My presumption was that person A thinks bad things about class of people D, which B may or may not belong to and is worried that B belongs to, but when others think of D they don’t think of B, so C’s opinion of B seems unlikely to change. If people assume B is in D, then that would be different (although likely still far less bad than it would feel like it was).
There seems to be a common thing where statements about a class of people D, will associate person B with class D by re-centering the category of D towards including B, even if it’s obvious that the original statement doesn’t refer to B. This seems like the kind of a case where that effect could plausibly apply (here, in case it’s not clear, B is a reasonable critic and D is the class of unreasonable critics).
My presumption was that person A thinks bad things about class of people D, which B may or may not belong to and is worried that B belongs to, but when others think of D they don’t think of B, so C’s opinion of B seems unlikely to change. If people assume B is in D, then that would be different (although likely still far less bad than it would feel like it was).
There seems to be a common thing where statements about a class of people D, will associate person B with class D by re-centering the category of D towards including B, even if it’s obvious that the original statement doesn’t refer to B. This seems like the kind of a case where that effect could plausibly apply (here, in case it’s not clear, B is a reasonable critic and D is the class of unreasonable critics).