Fallacy Name:
Legitimate Appeal to Authority
Alternative Names:
None
Category:
Fallacy of Relevance > Appeals to Authority
Explanation:
Not every reliance upon the testimony of authority figures is fallacious. We often rely upon such testimony, and we can do so for very good reason. Their talent, training and experience put them in a position to evaluate and report on evidence not readily available to everyone else. But we must keep in mind that for such an appeal to be justified, certain standards must be met:
- 1. The authority is an expert in the area of knowledge under consideration.
- 2. The statement of the authority concerns his or her area of mastery.
- 3. There is agreement among experts in the area of knowledge under consideration.
Examples and Discussion:
Let’s take a look at this example:
- 4. My doctor has said that medicine X will help my medical condition. Therefore, it will help me with my medical condition.
Is this a legitimate appeal to authority, or a fallacious appeal to authority? First, the doctor has to be a medical doctor — a doctor of philosophy simply won’t do. Second, the doctor has to be treating you for a condition in which she has training — it isn’t enough if the doctor is a dermatologist who is prescribing you something for lung cancer. Finally, there has to be some general agreement among other experts in this field — if your doctor is the only one using this treatment, then the premise does not support the conclusion.
Of course, we must keep in mind that even if these conditions are fully met, that does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. We are looking at inductive arguments here, and inductive arguments do not have guaranteed true conclusions, even when the premises are true. Instead, we have conclusions which are probably true.
An important issue to consider here how and why anyone might be called an “expert” in some field. It isn’t enough to simply note that an appeal to authority is not a fallacy when that authority is an expert, because we need to have some way to tell when and how we have a legitimate an expert, or when we just have a fallacy.
Let’s look at another example:
- 5. Channeling the spirits of the dead is real, because John Edward says he can do it and he is an expert.
Now, is the above a legitimate appeal to authority, or a fallacious appeal to authority? The answer rests with whether or not it is true that we can call Edward an expert on channeling the spirits of the dead. Let’s do a comparison of the following two examples to see if that helps:
- 6. Professor Smith, shark expert: Great White Sharks are dangerous.
- 7. John Edward: I can channel the spirit of your dead grandmother.
When it comes to the authority of Professor Smith, it isn’t so hard to accept that he might be an authority on sharks. Why? Because the topic that he is an expert on involves empirical phenomena; and more importantly, it is possible for us to check on what he has claimed and verify it for ourselves. Such verification might be time consuming (and, when it comes to sharks, perhaps dangerous!), but that is usually why an appeal to authority is made in the first place.
But when it comes to Edward, the same things cannot really be said. We simply do not have the usual tools and methods available to us to verify that he is, indeed, channeling someone’s dead grandmother and thereby getting information from her. Since we have no idea how his claim might be verified, even in theory, it simply isn’t possible to conclude that he is an expert on the subject.
Now, that does not mean that there cannot be experts or authorities on the behavior of people who claim to channel the spirits of the dead, or experts on the social phenomena surrounding belief in channeling. This is because the claims made by these so-called experts can be verified and evaluated independently. By the same token, a person might be an expert on theological arguments and the history of theology, but to call them an expert on “god” would just be begging the question.
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