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 Authority:Social 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 face—interpretation 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 years—some of these may be morally significant.

5. Appeal to Authority: God (cont’d) • 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 one’s 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 opponent’s 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 counterexample—basically, 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 not—they 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 isn’t 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 story’s 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 don’t • Commonality and compromise are ways to overcome value dichotomies