Argument from authority

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

  

An argument from authority (argumentum ab auctoritate), also called an appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam, is a form of defeasible argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument. It is well known as a fallacy, though some consider that it is used in a cogent form when all sides of a discussion agree on the reliability of the authority in the given context. Other authors consider it a fallacy to cite an authority on the discussed topic as the primary means of supporting an argument.

Forms

Appeals to authorities

Historically, opinion on the appeal to authority has been divided: it is listed as a valid argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources, with some holding that it is a strong or at least valid argument and others that it is weak or an outright fallacy.

If all parties agree on the reliability of an authority in the given context it forms a valid inductive argument.

Use in science

Scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority as authority has no place in science. 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.

One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923, when 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 until 1956, scientists propagated this "fact" 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 generated 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", and scientists who obtained the accurate number modified or discarded their data to agree with Painter's count.

A more recent example involved the "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality" paper, published in 2014. The paper was a fraud based on forged data, yet concerns about it were ignored in many cases due to appeals to authority. One analysis of the affair notes that "Over and over again, throughout the scientific community and the media, LaCour’s impossible-seeming results were treated as truth, in part because of the weight [the study's co-author] Green's name carried". One psychologist stated his reaction to the paper was "that's very surprising and doesn't fit with a huge literature of evidence. It doesn't sound plausible to me... [then I pull it up and] I see Don Green is an author. I trust him completely, so I'm no longer doubtful". The forger, LaCour, would use appeals to authority to defend his research: "if his responses sometimes seemed to lack depth when he was pressed for details, his impressive connections often allayed concerns", with one of his partners stating "when he and I really had a disagreement, he would often rely on the kind of arguments where he’d basically invoke authority, right? He's the one with advanced training, and his adviser is this very high-powered, very experienced person...and they know a lot more than we do".

Much like the erroneous chromosome number taking decades to refute until microscopy made the error unmistakable, the one who would go on to debunk this paper "was consistently told by friends and advisers to keep quiet about his concerns lest he earn a reputation as a troublemaker", up until "the very last moment when multiple 'smoking guns' finally appeared", and he found that "There was almost no encouragement for him to probe the hints of weirdness he’d uncovered".

Appeals to non-authorities

Fallacious arguments from authority are also frequently the result of citing a non-authority as an authority. The philosophers Irving Copi and Carl Cohen characterized it as a fallacy "when the appeal is made to parties having no legitimate claim to authority in the matter at hand".

An 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.

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 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.

Cognitive bias

The argument from authority is based on the idea that a perceived authority must know better and that the person should conform to their opinion. This has its roots in psychological cognitive biases such 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.

Another study shining light on the psychological basis of the fallacy as it relates to perceived authorities are the Milgram experiments, which demonstrated that people are more likely to go along with something when it is presented by an authority. In a variation of a study where the researchers did not wear lab coats, thus reducing the perceived authority of the tasker, the obedience level dropped to 20% from the original rate, which had been higher than 50%. Obedience is encouraged by reminding the individual of what a perceived authority states and by showing them that their opinion goes against this authority.

Scholars have noted that certain environments can produce an ideal situation for these processes to take hold, giving rise to groupthink. In groupthink, individuals in a group feel inclined to minimize conflict and encourage conformity. Through an appeal to authority, a group member might present that opinion as a consensus and encourage the other group members to engage in groupthink by not disagreeing with this perceived consensus or authority. One paper about the philosophy of mathematics notes that, within academia,

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.

Corporate environments are similarly vulnerable to appeals to perceived authorities and experts leading to groupthink, as are governments and militaries.

Begging the question

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question 

 

Bust of Aristotle, whose Prior Analytics contained an early discussion of this fallacy

In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. It is a type of circular reasoning: an argument that requires that the desired conclusion be true. This often occurs in an indirect way such that the fallacy's presence is hidden, or at least not easily apparent.

In modern vernacular usage, however, begging the question is often used to mean "raising the question" or "suggesting the question". Sometimes it is confused with "dodging the question", an attempt to avoid it.

The phrase begging the question originated in the 16th century as a mistranslation of the Latin petitio principii, which in turn was a mistranslation of the Greek for "assuming the conclusion".

