Look at what is being said not who is saying it

Question

I have problem understanding this Arab Proverb:

Look at what is being said not who is saying it.

another version:

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

I have googled to find arguments about it but there is no one with good reasoning behind it. The reverse makes sense in many cases to me although that is not always true.

Simply the emphasize is on the content rather than context in that quote while the reverse comes handy in some cases.

Is it a known philosophical argument? Is there any strong debate on this topic?

Answer 1

This sentiment is analyzable by studying three specific fallacies:

Argument from authority

Argument ad populum

Ad hominem

The first fallacy is an example of "examining the person instead of their argument" because it makes an appeal to the authority of somebody without actually analyzing the words they are saying. An example would be a chemist telling you that hydrogen bonds are an example of covalent bonding. This is false and believing the chemist purely based off of their status as a chemist would be fallacious. The truth of the statement is not determined by the person's job or education level; the truth of the statement is determined by the facts of the situation. This means you should not evaluate them as a person, instead you should evaluate their words (their argument).

The second fallacy is an support of the proverb because it makes an appeal to popular consensus. For this example, imagine that the year is 300 B.C.E. The example would be: "many people believe that the Sun orbits the Earth, therefore the Sun orbits the Earth." This is a fallacy because it is an appeal to the amount of people that believe a statement instead of the actual facts relating to the statement. The reasoning goes like this: Many people believe this, it would be improbably for a large amount of people to believe something false, therefore it must be true. You can see that this argument has nothing to do with the actual statement, it is merely an appeal to the large amount of people that believe it. It supports the proverb because it shows the fallacious nature of only looking at the amount of people speaking and not at their actual words.

Finally, the third fallacy supports the proverb because it shows the irrelevance of attacking a person instead of their argument. Suppose that Alice and Bob are having a discussion about which flavor of ice cream is the best and Alice says chocolate. If Bob then replies "Well, you voted for Nixon so what do you know?" that would be an example of an ad hominem fallacy. The truth, or merit, of whether or not chocolate is the best ice cream has nothing to do with whom Alice voted for. Bob is trying to show that Alice's opinion cannot be trusted because she made a poor decision in the past but, again, this is irrelevant to the topic at hand. It is not impossible for someone who showed poor judgement once to show good judgement later and whom Alice voted for has nothing to do with the qualitative values of flavors of ice cream.

See also: genetic fallacy

Answer 2

I think the answer you're looking for is the distinction between argumentum ad auctoritatem and argumentum ad verecundiam. Both are arguments from, or appeals to, authority but the first is valid inductive reasoning in the sense that one might say the argument is more likely to be right because of the particular characteristics of the person. The logic does not need to apply only to authority, it could be that the person is known to be clever and so their reasoning is more likely to result in a sound theory than others.

The second form is invalid in that it is the type of reasoning that supposes (incorrectly) that authority transfers across disciplines (presuming a expert mathematician is more likely to be an authority on biology, for example).

The debate on the topic, as far as I'm aware, is not largely philosophical, but practical. knowing that in some cases it is valid to reason that an expert is more likely to be right than a lay person does not itself provide you with the crucial parameters need to make any decision about whom to trust - namely; how much more likely (needed when the expert is saying something implausible and the laymen something much more credible), and what factors to agree define and "expert".

I suspect the preponderance of sayings emphasising the need to examine the content of a pronouncement rather than its orator is largely to do with the fact that the opposite is the pragmatic status quo most of the time. We simply don't have time to personally examine the veracity of every statement and so have to engage with the process of trusting it or not on the basis of who said it.