Greetings again, fellow travelers!
Today’s edition of this ongoing series exploring logical fallacies examines “Poisoning the Well.” Let’s jump right in (pun intended) and get to it, eh? Oh, by the way, links to the previous installments of this series are linked at the bottom if you’ve missed any or come in late (I’m shooting for a twice weekly Wed & Fri publishing schedule, we’ll see if I can maintain that).
“Poisoning the Well” is a fallacy whereby a party is (often preemptively) attacked in order to discredit them to observers. Again, a very common fallacy used in politics (it’s amazing how many logical fallacies get committed in politics).
The fallacy essentially takes this form in most cases:
Person X is a bad person because Y.
Bad people are untrustworthy and shouldn’t be believed.
Therefore, Person X shouldn’t be believed.
Let’s look at a few examples:
“Mr. Smith is going to speak in a moment, and may I just remind you all that Mr. Smith has been in prison.”
This is an effort to poison the well by implying that, because Mr. Smith has been in prison, what he is about to say is therefore automatically suspect and untrustworthy. This, of course, is not a valid argument — Mr. Smith may have a perfectly sound point to make, and his having a criminal record has no bearing on the validity of his statements.
“Dr. Jones is in the pocket of Big Pharma. Don’t believe a word he says about vaccines, he’s just in it for the money.”
This argument attempts to discredit anything Dr. Jones says by implying that he’ll say anything, so long as there’s a paycheck in it for him. This, of course, is a serious accusation to make with no supporting evidence to back it up, and does not automatically invalidate what he says. If Dr. Jones advocates for getting vaccinated for example and this aligns with the greater body of medical knowledge and the opinion of the medical community, what he said in that statement is perfectly legit. Conspiracy theorists are fond of this type of attack, btw — claiming someone is a shill or “in the pocket” of some industry or person in order to imply they are simply spouting the talking points of whoever is supposedly paying them off.
Here are a couple of real-life examples that go beyond just a debating strategy:
In 2013, Microsoft implemented an ad campaign in which most of the ad time was spent attacking Google by implying that Google employees had access to users’ Gmail accounts. At the end of the ad, surprise! It turns out to be an ad for Microsoft Outlook. This was an attempt by Microsoft to “poison the well” for potential Google customers by implying that Google employees were browsing through everyone’s Gmail accounts in their spare time, and oh, hey, by the way, did we mention this alternative email app that we just happen to make!
As you can see from this example, “Poisoning the Well” has more applications that simply when two people are in an argument while an audience is listening.
“He was no angel. <Proceed with character assassination>”
How many times when a person of color is killed by police is it brought up that the victim had some kind of prior legal troubles, a criminal record, etc. that had absolutely no bearing on the incident in which they were killed? What may have happened well prior to the incident in their lives has no bearing on whether, for example, a police officer shot them while unarmed or knelt on their back or neck until they suffocated. But this is often used as an attempt to smear the victim preemptively to deflect attempts to hold police accountable for use of excessive force, poor judgement, etc. by implying that the victim somehow deserved what happened to them because of things (that may or may not even be true) they did in the past. In this case, it’s an oblique use of Poisoning the Well because it’s not an attack upon the person making an argument or statement to discredit them directly, but rather attacking the character of the victim that is subject of the discussion in order to discredit the person’s arguments in that way.
Poisoning the well, by the way, is a tactic sometimes used in court, when a lawyer may try to slide in some information about a defendant or a witness, or make an implication about them to discredit them in the eyes of the jury even if it has no bearing upon the legal proceedings at hand.
Tune in next time where I’ll talk about the No True Scotsman fallacy! Bring your kilt and pipes (but let’s skip the haggis)!
And as promised here are links to previous installments of the Logical Fallacies Bootcamp series:
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp: The Strawman
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp: The Slippery Slope
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp: Begging the Question