I identify as an anti-credentialist in the sense that I believe ideas can (under ideal circumstances) be considered on merit alone, regardless of how unreliable or bad the source of the idea is. Isn’t credentialism basically a form of ad hominem attack?
Isn’t credentialism basically a form of ad hominem attack?
My take on this is inspired by the Fallacy Fork, which is to say that there are two ways in which we can understand “ad hominem” (among many other fallacies):
As a deductive / formal logic principle: an ad hominem argument is to say that because of some fact about the identity of the arguer, we can logically deduce their argument is invalid. This is obviously wrong, but credentialism isn’t ad hominem in this sense, because it doesn’t say that correctness (or incorrectness) logically follows from the characteristics of the speaker, just that they’re correlated.
An inductive / correlational principle: an ad hominem argument is one which uses characteristics of the speaker to make probabilistic guesses / inform a prior on the validity of their speech. But in this form I’d argue it just isn’t fallacious: in terms of getting the right answer most often, it is in fact useful to incorporate your knowledge of someone’s background into your best guess of whether their ideas are good.
There are still some reasons to avoid credentialism or ad hominem for reasons other than maximising the truth of the claim you’re considering:
You might have e.g. fairness intuitions that are willing to compromise on accuracy in this case in order to promote some other virtue that you value,
You might think that people systematically either update too strongly on credentials, or update on them in an incorrect way, and you therefore think that you best contribute to overall healthy truth-seeking by prioritising the things that other people have missed by doing this (this might even argue for being credential-hostile rather than merely credential-neutral),
The point of credentialism is that the ideal circumstances for an individual to evaluate ideas don’t exist very often. Medical practitioners aren’t always right, and homeopaths or opinion bloggers aren’t always wrong, but bearing in mind that I’m seldom well enough versed in the background literature to make my own mind up, trusting the person with the solid credentials over the person with zero or quack credentials is likely to be the best heuristic in the absence of any solid information to the contrary
And yes, of course sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes the bar is completely arbitrary (the successful applicant will have some sort of degree from some sort of top 20 university) or the level of distinction irrelevant (his alma mater is more reputable than hers) and sometimes the credentials themselves are suspect
I identify as an anti-credentialist in the sense that I believe ideas can (under ideal circumstances) be considered on merit alone, regardless of how unreliable or bad the source of the idea is. Isn’t credentialism basically a form of ad hominem attack?
My take on this is inspired by the Fallacy Fork, which is to say that there are two ways in which we can understand “ad hominem” (among many other fallacies):
As a deductive / formal logic principle: an ad hominem argument is to say that because of some fact about the identity of the arguer, we can logically deduce their argument is invalid. This is obviously wrong, but credentialism isn’t ad hominem in this sense, because it doesn’t say that correctness (or incorrectness) logically follows from the characteristics of the speaker, just that they’re correlated.
An inductive / correlational principle: an ad hominem argument is one which uses characteristics of the speaker to make probabilistic guesses / inform a prior on the validity of their speech. But in this form I’d argue it just isn’t fallacious: in terms of getting the right answer most often, it is in fact useful to incorporate your knowledge of someone’s background into your best guess of whether their ideas are good.
There are still some reasons to avoid credentialism or ad hominem for reasons other than maximising the truth of the claim you’re considering:
You might have e.g. fairness intuitions that are willing to compromise on accuracy in this case in order to promote some other virtue that you value,
You might think that people systematically either update too strongly on credentials, or update on them in an incorrect way, and you therefore think that you best contribute to overall healthy truth-seeking by prioritising the things that other people have missed by doing this (this might even argue for being credential-hostile rather than merely credential-neutral),
idk probably other reasons I haven’t thought of
The Fallacy Fork was an amazing read. Thanks for the pointer!
The point of credentialism is that the ideal circumstances for an individual to evaluate ideas don’t exist very often. Medical practitioners aren’t always right, and homeopaths or opinion bloggers aren’t always wrong, but bearing in mind that I’m seldom well enough versed in the background literature to make my own mind up, trusting the person with the solid credentials over the person with zero or quack credentials is likely to be the best heuristic in the absence of any solid information to the contrary
And yes, of course sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes the bar is completely arbitrary (the successful applicant will have some sort of degree from some sort of top 20 university) or the level of distinction irrelevant (his alma mater is more reputable than hers) and sometimes the credentials themselves are suspect