Isnât 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 âad hominemâ (among many other fallacies):
As a deductive /â 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 isnât ad hominem in this sense, because it doesnât say that correctness (or incorrectness) logically follows from the characteristics of the speaker, just that theyâre correlated.
An inductive /â correlational principle: an ad hominem argument is one which uses characteristics of the speaker to make probabilistic guesses /â inform a prior on the validity of their speech. But in this form Iâd argue it just isnât fallacious: in terms of getting the right answer most often, it is in fact useful to incorporate your knowledge of someoneâs 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 youâre 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),
My take on this is inspired by the Fallacy Fork, which is to say that there are two ways in which we can understand âad hominemâ (among many other fallacies):
As a deductive /â 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 isnât ad hominem in this sense, because it doesnât say that correctness (or incorrectness) logically follows from the characteristics of the speaker, just that theyâre correlated.
An inductive /â correlational principle: an ad hominem argument is one which uses characteristics of the speaker to make probabilistic guesses /â inform a prior on the validity of their speech. But in this form Iâd argue it just isnât fallacious: in terms of getting the right answer most often, it is in fact useful to incorporate your knowledge of someoneâs 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 youâre 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 havenât thought of
The Fallacy Fork was an amazing read. Thanks for the pointer!