Genetic Fallacy: Difference between revisions

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* The outright rejection of a factual claim because the source of the claim is known to be unreliable. A man who suffers from frequent hallucinations could not be relied upon to always accurately report observations of the physical world, to be sure. But to immediately classify ''all'' his observations and testimony as false ''by definition'' is a classic instance of this fallacy, and ignores what might be called "The Stopped Clock Principle": even a broken clock is correct twice a day. The man may not have been hallucinating when he made the observation, or even if he did hallucinate, the claim may still be true. It is necessary to investigate his claims to avoid the fallacy.

* A tragic real-world example would be Dr. Peter Duesberg. An oncologist at UC Berkeley, he became best known for claiming in 1987 that HIV did not cause AIDS, but rather that AIDS was the result of recreational and or/antiretroviral drug use, with HIV being only a "harmless" passenger virus. Outrage predictably followed, and Duesberg quickly fell from grace. Worse, this view had a major influence on South African President Thabo Mbeki, who failed to provide antiretroviral drugs to AIDS victims (Duesberg claimed such drugs in fact caused AIDS rather than treating it), resulting in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. However...Duesberg had discovered a gene that helps cause cancer in 1970, which he continued to conduct research on in the intervening years, including when he was involved with the AIDS controversy. As he was so ostracized and discredited, most of his research was not even read. [https://web.archive.org/web/20120921023535/http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-pariahs-have-good-ideas Ironically, it has potential to save millions of more lives than the deaths his AIDS denialism contributed to]. He demonstrates both sides of the fallacy, as many people believed his AIDS denialist theory due to his scientific credentials, while conversely other scientists did not read his work due to that very theory.

 

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[[Category:Logical Fallacies]]