Cyberherbalist's Blog

From Wikipedia:

“Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a rhetorical device where adverse information about a target is pre-emptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say.”

This is another rather common way to overcome an argument that one cannot defeat by logic or reason.  It is not quite as useful as some other methods in a live debate, because it is more easily recognized and countered as a form of “ad hominem” attack — the target can easily point it out to the audience as empty rhetoric — though a skillful debater can shut the door to this defense.  But especially where the target does not easily have access to the medium (i.e. an essay appearing in a source the target cannot access), it is again quite useful.

A summary of this form of fallacious argument:

Discredit the other person before they speak. Or discredit the topic or  argument that they may support.  Call them names. Talk about  their supposed lies. Show them to be  unworthy. Tell how they are unintelligent, crazy or otherwise undesirable, inferior and not worth listening to, let alone believing.

Poisoning the Well is closely related to Appeal to Ridicule.

I remember that morning very well.  Living on the West Coast, things were well along by the time I woke up, and I woke up to one of the kids proclaiming loudly in the hallway that one of the towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed!  I recall dragging myself groggily out of sleep, not entirely sure if I was dreaming — I knew about the WTC, having at one time flown between the two towers in MS Flight Simulator, ironically enough — but suddenly I realized that this had to be real.  I rushed some semblance of clothing onto my frame and hurried downstairs to see what was up.

The television now showed one smoking tower where once there had been two, and I hardly knew what to think.  They still hadn’t come out with certain news about who might be responsible for this, but it was clear then that two airliners had been deliberately flown into the buildings.  I don’t remember if the other two aircraft (the one aimed at the Pentagon and the other presumably aimed at the White House) had been mentioned yet, or not.  But I remember clearly that while I was watching the second tower burning and smoking away, it suddenly collapsed itself, the structure falling onto itself until it, too, no longer stood.  What a feeling it was!

The household was a little bit in an uproar.  We still had four children at home, all legal adults, and one of them, David, was at that time or perhaps later in the day, proclaiming that he was going right down to the recruiting station and sign up for the Marines.  While I didn’t have any objection to this, in principle, I realized that this was an emotional reaction and felt he should think it over a bit more before committing himself.  Also, there was one impediment to his joining the Marines that I was aware of, and that was him being home-schooled and still without a GED.  When I mentioned to him that the Marines wouldn’t take him without a GED, he was dismayed.  But it did slow him down long enough to think it through.  Ultimately he didn’t join the Corps.

And after all this time has gone on, it is quite amazing to me that so many people in this country don’t realize that we are still at war, and will continue to be at war for a long time to come.  And that there’s nothing that can be done about it.  The problem is, we are not at war with a nation state that we can invade and conquer — although we did take al-Qaeda’s host-state, Afghanistan.  It is as if the Nazis had continued their war through guerilla means (which was in fact a fear of the Allies at the end of WW2).  They could have done so for years, but they didn’t, thank goodness.

But here we are, and here we will stay, at least until we run out of al-Qaeda and related bad guys.  This may never happen.

If you pay attention to political rhetoric, you’ll see a lot of this.  I have to admit that I find myself shaking my head in wonder waaaay too often over it.  But it’s inevitable.

For those of you who don’t know what a Straw Man is, it would be a good idea to explain.  First of all, it is not a scarecrow.  In this context it is one variety of something called a Logical Fallacy.

Since logical fallacies are ubiquitous in political rhetoric, it may be instructive to consider some of these.  As indicated, I’ll start with the Straw Man.  Wikipedia defines it as follows:

A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

Example:

• Person A: Sunny days are good.
• Person B: If all days were sunny, we’d never have rain, and without rain, we’d have famine and death. Therefore, you are wrong.

Problem: B has misrepresented A’s claim by falsely suggesting that A claimed that only sunny days are good, and then B refuted the misrepresented version of the claim, rather than refuting A’s original assertion.

This fallacy is called a “Straw Man” because in a fight it is harder to attack and beat your actual opponent than a straw representation of your opponent, which is considerably easier to attack because naturally, it neither moves nor fights back.

The Straw Man is an important rhetorical tool (if you can slip it by without anyone noticing) in partisan politics, and is easily one of the most common fallacy used.  The main reason why the Straw Man is so popular is because it is useful when you have no valid counterargument for your opponent’s position, and when it is used skillfully it makes you look like you know what you are talking about, when you really don’t.  Additionally, if you are particularly skillful, you can so misrepresent your opponent’s position that it becomes impossible for him or her to answer in a reasonable timeframe. This is particularly important in a verbal debate.  A famous example is the Vice Presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle.

In this 1988 televised debate between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle made a tactical error in deflecting questions about his youth and inexperience by bringing  John F. Kennedy into it, by stating that JFK was even younger when he ran for president than Quayle was at the time. Bentsen turned this around on him in a famous retort that went on to be the most telling moment of the debate, when he said to Quayle,

“I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And, Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Zing!  This was an effective and memorable remark — remembered well to this day — but did Quayle ever say he was a “Jack Kennedy”? Did he really intend to compare himself to Kennedy, or was he using Kennedy merely as an example that one’s age doesn’t necessarily determine one’s qualifications?  Clearly the latter!  However, Bentsen, the consummate debater, was able to create a false image of his opponent’s remarks, and knocked them over with ease.

More later!