8.6.1: More about Assessing Credibility

Suppose your next-door neighbor says you shouldn't marry your sweetheart. When you ask her why, she says it's because her older brother thinks so. "So what?" you say. She responds by pointing out that he is an expert psychologist. At this point are you going to call up your true love and say it's all over? No. Being an expert on psychology doesn't make your neighbor's brother an expert on your love life. You know that your neighbor picked an inappropriate authority to back up her claim. The neighbor has made a famous error of reasoning, the fallacious appeal to authority. When it comes to your love life, there probably isn't any authority.

There is an appeal to authority in this article from a college newspaper. Does it commit the fallacy?¹

The Lottery—The Odds to Beat

Just what are the chances of winning the state lottery? Statistician Peter Bennett says there is one chance in 25 million of winning the $2 million grand prize. The odds are pretty slim, but remember, a $1 ticket could turn into $2 million!

Did the newspaper reporter commit a fallacious appeal to authority by citing statistician Peter Bennett? No. Statisticians are just the right sort of people to appeal to about such a matter. So, unless you have a good reason to doubt Bennett's statistics, you should accept them. This acceptance is based on the following principle of logical reasoning: If a person is especially knowledgeable about a subject, then that person's views on the subject should be trusted more.

A fallacious appeal to authority can occur when an appeal is to someone who really is not an authority in the area. Don't ask a chemist when you want an expert opinion about hockey rules. The fallacy can also occur when a claim is backed up by an appeal to an authority in the appropriate area yet the authorities themselves are in significant disagreement with each other. When authorities disagree, none of them can "speak with authority." If I find ten authorities who say to vote Republican in the next U.S. presidential election, you can probably find ten authorities who say to vote Democratic. So if I appeal to my ten authorities as the reason why you should vote Republican, I’ve committed a fallacious appeal to authority. Sometimes, however, political experts should be trusted. If they say who won last year's election, you should trust what they say unless you have a good reason not to. You have background knowledge that the experts won't disagree on this topic.

Here is a more difficult question along this line. Does the following passage commit a fallacious appeal to authority?

According to psychologists, telepathy (that is, mind reading) occurs more often between friends. The closer the friend, the more frequent the telepathy and the stronger the connection. Only the most gifted of people can read the thoughts of total strangers.

What should you think about all this? First, ask yourself whether psychologists are the right authorities. Shouldn't the speaker appeal instead to brain surgeons? No, psychologists are the appropriate authorities. The fallacy occurs because the speaker has twisted what the authorities really do say about telepathy. Only a small percentage of psychologists believe in telepathy, and they are not the experimental psychologists (the scientists). Almost all scientific experts agree that telepathy is impossible. Therefore, the rest of us are justified in saying so, too.

How could the position of the psychological authorities be changed to favor telepathy? Here is one way. Have a purported mind reader pass a test. The mind reader could agree in advance to tell some of those psychologists what they are thinking about—say, at 2 p.m. each day for the next three days. If the mind reader is correct in even only two out of the three days, the psychologists would kneel down and kiss the mind reader's feet. Claims to be able to read minds on demand are at least testable; and passing the tests should make the case in favor of the existence of telepathic powers. Unfortunately, nobody has ever been able to pass such a test.

You should critically examine such phrases as "According to psychologists..." and "Science has shown that..." These phrases are occasionally misleading.

You also need to be on the alert that experts won’t always tell you the truth. Of course you can always trust me, the author of this book. After all, who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?

Most of us, not being scientists ourselves, cannot evaluate the scientific details. We have to rely on what others tell us the scientists say. Those others are usually reporters for newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. Sometimes in their rush to get the story done, reporters will not bother to examine the quality of the science they are reporting on. They won't be careful to evaluate the reputation of the scientist or to check whether other scientists dispute the quality of that scientist's work. For example, suppose the issue is whether the state legislature should pass a bill favoring cloth diapers over disposable diapers. The relevant scientific issue is the impact of both kinds of diapers on the environment. One reporter may incorporate into his news article some paragraphs from a press release crafted by the cloth diaper company that financed the research. The press statements might say, "Independent research shows cloth diapers to be environmentally sound, while disposable diapers clog our nations landfills without decomposing." The reporter might not have taken the time to determine whether the scientific research really was done by an "independent" researcher. Perhaps it was done by a scientist specifically paid to do the research because the company suspected he or she would come up with the "right" results about the product. Meanwhile, perhaps unknown to the first reporter, some other reporter is incorporating into her own article the key paragraphs from the press release of the disposable diaper company. It has financed its own scientific research showing that "disposable diapers are environment-friendly while cloth diapers must be washed with suds that foul our rivers." We consumers need to be wary of these possibilities of sloppy reporting.

One thing we can do as readers is to be alert for a sentence saying that the scientist was not financed by the company whose product is being reported on. We should also be alert for a sentence indicating that other researchers support the scientist's work. When such helpful sentences are absent, do we conclude that the reporter didn't check all this out, or do we conclude that he or she did but just didn't bother to tell us? We really are stuck in a dilemma. And there is a second dilemma. Do we accept the reported conclusion of the scientific research, or do we remain skeptical? We are too busy to check up on the report ourselves—we barely have enough time to read the entire article from just one reporter. Most reports we receive are not personally important enough for us to engage in a massive reading project to determine just what to believe. Ideally, we might want to withhold our judgment about cloth versus disposable diapers until we get better information, but realistically we will probably never get that information. Nor will we get definitive information about the thousands of other large and small issues facing us throughout our life, and we cannot go through life never having an opinion on anything. The philosopher George Santayana may have been correct when he said that skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, but our intellects can't be skeptical all the time; we have to embrace most of the beliefs of the reporters. It is for this very reason that the information media are so powerful; they inevitably shape our minds even when we are trying to be logical reasoners and careful about what beliefs we adopt. The defense against this situation is to try and get information from a wide variety of sources.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Identify the appeal to authority in the following piece of reasoning. Why should you be convinced by the speaker's reasoning?

Our government is standing in the way of progress. What the government should be doing is solving our problems. Yet the government is not doing this because it is not funding a request for what it needs most of all, a universal answering machine. This machine would give an answer to nearly all factual questions that were fed into it. For example, if you want to know if a piece of reasoning is fallacious, you input the reasoning into the machine and then check the output for an answer. If you want to know the cure for AIDS or for some other disease that has no known cure, then just feed in the question, and the universal answering machine will give the correct answer. The machine would do all this without the programmer first feeding it the answers. We don't have such a machine yet, but we should get one right away because having it would be so helpful. Scientific reports show that its creation is not far off; there just needs to be a major increase in funding. There should be a lot of money offered for the best grant applications. That grant money will draw in the best scientific minds to work on this most important project.

The government knows about the universal answering machine project. I wrote Congress and the president two years ago about it. Their inaction shows that the government is standing in the way of progress. Either they are stupid, or there is a cover-up.

Answer

99 The speaker is wrong when he appeals to authorities by saying "Scientific reports show." The reports show no such thing, at least so far. The reasoning is based on the assumption that such a machine is feasible. There is good evidence that it isn't feasible; the government recognizes this, which is why it has not acted. In short, the speaker is a crackpot. Nevertheless, the possibility of getting significant help with most all our decisions from artificially intelligent beings is not ridiculous, but when it occurs we’ll all know about it right away.

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¹ From The New York Times, June 14, 1988.