Poisoning the Well
Roberto Ruiz
Trump Running Against Crooked Media Supporting Crooked Hillary.
Headline from the American Thinker blog site (August, 2016)
Poisoning the well (PTW) is a form of ad hominem attack - one directed against a person rather than the person’s argument.
Unlike other forms of ad hominem varieties - such as direct (see Chapter 10), circumstantial (see Chapter 9), and tu quoque (see Chapter 11) - which are usually a response to an interlocutor’s claims, PTW occurs when we illegitimately prime our audience with a pre-emptive strike against, or with adverse information about, an argumentative opponent before the latter has had a chance to say anything in her own defense, or in defense of her point of view. This has the insidious effect of creating a conceptual framework according to which the audience - and maybe even the interlocutor herself - will interpret her claims as ‘fulfilling’ and ‘confirming’ the presumptions buried inside this conceptual trap. Consider the following exchange between Dilbert and his neighborhood’s garbage man:Dilbert: How much wearable tech can I use before I’m technically a
cyborg?
Garbage man: It doesn’t matter because you’re a software simulation created by humans who perished after the technological singularity. And you’re programmed to scoff at what I just said.
Dilbert: Crazy old coot. (Adams 2014).
Notice that what the garbage man says in response to Dilbert’s question is quite absurd, but before Dilbert gets a chance to say anything - or to scoff at such a ridiculous statement - the garbage man anticipates Dilbert’s likely dismissal of his claim, and frames the issue in such a way that Dilbert’s scoff is now made to look like ‘confirmation’ of the ‘truth’ of his sci-fi claim. The problem, of course, is that Dilbert’s response is actually quite sensible! But the garbage man’s clever - if unfair - framing has rigged the rules of the game in his favor.
Or consider that time when, during a hunting trip, former Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington in the face. A famous cartoon by Glenn McCoy depicts Cheney still holding on to his shotgun, smoke coming out of the barrel, and Whittington lying on the ground, legs up. The caption shows Cheney’s response to this tragedy: “Just watch,” he tells the Secret Service agent standing behind him, “the press is going to try to put some negative spin on this!” (McCoy 2006).
Despite much evidence to the contrary, conservative politicians in the United States often claim that there is a “liberal mainstream media” bias against them. This frame comes in very handy, particularly during embarrassing moments, such as when political candidates are asked such tough ‘gotcha’ questions as: “What newspapers and magazines do you regularly read?” In the example above, Cheney masterfully utilizes PTW: he has shot his friend in the face, which is clearly a negative thing, but before anyone gets a chance to report on the story, he cleverly invokes the liberalmainstream-media-bias frame in a way that will ultimately ‘confirm’ his original self-victimization once the story is reported. The problem, of course, is that it is just not possible to frame this story in a positive light. As a master politician, though, the Cheney in the cartoon knew precisely how to use this inescapable situation to his advantage. Incidentally, and in an epilogue that’s probably unrelated to the well-poisoning, Whittington eventually went on national television and apologized to Cheney (and not the other way around!) for the emotional trauma that Cheney must have gone through in the aftermath of having shot Whittington in the face. As it turns out, Cheney may have been the first Sith Lord to preside over the United States of America.
The phrase “poisoning the well” seems to trace back to the egregious medieval European myth that claimed that Jews secretly poisoned wells and drinking fountains used by Christians.
If an epidemic or plague hit a town, whether real or imagined, the least tolerant among the locals - and often the most vociferous - would start accusing Jews of having poisoned the water supply upon which the town depended. This lame attempt at a self-fulfilling and post hoc ‘explanation’ was then felt to justify feelings of anti-Semitism and paranoia, as well as any subsequent violence and injustices perpetrated against Jews.Though PTW is usually understood merely as an ad hominem fallacy, this etymological story regarding self-sustaining and irrefutable ‘explanations’ illustrates an additional and more general concept studied primarily in the philosophy of science which was first articulated and popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper: falsifiability. Popper was interested in the demarcation problem: the question of how to determine the difference between legitimate science and pseudoscience. According to the problem of induction - a problem posed in the eighteenth century by the Scottish philosopher David Hume - nothing short of an infinite amount of evidence can prove the truth of a scientific hypothesis. Popper’s attempt to solve Hume’s problem was to observe that while no scientific theories could be proven true, a single observation that contradicts the predictions of a scientific hypothesis can, in principle, disprove it. By contrast, Popper thought, pseudoscientific hypotheses are unfalsifiable (or disprovable). They are so flexible that they can be made to be consistent with any and all possible observations.
One of Popper’s targets of attack was Freudian psychoanalysis: claims regarding repressed memories, latent oedipal feelings, subconscious denial, wish fulfillment, castration anxiety, penis envy, and others, can be used to ‘explain’ virtually all possible forms of human behavior and psychology. If you’re having a hard time adjusting to the current circumstances surrounding your life, for instance, your therapist might tell you that maybe your mom didn’t love you enough as a child, or that maybe she showed you too much affection, or that maybe there was some traumatic and life-altering experience that you have repressed deep into your subconscious mind and that you can’t remember, or that maybe you’re subconsciously denying your latent homosexual desires, or that you never quite successfully outgrew the anal stage of childhood development, or, if you deny any of this, maybe you’re just in denial about the truth of who you really are. The problem, Popper thought, is that this kind of unrestrained flexibility renders such hypotheses completely useless.
