Poisoning the well
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Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a type of informal logical fallacy where irrelevant adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything 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 with this sense by John Henry Newman in his work Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864).
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See also
- Anchoring
- Appeal to ridicule
- Black propaganda
- Framing (social sciences)
- Fruit of the poisonous tree
- Guilt by association
- Procatalepsis
- Scorched earth (Militarily doctrine involving literal well poisoning)
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