History

The original phrase used by Aristotle from which begging the question descends is: τὸ ἐξ ἀρχῆς (or sometimes ἐν ἀρχῇ) αἰτεῖν, "asking for the initial thing." Aristotle's intended meaning is closely tied to the type of dialectical argument he discusses in his Topics, book VIII: a formalized debate in which the defending party asserts a thesis that the attacking party must attempt to refute by asking yes-or-no questions and deducing some inconsistency between the responses and the original thesis.

In this stylized form of debate, the proposition that the answerer undertakes to defend is called "the initial thing" (τὸ ἐξ ἀρχῆς, τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ) and one of the rules of the debate is that the questioner cannot simply ask for it (that would be trivial and uninteresting). Aristotle discusses this in Sophistical Refutations and in Prior Analytics book II, (64b, 34–65a 9, for circular reasoning see 57b, 18–59b, 1). 

The stylized dialectical exchanges Aristotle discusses in the Topics included rules for scoring the debate, and one important issue was precisely the matter of asking for the initial thing—which included not just making the actual thesis adopted by the answerer into a question, but also making a question out of a sentence that was too close to that thesis (for example, PA II 16).

The term was translated into English from Latin in the 16th century. The Latin version, petitio principii, "asking for the starting point", can be interpreted in different ways. Petitio (from peto), in the post-classical context in which the phrase arose, means assuming or postulating, but in the older classical sense means petition, request or beseeching. Principii, genitive of principium, means beginning, basis or premise (of an argument). Literally petitio principii means "assuming the premise" or "assuming the original point". 

The Latin phrase comes from the Greek τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι (to en archei aiteisthai, "asking the original point") in Aristotle's Prior Analytics II xvi 64b28–65a26:

Begging or assuming the point at issue consists (to take the expression in its widest sense) [of] failing to demonstrate the required proposition. But there are several other ways in which this may happen; for example, if the argument has not taken syllogistic form at all, he may argue from premises which are less known or equally unknown, or he may establish the antecedent by means of its consequents; for demonstration proceeds from what is more certain and is prior. Now begging the question is none of these. [...] If, however, the relation of B to C is such that they are identical, or that they are clearly convertible, or that one applies to the other, then he is begging the point at issue.... [B]egging the question is proving what is not self-evident by means of itself...either because predicates which are identical belong to the same subject, or because the same predicate belongs to subjects which are identical.

— Aristotle, Hugh Tredennick (trans.) Prior Analytics

Aristotle's distinction between apodictic science and other forms of non-demonstrative knowledge rests on an epistemology and metaphysics wherein appropriate first principles become apparent to the trained dialectician:

Aristotle's advice in S.E. 27 for resolving fallacies of Begging the Question is brief. If one realizes that one is being asked to concede the original point, one should refuse to do so, even if the point being asked is a reputable belief. On the other hand, if one fails to realize that one has conceded the point at issue and the questioner uses the concession to produce the apparent refutation, then one should turn the tables on the sophistical opponent by oneself pointing out the fallacy committed. In dialectical exchange it is a worse mistake to be caught asking for the original point than to have inadvertently granted such a request. The answerer in such a position has failed to detect when different utterances mean the same thing. The questioner, if he did not realize he was asking the original point, has committed the same error. But if he has knowingly asked for the original point, then he reveals himself to be ontologically confused: he has mistaken what is non-self-explanatory (known through other things) to be something self-explanatory (known through itself). In pointing this out to the false reasoner, one is not just pointing out a tactical psychological misjudgment by the questioner. It is not simply that the questioner falsely thought that the original point, if placed under the guise of a semantic equivalent, or a logical equivalent, or a covering universal, or divided up into exhaustive parts, would be more persuasive to the answerer. Rather, the questioner falsely thought that a non-self-explanatory fact about the world was an explanatory first principle. For Aristotle, that certain facts are self-explanatory while others are not is not a reflection solely of the cognitive abilities of humans. It is primarily a reflection of the structure of noncognitive reality. In short, a successful resolution of such a fallacy requires a firm grasp of the correct explanatory powers of things. Without a knowledge of which things are self-explanatory and which are not, the reasoner is liable to find a question-begging argument persuasive.

