Appeal to Authority

1
Appeal to Authority

• Appeal to someone as an authority in areas where
  they lack relevant expertise (either by appealing
  to someone with no recognizable expertise, or
  appealing to someone outside their area of
  expertise).
• Be on the lookout for experts that nevertheless
  have recognizable biases in the area in question.

2
Appeal to AuthoritySocial Norms, Customs, and
Law

• All of these may be vague or be in conflict with
  each other
• There is diversity both between and within
  cultures
• Any of these could be the product of bias,
  prejudice and preconceptions
• All of these are open to revision

3
Ad Populum Fallacy

• Appeal to mass belief, mass sentiment or mass
  commitment
• Fallacious because none of these are relevant to
  considering whether a claim is true
• False Consensus presentation of a controversial
  view as if it has received general consensus

4
Appeal to Authority God

• Diversity of available scripture, both between
  and within religious traditions
• Scripture does not always carry its meaning on
  its faceinterpretation is always involved.
  (This could include changes in the meaning of
  certain terms.) Even literalism is an
  interpretation.
• We tend to lift scriptural passages out of
  context if they say what we want.
• We tend to be selectively obedient to the
  passages that support what we already believe.
• There is evidence that scriptures have been
  editorially revised over the yearssome of these
  may be morally significant.

5
Appeal to Authority God (contd)

• Our western religious scriptures themselves have
  passages that present humans as co-creators and
  present arguing with God as legitimate.
• Appeals to God rely on a common, but
  questionable, idea about the relationship between
  God and humanity one of profound inequality that
  calls for obedience on our part.

6
Ad Hominem

• Literally against the man
• Replaces evaluation of ideas or evidence with a
  critique of some irrelevant characteristic of the
  person whose beliefs or evidence they are
• Ad Hominem Circumstantial group-based version of
  the ad Hominem
• Personal attacks are not fallacious if they are
  relevant to evaluating such things as the
  reliability of ones evidence

7
Straw Man

• Deliberate misrepresentation of an opposing
  viewpoint distorts or caricatures for ease of
  refutation
• Look for attributions of extreme views this is a
  red flag for a Straw Man
• Look for attributions of absurd views this is a
  red flag for a Straw Man
• Different from a Reductio argument, which tries
  to show that an opponents viewpoint leads to
  patently false or absurd conclusions

8
Hasty Generalization

• Hasty Generalizations occur when an inference is
  made from a small or atypical sample. Not all
  fallacious generalizations are HASTY
  generalizations.
• This results in a misrepresentation of the actual
  data
• Use of single case studies and single examples
  tends to lead to hasty generalizations

9
Availability Bias

• We tend to overestimate how likely an event is to
  occur based on how easy it is to recall to memory
• Events that are startling, emotionally evocative
  or otherwise salient will be recalled easier
• This helps to create hasty generalizations

10
Confirmation Bias

• Our tendency to search out confirming evidence
  and ignore possible disconfirming evidence
• Includes our tendency to treat disconfirming
  evidence more critically than confirming evidence
• This tends to reinforce hasty generalizations

11
Fallacy of Misleading Vividness

• Overlooking strong evidence due to a salient
  counterexamplebasically, rejecting a
  generalization on the basis of a small or
  atypical example
• statistics

12
Begging the Question (Circularity)

• Directly circular reasoning (Begging the
  Question) assumes what it is out to prove the
  evidence already assumes the truth of the
  conclusion
• Indirectly circular reasoning appeals to evidence
  that would only be accepted by those who are
  already in agreement with your conclusion the
  evidence is controversial but not treated as such
• Question-begging arguments are unsalvageable,
  indirectly circular arguments are notthey call
  for MORE argumentation

13
Slippery Slope

• Predictive story without supporting evidence, or
  where the only evidence is common sense
• Connections in the story are assumed, not
  demonstrated
• Can be progressive (if we just do X, all these
  great things will happen!) or gloom-and-doom (if
  we do X, the sky will fall!)
• Related to Golden Age Fallacy (things were so
  much better in the past) and Utopian Fallacy
  (things are so much better than they once were)

14
Slippery Slope continued

• Predictive stories are never more certain than
  their first step
• This is because with each additional step in the
  story that isnt CERTAIN, the likelihood that the
  whole story is true DECREASES
• The irony the features that make a slippery
  slope a good story undermine the likelihood of
  the storys truth

15
Bifurcation (aka False Dichotomy False Dilemma)

• Artificial limitation of options typically to 2
• Often linked to other fallacies
• Brainstorming as a way to overcome bifurcation
• Value Dichotomies WE value x, while THEY dont
• Commonality and compromise are ways to overcome
  value dichotomies