Humans often pride themselves on their individuality, on their standing “apart from the crowd, and on their self-professed superiority to the unwashed masses of humanity. Humans are, however, quite common and predictable in their behaviors, especially when it comes to aversions and phobias.
There are phobias of things, with spiders, snakes, germs, clowns, dogs, and dolls making the top 20 list.
There are phobias of situations, with heights, closed spaces, open spaces, public speaking, and flying being among the most common.
Then there are the social phobias and aversions. Among these is the fear of embarrassment, negative judgment, or looking foolish, often referred to as social anxiety phobia/disorder. It typically takes a very strong, seasoned and confident personality to stand immune to this, and it typically takes decades to cultivate such a personality.
The ubiquity of this phobia enables those who aren’t averse to playing dirty a great tool with which to give themselves advantage in arguments and debates. It’s commonly used in a “guilt by association” format, where a person’s reasoned but unpopular position on some science-related topic is attacked with declarations that anyone who believes in X also, obviously, believes in a laundry list of quackery.
My favorite example is global warming. As of today, based on all I’ve read (and that’s a pretty long list), I’d call myself a lukewarmist. This is, of course, a controversial position to take today, and it may very well be wrong. Time and more research will tell, and if new information comes to light, I’m not averse to moving my opinion with it. I’m not alone in this interpretation of the current state of things. Argumentum ad populum is, however, a fallacy whether one is a denier, lukewarmist or alarmist, and I won’t assert it as a justification for my position. I will note that there are legitimate scientific reasons to come to the lukewarmism conclusion, not the least of which is the failure of the predictive models and the “hiatus”, and this reality puts global warming into a category of theories about which we can have reasoned debate and disagreement.
If you offer up lukewarmism as an interpretation of the current state of things, however, there are people who will conflate your ‘denial of the irrefutable reality of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’ with belief that the Earth is flat, that it’s 6000 years old, that astrology is real, that homeopathic medicine works, that vaccines cause autism, that crystals can heal your cancer, that the government is engaging in mind control via chemtrails and fluoridated water, and all sorts of other quackery.
The goal in this is to embarrass you into recanting your legitimate conclusions, of course, by playing on your social anxiety. It’s also a deflection, meant to turn the focus of discussion away from global warming or whatever you’re talking about and onto you personally. Instead of arguing your point with the facts you have at hand, you’ll find yourself defending against accusations of ignorance, stupidity, willful blindness, or conspiring with the selfish and evil destroyers of Mother Earth. Even if you successfully deny belief in all those things, the effect of associating the topic of the moment with all that hogwash will have had its effect on third party observers.
Such a debating tactics is, of course, fallacious. One doesn’t refute an idea by declaring that the idea’s supporter also believes in a laundry list of quackeries, especially if he doesn’t.
Thus, I’d like to add to the lexicon Argumentum Ad Quackulum, or the logical fallacy of refuting someone’s rationally-derived belief by asserting he must also believe in nonsensical pseudoscientific “theories” and conspiracy theories that have no connection to reality.
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Argumentum Ad Quackulum is only the latest logical fallacy to be identified. It’s long overdue, since it’s a favorite tool of the left now. It has used it repeatedly against me and others whenever there’s legitimate scientific doubt as a way of getting me to withdraw my argument. Of course, it goes right along with “the science is settled”, which I’d call Argumentum Ad Finitum, which doesn’t actually answer the argument but declares effectively that there *can be* no argument.