Where someone attempts to invalidate anything that’s problematic to their narrative and/or would trigger cognitive dissonance. Conspiracy theorists do this a lot, but so do your garden-variety bigot: when you’re outed as a drug addict, anyone can literally accuse you of anything, because no matter what you say or how stupid the accusation is, “junkies will do or say anything for dope,” “well of course junkies lie,” and “maybe you don’t remember because you were tweaking hard.”
You’re describing two separate problems there.
Attacking the person rather than their argument (“you would say that”, “you‘re a junkie”) is ad hominem, with its various subtypes.
As has already been pointed out, being selective about what you accept on the basis of pre-existing beliefs, cherry picking only what fits, is confirmation bias.
Although it may give onlookers a greater sense that you are the one who knows what they’re talking about, if you’re just trying to win an argument with someone like this, knowing either of these things is unlikely to be helpful. They’ll dismiss that as easily as anything else.
In addition to other comments, the first part
Where someone attempts to invalidate anything that’s problematic to their narrative and/or would trigger cognitive dissonance
is just plain ol’ confirmation bias
Poisoning the well
If there’s no actual connection to being an addict (particularly your middle example) that qualifies as an ad hominem, and if there is a connection (but that connection is not adequate justification, as it isn’t here) then it’s poisoning the well. But I agree with GotW’s conclusion that it’s all just bigotry, just “they’re an other, so whatever bad thing you can say about them must be valid”. I really think that framing, which you already articulated in your post, is really the pertinent thing to trying to explaining it to someone.
If I stole shit from someone once, that doesn’t mean that you can accuse me of setting your house on fire with no actual evidence, and what I’m saying isn’t less true even if we just accept that I’m a shitty person. I can’t make the sky less blue by claiming that it is blue after having murdered someone, nor would I be somehow prevented from rightly claiming that it is blue because murdering someone has somehow infected me with an inability to tell the truth (not that that’s in any way equivalent to being an addict, which is not a moral wrong, I’m just using an extreme case).
This is unimportant, but if you let those people explain themselves more, you could probably get most of them to make a “genetic fallacy”, which is essentially the inverse of what I was just saying, the assertion that testimony from someone/somewhere is invalidated by its source (which I guess is a superset to the two fallacies I initially listed), as though people you don’t like are incapable of saying correct things.
The term that comes to mind would be “reductionism” but it’s not really a fallacy, it’s more of a path of least resistance. Marxism could be accused of reductionism because everything is seen through the lens of class struggle. And tbh, fair enough, if you successfully understand the fundamental structure of something you can absolutely “reduce” everything to that and get a lot of things right.
However in the example you mentioned, the bigot is denying the complexity and agency of a person. It’s not about arguments anymore, because somebody is actively dehumanising somebody else and they found one weak point to justify it all. In this case they’re no debate to be had, either you can remind the bigot they are talking about someone with consciousness and agency or you tell them to fuck off and leave them in their sad little hateful life
I think that it’s unfair to view Marxism as reductionist in that manner, which is why we have the phrase “class reductionism,” though simultaneously it does get abused sometimes. Obviously Marx’s beliefs did not reflect such a thing, or else why would he have entrusted so much to Engels? There’s a huge difference between saying “X has a heavy systemic bias toward Y” versus “X is usually Y” versus “X is Y”. Reductionism is that last one, because the problem isn’t acknowledging that something is often but not always the case (it’s okay to have heuristics), it’s simplifying things to eliminate other factors and exceptions and so on.
I think you’re mostly right, there’s just a nuance between the “class reductionism” which is wrong because it means disregarding other struggles entirely and “historical materialism reduces History to class struggle” which shouldn’t be read as an insult to Marxist science
Thing is, we got to find an effective way of encompassing History to analyse it or we’re going to get lost in so many details it will lead to stagnation, it’s okay to use reduction in that case, it’s on board with the philosophy of action and change that characterize Marxism
For example, it’s not wrong to say “Marxism doesn’t account for how psychology affects History” but it’s also totally liberal wanking because we won’t achieve anything by psychoanalyzing every goddamn person in the world because taking any action
My point is, reductionism isn’t technically bad, it’s bad when you use it wrong
You don’t have to define it to be able to beat up the person who said it
/sLangelyDominos said “poisoning the well” and while I kind of agree, I think the fallacy is just straight up bigotry. Poisoning the well is defined as “presenting bad things about a person to discredit their argument” when there is no facts presented in your case. It’s literally just “Don’t listen to this person, they’re an other!” Of course there’s more nuance, but the key thing is that there’s stereotypes about your group, and they’re appealing to those stereotypes rather than the factual realities of your oppression. /srs
