On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Charles Brown wrote:
> CB: What you say is true. However, the problem is there is no evidence of
> the status of social security funds that can be gotten from anything other
> than people. So, if those people lie or are biased, your available
> "evidence" might be false.
>
> Thus in court, a witness's biases , and thus motives,are pertinent in
> judging the reliability of her testimony. It is not an _ad hominem_ fallacy
> to present evidence of a witness's bias, i.e. motives.
Fortunately for all of us, the world isn't a courtroom. The passage above implies that human knowledge is the product of single individuals whose claims are not tainted by motives or biases. I think it's more useful to acknowledge that human knowledge is a product of social relations and social organizations. For instance, I can trust a climatologist's claim about global warming because their work has undergone intense scrutiny by well educated peers. Knowing anything at all about the motives of the climatologist is beside the point.
Miles