So what they're saying is that an appeal to authority is not fallacious, as long as you commit a bandwagon fallacy instead.
What a psyop. This isn't logic; it's propaganda.
Quick refresher on the scientific method: Science is never "settled". That's not how science works. For one thing, those "experts" are humans, and humans are fallible. Full stop. There is ALWAYS room for doubt.
If the last four years have taught us anything, it's that "experts" are just as susceptible to jumping on bandwagons as normal people - more, once you factor in the certification boards that take away the livelihoods of the ones who question the "settled" science.
An appeal to authority occurs when someone backs up an argument by saying *who* agrees with it, rather than *why* it should be so. This is a fallacy, in the formal logic sense. This doesn't mean the argument isn't true; just that it isn't proof. There are no exceptions just because you really really want to believe the authority.
>If the last four years have taught us anything, it's that "experts" are just as susceptible to jumping on bandwagons as normal people - more, once you factor in the certification boards that take away the livelihoods of the ones who question the "settled" science.
You missed #RKIFiles it seems.
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great topic for discussion. I think you're correct but don't we often not want to understand enough details to know whether something is actually true or not? maybe there's lots of possible factors or relevant documents we don't know about. maybe there's a time crunch. or it's about an event only a few people have direct knowledge of. then given constraints, we'd rather at least know what most experts think. people are busy & distracted. that's more our problem than stupidity or malice.
@ryan
Right, so appeal to (legitimate) authority is indeed a FORMAL logical fallacy, but is acceptible in a statistical informal argument.
That's why citations can carry weight in a scientific paper.
You are not saying that P is necessarily true because refs A, B, C by known experts or peer-reviewed papers say so, but you ARE saying that P is more likely to be true than the null hypothesis of what Joe Schmo and his mates say
@ryan
When trying to learn about logical fallacies I found that basically all modern literature on it commits this mistake. The definition of one fallacy involves committing another. Its best to go back as far as possible to the early logicians. Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" introduces about a dozen of them, other great thinkers add to them over the centuries. But get too modern, and it gets sloppy as they become the tools of scientism and politics.
We don't know general and special relativity are true because Albert Einstein came up with them and we know Albert Einstein is really smart. We know they're true because the model he created explained gaps we already had in our understanding of Newtonian physics. And he wasn't right on all things, he was wrong on a lot of quantum mechanics, so being an expert who is really smart obviously didn't make him correct all the time. At the end of the day, reality is what chooses who is correct in science, not authority.
For an example of authorities who were consensus but were also wrong, the ancient Greeks were held as high authorities on many topics and they drove the consensus, and many of the theories they presented were simply wrong -- bile theory in medicine, elemental theory in the composition of matter, many other things, they were factually incorrect and led people down the wrong path, but because they were so respected their ancient analysis was the consensus.
Epistemologically there are limits to what can be known in general, but appeals to authority can cloud this reality. "Oh, an expert said it is true, they must know" -- but a lot of things we can't know for certain until the future comes and we can see what predictions comes true and which do not.
In the media, there's actually a surprising number of times that a "doctor" says something, and later it turns out that person was a chiropractic "doctor" (something that takes a couple years study at a private institution to become and is not a licensed medical doctor) -- and so the "expert" isn't one and is just saying something the media agrees with but isn't necessarily true.