— Scott Gregory Schreiber, Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations

Thomas Fowler believed that Petitio Principii would be more properly called Petitio Quæsiti, which is literally "begging the question".

Definition

To "beg the question" is to put forward an argument whose validity requires that its own conclusion be true. 

Also called petitio principii, the fallacy is an attempt to support a claim with a premise that itself presupposes the claim. It is an attempt to prove a proposition while simultaneously taking the proposition for granted.

Given the single variable C (claim), "begging the question" is an attempt to assert that C → C. In two variables, C (claim) and P (premise), it attempts to pass (C → P) → C as the valid claim P → C. This is a form of circular reasoning, and may involve any number of variables. 

When the fallacy involves only a single variable, it is sometimes called a hysteron proteron (Greek for "later earlier"), a rhetorical device, as in the statement:

• "Opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality."

A similar example:

• "Everyone wants this new Hero Man action figure because it's the hottest toy this season."

This form of the fallacy may not be immediately obvious. Linguistic variations in syntax, sentence structure and literary device may conceal it, as may other factors involved in an argument's delivery. It may take the form of an unstated premise which is essential but not identical to the conclusion, or is "controversial or questionable for the same reasons that typically might lead someone to question the conclusion":

...[S]eldom is anyone going to simply place the conclusion word-for-word into the premises ... Rather, an arguer might use phraseology that conceals the fact that the conclusion is masquerading as a premise. The conclusion is rephrased to look different and is then placed in the premises.

— Paul Herrick

For example, one can obscure the fallacy by first making a statement in concrete terms, then attempting to pass off an identical statement, delivered in abstract terms, as evidence for the original. One could also "bring forth a proposition expressed in words of Saxon origin, and give as a reason for it the very same proposition stated in words of Norman origin", as here:

• "To allow every man an unbounded freedom of speech must always be, on the whole, advantageous to the State, for it is highly conducive to the interests of the community that each individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited of expressing his sentiments."

When the fallacy of begging the question is committed in more than one step, some authors dub it circulus in probando (reasoning in a circle) or, more commonly, circular reasoning. 

Begging the question is not considered a formal fallacy (an argument that is defective because it uses an incorrect deductive step). Rather, it is a type of informal fallacy that is logically valid but unpersuasive, in that it fails to prove anything other than what is already assumed.

Related fallacies

Closely connected with begging the question is the fallacy of circular reasoning (circulus in probando), a fallacy in which the reasoner begins with the conclusion. The individual components of a circular argument can be logically valid because if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true, and does not lack relevance. However, circular reasoning is not persuasive because a listener who doubts the conclusion also doubts the premise that leads to it.

Begging the question is similar to the complex question (also known as trick question or fallacy of many questions): a question that, to be valid, requires the truth of another question that has not been established. For example, "Which color dress is Mary wearing?" may be fallacious because it presupposes that Mary is wearing a dress. Unless it has previously been established that her outfit is a dress, the question is fallacious because she could be wearing pants instead.

Another related fallacy is ignoratio elenchi or irrelevant conclusion: an argument that fails to address the issue in question, but appears to do so. An example might be a situation where A and B are debating whether the law permits A to do something. If A attempts to support his position with an argument that the law ought to allow him to do the thing in question, then he is guilty of ignoratio elenchi.

Contemporary usage

Some contemporary English speakers use begs the question (or equivalent rephrasings thereof) to mean "raises the question", "invites the question", "suggests the question", etc. Such preface is then followed with the question, as in:

• [...] personal letter delivery is at an all-time low... Which begs the question: are open letters the only kind the future will know?
• Hopewell's success begs the question: why aren't more companies doing the same?.
• [Universal access to all-female schools is] an appeal bound to elicit sympathy, especially from guilty liberals, but it begs the question of whether the daughters of the rich benefit from single-sex education.
• Spending the summer travelling around India is a great idea, but it does beg the question of how we can afford it.

Prescriptivist grammarians and people versed in philosophy, logic, and law object to such usage as incorrect, or at best, unclear. This is because, it is claimed, the classical sense of Aristotelian logic is the correct one.