latest morsel of wisdom. There’s no need to do any further investigation. The person who says that NASA is somehow conspiring to misinform us about the color of Mars is unreliable, so it’s probably false information, so we shouldn’t care about it enough to check it out. By your own admission, Libertarian, I think you’ve conceded that point.
We all make inferences every day that are not logically supported in the sense of classical debate. The fact that something cannot be used to construct a sound syllogism does not mean that it isn’t a practical way of dealing with the world in a given situation.
So, you are absolutely correct in stating that it may be impractical in a given situation to “debunk” a known liar’s wild assertions. I don’t have the time or inclination, and if someone has lied to me in every single prior interaction we’ve had, I’ll take the chance that this time I’m dismissing “truth.”
But Lib is just as correct in stating that in doing so I have not satisfied the rigors of argument as they are typically defined in debate. In fact, this is a classic logical fallacy, to assume that attacking the source changes an asserted fact or argument. A fact or argument exists on its own merit, divorced from the person who is advancing it.
If a known liar said the earth was round, would we also consider that false? The genetic fallacy in all its forms is an appropriate issue to raise, period.
I don’t understand why anyone would not consider the source when attempting to determine the truth. Shouldn’t I consider the possible motives of my sources? Shouldn’t I consider their records regarding integrity and a lack of bias? The level of expertise?
I’m left scratching my head and wondering if I missed something…
Zoe, we all do exactly what you describe, it’s a necessary skill for living. (Rhetorical attempts to deny this notwithstanding).
But, it’s really a conscious or unconscious bias. You have to do it to survive in the real world, but what this thread is about is whether that can be validly used to win arguments.
Similar arguments occur in the judicial system: should the accused’s prior criminal history be revealed to juries? should a rape victim’s prior sexual history be revealed? Answer to both of those, usually no. Should the credibility of a witness or expert witness be open to attack? Usually, yes.
IMHO, the answer depends on the significance of the question being asked.
I think the division between various posters in this thread boils down to one basic notion: some of us believe that the real world is not a debating society. The course of human events is rarely altered by “winning arguments.” The “rigors of argument” provide a helpful framework for thinking about difficult questions, but eventually, one has to come back to reality, and sometimes, that means tossing the “rigors of argument” overboard.
Go back to the thread that spawned this one, here, wherein Libertarian raised his “genetic fallacy” objection to stpauler’s “consider the source” comment. Given the circumstances, falling back on rigorous analysis is pretty clearly a waste of time. An unreliable loony made some nonsensical claims. Dismissing those claims doesn’t really require launching a fact-finding mission, and constructing a truth table to do the analysis. Doing so amounts to obsessive-compulsive behavior.
In the context of that original thread, Libertarian’s “You mean the best you can do is a genetic fallacy?” seems only to reflect a desire to accumulate debating points in some imaginary competition.
Whenever we’re determining the significance or worth of a position, the source is irrelevant: only the arguments presented matter.
However, I tend to ignore the positions of those who experience has shown me make grossly inaccurate or fundamentally incorrect arguments, so the issue never really comes up.
After all, if you never hear the position, you don’t have to disregard it because of its source, right?
The point of the genetic fallacy is not to guarantee the credibility of a witness, it is to simply note that what is necessary to determine the truth of the claim is never, “X said it was so.” The point of attacking credibility should only take the form of demonstrating that he person making the claim isn’t in a position to know the assertion in question, and in some situations this is useful. For example, if a witness saw a man stealing a car, and a car was stolen but who did it was in question, the credibility of the witness is worth calling to question. But when we have come to our negative opinion regarding that credibility, the question still needs to be answered: did so and so steal the car? You can see how the credibility of a witness does not answer this question.
Well, one of those have been demonstrated, or is at least more or less publicly accepted. But you don’t get to kill two birds with one stone here as the credibility of a claimant does not demonstrate or refute the claim. Again, consider if the man had claimed the earth was round. Discrediting him will not demonstrate that it is, in fact, flat.
Chistmas vacation! I had a cool 15 days off work to enjoy snowy Ohio and all the assorted family and friends I left behind there for snowy Massachusetts.
With respect to the other thread that they’re talking about, you will see that Podkayne handled matters perfectly — addressing the assertions directly without respect to the source, and debunking them thoroughly.
Actually, I did, so if a poster is going to stick to strict debating society rules, this is certainly the forum in which to do so. But upon looking at most of the threads in the forum, it appears that most of them really don’t “read” like structured debates. Far too much messy mud-wrestling - more like the “real world” of which I speak!
BTW, if you want to see some really egregious uses of the “genetic fallacy” species of reasoning, check out some of Chumpsky’s recent stuff! In this thread, it becomes painfully apparent that, if a media outlet says anything that doesn’t correspond to Chumspky’s version of reality, he concludes that the source is biased. Kind of the inverse of the genetic fallacy we’ve been kicking around, but I believe the same term covers both varieties, no?
All part of life’s rich pageant (which is what one of my former cow-orkers used to say whenever things were going straight to hell).
This is true. And it would be true whether you were a credible source or not, which I could find out by inspection of the threads in GD, not by simply checking with you.
