[split] Critical Thinking Skills

[Joel]

This is a pretty catchy quote alright. The only way I see to improve on this would have been:

"It is not fallacious to appeal to popularity, people do it all the time."

Yeah, I really wish he had said that.
I'm sure he'll say something like that, anyway. Give it time.

[jstrodel]

This is a pretty catchy quote alright. The only way I see to improve on this would have been:

"It is not fallacious to appeal to popularity, people do it all the time."

The statement was not intended to be a philosophical argument proving the concept of the argument from authority, which is widely used in all professional writing, it was intended as a common sense reminder of the role that arguments from authority play at all levels of public understanding.

If someone thinks that all arguments from authority are fallacious, it is because they have never done any serious research, not because they are advancing a controversial issue.

The argument from authority is one of the central aspects of the modern world. See how many chemists can understand everything that biologist write about at the highest levels of biology. If people deny the importance of the argument from authority, it is because they are ignorant, not because they are advancing a controversial issue such as the role of the illumanati in public affairs or the merits of nuclear weapons, it is because they are just ignorant and they have never done any serious academic writing or research in their life.

I can't believe I am even writing this and no one is correcting the person. The atheist who does not have a zeal in his heart about the errors of his fellow atheists because of political motivations is a dishonest atheist.

[Tonus]

If someone thinks that all arguments from authority are fallacious, it is because they have never done any serious research, not because they are advancing a controversial issue.

If you had a quote from a person that shows that they think all arguments from authority are fallacious, you might have... something. As it is, it seems you're reaching. If the person in question agreed in a follow-up post that not all arguments from authority are fallacious, perhaps you missed it or simply decided to misrepresent what that person thinks. Some people might think that misrepresenting a written exchange is a bit dishonest.

[jstrodel]

You are so proud. Why can't you listen to others? You are so ideological biased. If you were humble, you would check on yourself because you are making the most basic error of undergraduate atheism. This is why people are atheists, because they are proud, they won't listen to people that think differently from them, they aren't really curious, they are curious about liberalism, they don't care if they are right, they care about winning arguments.

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Look up ad verecundiam in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam), also authoritative argument and appeal to authority, is an inductive-reasoning argument that often takes the form of a statistical syllogism.[1] Although certain classes of argument from authority can constitute strong inductive arguments, the appeal to authority is often applied fallaciously: either the authority is not a subject-matter expert, or there is no consensus among experts in the subject matter, or both.[1][2][3]

Fallacy labels have their use. But fallacy-label texts tend not to provide useful criteria for applying the labels. Take the so-called ad verecundiam fallacy, the fallacious appeal to authority. Just when is it committed? Some appeals to authority are fallacious; most are not. A fallacious one meets the following condition: The expertise of the putative authority, or the relevance of that expertise to the point at issue, are in question. But the hard work comes in judging and showing that this condition holds, and that is where the fallacy-label texts leave off. Or rather, when a text goes further, stating clear, precise, broadly applicable criteria for applying fallacy labels, it provides a critical instrument more fundamental than a taxonomy of fallacies and hence to that extent goes beyond the fallacy-label approach. The further it goes in this direction, the less it need to emphasize or event to use fallacy labels. (Schwartz, 232)

If you want to understand the world, don't just screen out the stuff that doesn't agree with what you say. Look, when I am typing stuff on here, probably 85-95% of the stuff I am typing is true. I can promise you that. I havn't told a lie in 6 or 7 years. I can be wrong, but most of the stuff I say, is from direct experience from God. I am not saying that I am better than anyone else, or I am smarter than anyone else, I have average intelligence. I am not a genius. But I know what I am talking about.

You aren't even prepared to accept the possibility that someone who disagrees with you could know something that you don't. I hope that you can escape that. I am saying this because I want you to have what I have, the knowledge absolutely that God exists.


Good links on fallacies (including some interesting stuff on fallacies theory, good to know what exactly fallacies are and how it isn't necessarily that easy to apply them. The difference between a significant atheist philosopher like Daniel Dennet or Bertrand Russell and an undergraduate atheist who accuses and defames Christianity by using logical concepts and informal logical concepts falsely because he is too lazy to actually spend the time to understand how they work):
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/

Blessings,
Joseph

[Joel]

When someone says "X said it, therefore it is true." they are doing it the wrong way; in every case. It doesn't matter whether the subject is true. It's not true because someone said it: it's true because it was true to begin with.
It doesn't make the person wrong; it makes the way they were trying to prove something wrong.

EDIT: You make me feel sick.

[jstrodel]

Obviously, but the argument from authority is not concerned with depicting truth or the ultimate rational behind discerning truth claims, it is concerned with a probabilistic approach to learning that is likely to be true.

For instance, if you went to a doctor, and asked them a question about something, and you didn't know the answer, they would give you an answer that you couldn't necessarily know for certain whether it was true, but you would be better off following it in most cases. The argument from authority is not always fallacious.

You aren't even going to remove that signature either, even though you know that you are wrong. That is the character that is in people. They don't care about being right or wrong, they care about being atheists.

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Why can't you admit that you are wrong? What is so hard about that?

[Joel]

I'm not removing it because you justified a logical fallacy with a logical fallacy.
Stop asserting things about people. Be more humble

I could say the same thing about you, jstrodel. I'm not admitting I'm wrong because you haven't managed to show me that you're right and I'm wrong.
You just keep saying the same thing - which is incorrect.

[Jackalope]

You are so proud. Why can't you listen to others? You are so ideological biased.

[jstrodel]

If someone thinks that all arguments from authority are fallacious, it is because they have never done any serious research, not because they are advancing a controversial issue.

If you had a quote from a person that shows that they think all arguments from authority are fallacious, you might have... something. As it is, it seems you're reaching. If the person in question agreed in a follow-up post that not all arguments from authority are fallacious, perhaps you missed it or simply decided to misrepresent what that person thinks. Some people might think that misrepresenting a written exchange is a bit dishonest.

Look at Joels signature. He thinks, along with several other people here, that all arguments from authority are fallacious.

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You are so proud. Why can't you listen to others? You are so ideological biased.

You didn't demonstrate that. Cthulhu did you see the stuff I posted on there on "fallacy theory"? One of those was for you. The quote was for you. You seem to think that applying fallacy labels such as 'ad populum' is trivial. It isn't (see above), it is subject to the same standards as everything else.

[Joel]

If you had a quote from a person that shows that they think all arguments from authority are fallacious, you might have... something. As it is, it seems you're reaching. If the person in question agreed in a follow-up post that not all arguments from authority are fallacious, perhaps you missed it or simply decided to misrepresent what that person thinks. Some people might think that misrepresenting a written exchange is a bit dishonest.

Look at Joels signature. He thinks, along with several other people here, that all arguments from authority are fallacious.

If you actually read what I said instead of twisting it, you'll see that's not what I said.
Using an argument from authority as a method of proof is wrong.