The nature of discourse and argument Part 2

           The point of today's post is common mistakes made in arguments.  Again the definition of argument I am using is the formal one, of putting forth reasons, not the common one of having a disagreement.  The two main types of mistakes made are having bad starting information, or premises, and making a bad inference or connection between two or more points of information, called fallacies. The end claims made in fallacious arguments are not always false, we are currently only going over evaluation of claims as given, and not setting up and understanding requirements for truth value when claims are either not given or lacking in some way.   With that in mind let's talk about a few common fallacies in a group called Appeals.     






Appeal To Authority

The appeal to authority is a move in claiming that something is true without presenting direct evidence and instead saying it is true because a given source (the Authority) says it is true.  This is the common parenting tactic of  "Because I said so"  and the religious claim of "Holy book X says so"  among many other examples. 

Appeal To the Crowd

The argumentum ad populum is a claim that because a certain large group or percentage of people believe something it is therefore true.  This is a special type of the above example, but is worth noting as separate because the 'authority' is not a single source but rather the perceptions of a large group.   Examples of this are looking to polls or votes on moral issues, and of course the idea of something being common sense. And the often mentioned argument about this or that source being more trusted because of it's popularity or ratings.

Appeal To Law

Another form of the appeal to authority, this time using existing laws and legal practices.   Anyone who has heard a lawyer joke should be able to see through this one. (Ad Hominim)

Appeal To Incredulity

This claim ranges from the very straight forward "I just can't believe that" to the more insidious "no-one could believe that."   It is the idea that an unwillingness to accept an idea is a good and justifiable reason to consider that idea false. Fortunately, just because you want or don't want something to be true doesn't make it so. 

Appeal To Probability

This seems to stem from a basic misunderstanding of statistics and probability, and cannot be easily resolved without education in that area.  The idea that because there is some chance of something happening, that thing must happen eventually.  The gambler's fallacy is a form or offshoot of this.  As is Murphy's Law of whatever can go wrong will go wrong.


Appeal To Emotion

The most common emotions appealed to are fear, flattery, spite, ridicule, pity, consequence, and wishful thinking. The common tact in most of the appeal to emotion cases is to get the listener to feel an emotional state and judge the value of something based on that emotion.   Because most forms of this are the same I will only discuss a few particular cases that are slightly different from what is described above;  The appeal to consequence is the idea of accepting an idea because the outcome, if it were true, would be favorable (or unfavorable in the case of a die hard pessimist). Wishful thinking is very much what it sounds like, believing something to be so because you would like it to be so or it would be pleasing (displeasing) to think it were so. At first, second and third glance this seems to be the same as the appeal to consequence, but it tends to be used to describe a more pervasive form of cognitive bias and behavior. 


Appeal To Tradition/To Novelty

These are two sides of the same coin.  Something is true or good because it is old (tradition) or new (novelty). The best summing up of the appeal to tradition that I have heard is "A million dead people can't be wrong"  and while I haven't heard a pithy version of the appeal to novelty something like "No one ever got this right before so here's my answer"  gives a decent sense of why it's wrong.  This is a subset of a different type of fallacy and cognitive bias called The False Dichotomy.  Another example of a false dichotomy that is still an appeal Natural/Unnatural something is good/bad because it is natural/man-made.  "It's all natural" and "This was made by cutting edge technology" when presented as reasons for something being good are making these appeals.   


Appeal to Ignorance

Ignorance  (which is a lack of knowledge or information on a subject) and it's admission are important for truth seekers.  This appeal, dismisses ignorance as a credible state or uses it as a wedge.  The basic form is as follows;  "You can't prove bigfoot doesn't exist therefore bigfoot exists."   This is often an attempt to flip the burden of proof onto someone requesting evidence.  




             The class of fallacies called appeals can be thought of simply as an effort to dismiss or increase the relevance of a point based on something that is unrelated to its truth value.  That is not to say we should dismiss the ideas of Authority, Law, Democracy (the crowd), Emotions, Traditions and Novelty seeking. What instead is suggested is that we seek the reasons for that which we state.   All of us can be the victim of faulty reasoning, either accepting it from others or formulating it ourselves.  These appeals may be honest mistakes that we should seek to correct in ourselves and those we speak with.  There are some people however who use these as sly rhetorical devices, it is these people that we must address most firmly; For they promulgate poor thinking and because of the flamboyant and difficult to notice nature of the appeals are often respected by those they manage to convince.


A good follow up reading on these and various other fallacies as explained simply in plain English can be found here.