Argument from authority

An argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ad verecundiam or argumentum ad auctoritatem), also called an appeal to authority, is a type of argument which argues that because a person or group seen as having authority on an issue believes something about it, it is likely to be true.

Opinion on appeals to authority is divided, with some holding that it is a strong argument which "has a legitimate force", and others that it is weak or an outright fallacy holding that, as noted in the Medical Press and Circular, on a conflict of facts, "mere appeal to authority alone had better be avoided" and, as Carl Sagan wrote of arguments from authority:

One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

History

Historically, opinion on the appeal to authority has been divided as it is listed as a valid argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources.

John Locke, in his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was the first recorded to identify argumentum ad verecundiam as a specific category of argument. He noted that it can be misused by taking advantage of the "respect" and "submission" of the reader or listener to persuade them to accept the conclusion. Over time, logic textbooks started to adopt and change from Locke's terminology to refer more specifically to fallacious uses of the argument from authority. By the mid-twentieth century, it was common for logic textbooks to refer to the "Fallacy of appealing to authority," even while noting that "this method of argument is not always strictly fallacious."

In the Western rationalistic tradition and in early modern philosophy, appealing to authority was considered a logical fallacy.

More recently, logic textbooks have shifted to a less blanket approach to these arguments, now often referring to the fallacy as the "Argument from Unqualified Authority" or the "Argument from Unreliable Authority".

However, these are still not the only recognized forms of appeal to authority. For example, a 2012 guidebook on philosophical logic describes appeals to authority not merely as arguments from unqualified or unreliable authority, but as arguments from authority in general. In addition to appeals lacking evidence of the authority's reliability, the book states that arguments from authority are fallacious if there is a lack of "good evidence" that the authorities appealed to possess "adequate justification for their views."

And there are other recognized fallacious arguments from authority. Among them, the "Fallacies" entry by Bradley Dowden in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that "appealing to authority as a reason to believe something is fallacious ... when authorities disagree on this subject (except for the occasional lone wolf)" The "Fallacies" entry by Hans Hansen in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy similarly states that "when there is controversy, and authorities are divided, it is an error to base one’s view on the authority of just some of them." However, Hansen's entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not appear to share Dowden's exception regarding "lone wolf" dissenting authorities.

Appeal to non-authorities

Fallacious arguments from authority can also be the result of citing a non-authority as an authority or citing an expert on a conversational subject. A example of the fallacy of appealing to an authority in an unrelated field would be citing Albert Einstein as an authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics. The attributed authority might not even welcome their citation, as with the "More Doctors Smoke Camels" ad campaign, which illustrates how the fallacy occurs in accepting his an authority's opinion alone without considering the evidence.

It is also a fallacious ad hominem argument to argue that a person presenting statements lacks authority and thus their arguments do not need to be considered. As appeals to a perceived lack of authority, these types of argument are fallacious for much the same reasons as some uses of an appeal to authority.

Other related fallacious arguments assume that a person without status or authority is inherently reliable. For instance, the appeal to poverty is the fallacy of thinking that someone is more likely to be correct because they are poor. When an argument holds that a conclusion is likely to be true precisely because the one who holds or is presenting it lacks authority, it is a fallacious appeal to the common man.

Examples

Inaccurate chromosome number

In 1923, leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made, that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s to the 1950s, this continued to be held based on Painter's authority, despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23. Even textbooks with photos showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24 based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.

This seemingly established number created confirmation bias among researchers, and "most cytologists, expecting to detect Painter's number, virtually always did so". Painter's "influence was so great that many scientists preferred to believe his count over the actual evidence", to the point that "textbooks from the time carried photographs showing twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and yet the caption would say there were twenty-four". Scientists who obtained the accurate number modified or discarded their data to agree with Painter's count.

Psychological basis

An integral part of the appeal to authority is the cognitive bias known as the Asch effect. In repeated and modified instances of the Asch conformity experiments, it was found that high-status individuals create a stronger likelihood of a subject agreeing with an obviously false conclusion, despite the subject normally being able to clearly see that the answer was incorrect.

Further, humans have been shown to feel strong emotional pressure to conform to authorities and majority positions. A repeat of the experiments by another group of researchers found that "Participants reported considerable distress under the group pressure", with 59% conforming at least once and agreeing with the clearly incorrect answer, whereas the incorrect answer was much more rarely given when no such pressures were present.

Scholars have noted that the academic environment produces a nearly ideal situation for these processes to take hold, and they can affect entire academic disciplines, giving rise to groupthink. One paper about the philosophy of mathematics for example notes that, within mathematics,

If...a person accepts our discipline, and goes through two or three years of graduate study in mathematics, he absorbs our way of thinking, and is no longer the critical outsider he once was...If the student is unable to absorb our way of thinking, we flunk him out, of course. If he gets through our obstacle course and then decides that our arguments are unclear or incorrect, we dismiss him as a crank, crackpot, or misfit.

See also

• Authority bias
• Credentialism
• Ipse dixit
• Manifesto of the Ninety-Three
• Name-dropping
• Philosophical problems of testimony
• Woozle Effect
• Milgram experiment

External links

• The dictionary definition of ad verecundiam at Wiktionary