Thread by @FeserEdward

1/10 Here’s another case of someone actually trying to defend the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy (also known as the appeal to motive). It’s a fine example of irrationality masquerading as sophistication, containing several errors worth unpacking.

2/10 Notice first that, like so many other kinds of fallacious reasoning, it can easily be turned against the person who appeals to it. In particular, the tactic of claiming that others are guilty of motivated reasoning can *itself* be dismissed as a kind of motivated reasoning,

3/10 because the tactic allows one to feel superior to one’s opponents, and to dismiss their arguments a priori rather than having to do the hard work of evaluating them on the merits. Those who commit the circumstantial ad hominem are thus hoist on their own petard.

4/10 Second, note that this guy claims that one can “notice” suspect motives in another person that the person may not be aware of, and indeed can “intuit” them. But it is one thing to *claim* to know another’s hidden motives, and quite another thing *actually* to know them.

5/10 How are the “intuitions” in question any less subjective than other intuitions? Simply being able to *imagine* a motive that might have inspired a certain argument proves nothing, because one could do that for *every* argument that anyone’s ever given for any conclusion,

6/10 including the conclusions favored by the person accusing others of bad motives – once again putting him in a self-defeating position. A third problem is that even when we know that a person has some motive, it doesn’t follow that the person is not being objective.

7/10 For it’s possible both to be inclined to a certain POV and at the same time to take enough critical distance toward it to be able to evaluate arguments & evidence dispassionately. So, it’s no good to say “So-and-so has such-and-such a motive” and leave it at that.

8/10 You have to be able to *show* exactly how the motive in question undermined the integrity of the case he’s made. A fourth problem concerns this guy’s assertion that when someone accuses you of bad motives, “demonstrating they’re wrong is far from trivial.”

9/10 Well, sure it is, given that strictly to *demonstrate* this would require getting him to peer inside your mind, which is impossible. But this makes it sound like the burden of proof is on the person being accused of a bad motive. No, it’s on the person making the accusation.

10/10 Fifth & finally, though, even if you could demonstrate with metaphysical certainty that a person is hopelessly biased, that remains *completely irrelevant* to whether some *argument* he’s given is either sound or cogent. More on that in this thread:

https://twitter.com/FeserEdward/status/1667284436734590976?s=20