Ad Fontem

The following is the seventh in a series of posts on teaching rhetoric.

Having explored the ethical ad hominem appeal to the character of a person or thing, we will now turn to a closely related appeal: ad fontem.

“ad fontem/to the source”: when the source of information is used as a reason for doing/not doing something.

As finite humans who are not omnipresent or omniscient, we must inevitably look to sources outside ourselves to inform our choices and decisions. When you think about it, much of what we claim to know in this life is not based on our personal experiences, but on the testimony of some other source that we find trustworthy and authoritative. So, given the fallibility (and sometimes maliciousness) of the human race, we must be judicious in selecting which information we will trust and which we will reject as we make decisions in our lives.

The name of this appeal is a natural metaphor that uses springs of water as a way of picturing forth where information comes from. When I was a boy living in the mountains of Asheville, my parents owned a piece of property with a small stream flowing through it. I once hiked up the mountain to find the small pool from which the stream bubbled forth, so I have this particular image in my mind for this appeal. The water at the source was pure and unsullied, but the further it flowed from the source, the more likely it was to be corrupted by dead animals, stagnation, or chemicals from runoff—hence more dangerous for drinking.

This image of a spring of water (and an arboreal variation of it) is used in the book of James: “Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree…bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both saltwater and fresh.” While this verse is describing the types of language that comes forth from a person’s mouth, it draws upon the same metaphor as our appeal: the source from whence you get something will tell you much about what you can expect to receive from it. As with all ethical appeals, this one looks to the source of information to determine whether or not that source is of a trustworthy character.

Here are some simple, everyday situations in which we can see someone choosing a course of action because he trusts in the source of the information presented to him. Remember that what one person deems a valid appeal to the source might be judged by another to be fallacious!

A child grows up believing that Santa Claus brings him presents each Christmas because that is what his parents told him was true. 

A person goes to see a movie because his friend with good taste in film recommended it.

A nation goes into lockdown, shutting down businesses and establishing social distancing because of the recommendations of public health officials.

A person votes for a particular political candidate because of what he has heard about them on the news channel that he watches.

A person buys a car from a particular manufacturer because the company has established a reputation for making quality, dependable vehicles. 

A student believes that the earth has a molten magma core because he saw a diagram of it in his science textbook.

A person buys a new music album without having previewed or listened to it because it is by his favorite band whose music he loves.

A person mistrusts the promises of a political candidate because the candidate has a long history of making and breaking promises. 

A person refuses to believe some slanderous information about someone he knows because the person who told it to him is a notorious liar and gossip. 

A person thinks the moon landing was a hoax because he believes that his government has a history of lying to its citizens to manipulate them.

A person frequents a particular food blog because its recipes are always so delicious.

A person believes in reincarnation because that is what his religious tradition teaches.

As we can see from these various examples, many of our choices about how to be in the world arise from the basic trust or mistrust we have in the source from which we are getting our information (or obtaining an object).

One important thing to consider here is that there are often exceptions to the rule. Just because someone/thing has established itself as a credible source does not necessarily mean it is infallible. This has led to the common phrase you may have heard before, “trust, but verify.” In some cases, we may have an established trust in a source, but that does not mean we should necessarily forgo any evaluation or investigation into the information we get from it. Humans and human institutions tend to change over time, so just because they may have established a trustworthy ethos in the past does not mean that they might not have been corrupted over time by greed, jealousy, ignorance, etc. We may be dismayed if we put a kind of blind faith in our sources to avoid doing the intellectual work necessary to ascertain the truth for ourselves. Though, in some cases, it may not be possible for us to verify the truth of a given situation, and must therefore make our judgements based solely on the veracity of the source.

A bigger, real-life example that I find interesting comes in the form of a slogan that became popular during the pandemic: “Trust the Science.” This powerful little phrase has a lot packed into it. “Science” is put forward as an authoritative, infallible source the likes of which might normally be considered religious in nature. Phrases like “Science says that…,” as if science is a univocal entity that can make authoritative statements, have become so common as to be mundane and obvious. This appeal to the ultimate authority of science doesn’t even need words sometimes—putting a person in a white lab coat and slapping some eye-protective goggles on them visually forms a subtle appeal to the source of science; the lab coat has become a kind of priestly vestment of the modern world, which advertisers, commercials, politicians, and many others have co-opted for their own benefit. “Statistics show,” “a new study finds,” and similar phrases indirectly make appeals to the source as if numbers and data are a kind of authority that draws its power from science. This sort of language is ultimately religious in nature, and one can hear similar sorts of ad fontem appeals from adherents of various religious traditions: “the Bible says,” “the prophet said,” etc. We all look to some source that we view as authoritative to fill in the gaps of our own finitude, and we all want to believe that our source can be trusted, even if everyone else’s is wrong. Thus, the ad fontem appeal reaches down into even the deepest areas of Faith.

Start looking in your own life for examples of ad fontem appeals and you may be surprised to find how common they are!

Next up: the “tu quo que” appeal!