STIRRING UP PREJUDICE

Prejudice is an opinion held without reasonable grounds: it takes the form of a decided preference for something or aversion to it. One man may favor foreign aid, luxury taxes, or nonrepresenta-tional art; another may firmly oppose the very same things. An appeal to prejudice shrewdly represents a position as coinciding with whichever bias the speaker supposes to prevail in his audience. Such an appeal is evidently different from an examination of the merits of a given proposal -- or even of general tendencies and policies relating to the proposal.

It is often presumed that the strongest bias an audience has is toward its own interests, especially its economic and social inter-ests. Correspondingly, whatever threatens the audiences self-interest is a likely area of negative prejudice. Clever speakers take advantage of this -- and of their audience -- to exploit greed or snobbery or fear. But clever audiences learn to discount ad populum and ad hominem appeals and to pay attention to the arguments ad rem, if any. Ad yoyulum means "to the people," and refers to stirring up group prejudices: ad hominem means "to the man," and refers to appeals to these same prejudices usually by the round-about method of personal attack on the character or motives of an opponent. These Latin terms show how long these fallacies have been recognized; a naive person might be surprised we still have them with us. The remaining expression ad rent means argument "to the issue," and refers to those unadorned arguments that stick to it.