Poisoning the well

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This article is about the informal fallacy. For other uses, see Poisoning the well (disambiguation).

Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say. Poisoning the well can be a special case of argumentum ad hominem, and the term was first used in this sense by John Henry Newman in his work Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864).[1][2]

Structure

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Poisoning the well can take the form of an (explicit or implied) argument, and is considered by some philosophers an informal fallacy.[1]

A poisoned-well "argument" has the following form:

  1. Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented by another. Example: "Before you listen to my opponent, may I remind you that he has been in jail."
  2. Therefore, the claims made by person A will be false.[3]

Poisoned-well arguments are sometimes used with preemptive invocations of the association fallacy. In this pattern, an unfavorable attribute is ascribed to any future opponents,[4] in an attempt to discourage debate. For example, "That's my stance on funding the public education system, and anyone who disagrees with me hates children." Any person who steps forward to dispute the claim will then risk applying the tag to themselves in the process. This is a false dilemma: not all future opponents necessarily have the unfavorable attribute. For example, not everyone who has a different opinion on funding the public education system necessarily hates children.

A poisoned-well "argument" can also be in this form:[5]

  1. Unfavorable definitions (be it true or false) that prevent disagreement (or enforce affirmative position).
  2. Any claims without first agreeing with the above definitions are automatically dismissed.

Example: "Boss, you heard my side of the story, and why I think Bill should be fired and not me. Now, I am sure Bill is going to come to you with some pathetic attempt to weasel out of this lie that he has created."

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Walton, Douglas N. (1987). Informal Fallacies: Towards a Theory of Argument Criticisms. Pragmatics & beyond companion series. Vol. 4. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. p. 218. ISBN 1556190107. OCLC 14586031. See also: "Newman Reader – Apologia (1865) – Preface". newmanreader.org.
  2. ^ Newman uses the phrase "poisoning the wells":

    ... my present subject is Mr. Kingsley; what I insist upon here, now that I am bringing this portion of my discussion to a close, is this unmanly attempt of his, in his concluding pages, to cut the ground from under my feet;—to poison by anticipation the public mind against me, John Henry Newman, and to infuse into the imaginations of my readers, suspicion and mistrust of everything that I may say in reply to him. This I call poisoning the wells.

    (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, page 22)
  3. ^ Bennett, Bo. "Poisoning the Well". Logically Fallacious. Retrieved May 14, 2016.
  4. ^ "Poisoning the Well". FallacyCheck. Retrieved October 7, 2025.
  5. ^ Ruiz, Roberto (2018). "Poisoning the Well". Bad Arguments. pp. 196–200. doi:10.1002/9781119165811.ch40. ISBN 9781119165781. S2CID 189453536.