According to Popper, the problem is not that pseudoscientific claims are false (for all we know, they might even be true!). The problem is that it is impossible to test and know whether such claims are true or false, right or wrong. And since the purpose of science is to generate knowledge, philosophers of science usually refer to unfalsifiable claims as being so conceptually problematic and methodologically useless that they are “not even wrong.”Other common examples of such epistemically useless claims usually include those with a supernatural component to them, such as:
Teleology or intentionality as applied to inanimate matter: “Everything happens for a reason.”
Karma: “What goes around comes around.” Theodicy: “God works in mysterious ways.”
Mind-body dualism: “The soul is not limited by the constraints of the physical world.”
Reincarnation: “My name is John. In a past life, I was Marie Antoinette, and before that, Cleopatra.”
Answered prayers: “Thank you, Jesus, for giving me something indistinguishable from coincidence.”
Unanswered prayers: “Your baby is dead. It must be God’s will.” The “law of attraction”: “Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can” (Byrne 2006).
Religious experience: “I have been touched by the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly appendage, and I have felt the power of his balls!”
Near-death experiences: “I died temporarily and got a glimpse of heaven and the angels.”
Divine judgment: “Can you prove that Hurricane Katrina didn’t strike a hurricane-prone area during hurricane season as a punishment for homosexuality?”
Popper’s criterion of falsifiability has been challenged by philosophers as not producing a fully adequate basis for teasing science and pseudoscience apart. Nevertheless, most of the time it is still quite a useful tool and one that can help us gain a firmer understanding of PTW. One thing you’ll notice, if you look back to the Dilbert and Cheney examples above, is that in addition to being instances of ad hominem attacks, they are also framed as unfalsifiable statements - purposely designed to be irrefutable - which is ultimately what makes them appear more respectable and legitimate than they actually are.
Unfortunately, this is not merely an abstract and academic philosophical problem. The combination of unfalsifiable accusations and the ad hominem pre-emptive strike typical of PTW has been used throughout history to justify some truly horrific practices. Consider the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials: when a person (usually a woman) was accused of witchcraft, a comprehensive and self-fulfilling system of processes of investigation and interpretation of evidence guaranteed the accused, even if innocent, would be found guilty. What kind of evidence might be used to condemn you of witchcraft? So-called Devil’s marks: scars, birthmarks, moles, blemishes, boils, pimples, tumors, rashes, and so on. If you happened to have clear skin, ‘invisible marks’ - often identified by ‘prickers’ who worked on the equivalent of sales commission, and who consequently had a pecuniary interest in finding blemishes even when they just weren’t there - could do the job just as well. ‘Confessions’ procured through the brutality of torture were also deemed legitimate standard practice. If some pious soul somehow still refused to confess even under torture, the very act of denying involvement in witchcraft was interpreted as presumptive proof of her guilt, since according to this self-fulfilling reasoning whose conceptual well was poisoned from the outset, no real witch would have an interest in admitting to being a witch. At this point a final ‘test’ would be undertaken: since it was believed that Holy Water would reject the Devil’s minions, the accused would be tied up and thrown into a nearby river or lake. If she somehow managed to float, this would be interpreted as proof of her guilt, at which point she would be sentenced to be hanged or burnt at the stake. If she didn’t float, this might finally be interpreted as reason to suspect she might not be guilty after all, but it would be too late for her, since she would now have drowned and died. In short, because of the way these procedures and modes of interpretation were framed, once you were accused of witchcraft, any and all evidence, including your own denial of guilt or a watertight alibi, could always be twisted to support the accusations made against you.
Such a system was further reinforced by the coercive fact that anyone who dared to question the legitimacy of these practices was automatically accused of being an enemy of the Church, and hence of committing a mortal sin for which the punishment was torture and death (Sagan and Druyan 1997).Though extending the meaning of PTW (from its traditional role as a mere ad hominem attack to the more general problem of dealing with unfalsifiable statements) could result in a loss of specificity, I propose we start using the term poisoning the well - regardless of whether such statements also happen to include ad hominem attacks - to denote a person’s use of sneaky unfalsifi- able statements, which cannot be rationally or empirically substantiated, and which therefore do not even merit a refutation.
References
Adams, Scott. 2014. “Dilbert Comic Strip for Friday May 16, 2014.” Dilbert Comic Strip, May 16. http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-05-16 (accessed September 28, 2017).
Byrne, Rhonda. 2006. The Secret. New York, NY: Atria.
McCoy, Glenn. 2006. “GoComics for Monday February 13, 2006.” GoComics, February 13. http://www.gocomics.com/glennmccoy/2006/02/13 (accessed September 28, 2017).
Sagan, Carl, and Ann Druyan. 1997. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. London: Ballantine.