Appeal to Authority

Type

Informal

AKA

Argumentum ad Verecundiam (argument to reverence), Misplaced Authority

Description

Claiming something is true because an authority or expert says so, without presenting actual evidence.

Examples

"This supplement must work—my favourite actor uses it."
"It’s correct because a professor said it in a TED talk."

Linked from

Dietary Supplements

More is not better. The error underneath the industry is a linear one: if a nutrient is good, more of it must be better. Vitamins are cofactors for enzymes, and once the enzymes are saturated the surplus is excreted, stored, or does someth…

Equality

A professional footballer is better than most at playing football, but is no better than others in any other domain, and their footballing ability gives them no greater claim to a say in, for instance, tax policy. Competence does not trans…

Controversy Over Vaccine Research

It is a reminder that the Anti-Vaccine movement did not arise from nowhere. It had a peer-reviewed paper, a press conference and a photogenic doctor, which is why "it was in The Lancet" is not the end of an argument. See Appeal to Authorit…

Vaccine Link to Autism Retracted

Twelve years. The paper was doubted within months, partially retracted by most of its authors in 2004, and exposed as fraudulent by Brian Deer from 2004 onwards; the journal waited for a regulator to act before it would. That is the Appeal…

Brian Deer

He appears here because the vaccine-autism scare was undone by journalism, not by the medical establishment that published it, which is a point in favour of a free press and against the Appeal to Authority.

Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling (1901–1994), American chemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1954) for his work on the chemical bond and the Nobel Peace Prize (1962) for campaigning against nuclear testing, and the only person to hold two unshared…

Appeal to Popularity

It is not a fallacy to treat expert consensus as evidence, when the experts' agreement is the result of independent examination of the evidence; that is a reasonable Appeal to Authority. The fallacy is counting heads where the heads have n…