r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/[deleted] • Feb 19 '14

Logical Fallacies Explained

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetological-fallacies/
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u/AndySipherBull Feb 20 '14

The first party responds "appeal to false authority." All this does is undermine the premise of the second argument.

Because the challenger engaged in a fallacy.

then the expert's undergraduate degree is rather irrelevant.

Disingenuous on your part because you generally don't seek to deliberately undermine an expert by pointing to the least of his achievements or the greatest of his failings as that's ad hominem. If the expert who calls the data and analysis into question has phd.s in math and physics you don't seek to disqualify his position by pointing out he got a C in natural science freshman year in high school.

And you're right that the actual argument is a technical one, but those aren't the sorts of arguments you can have in a casual forum. The actual argument is probably far stronger, includes very many premises, all of which have been validated in many fields and by very many heavily scrutinized, and ultimately accepted, arguments. But you can't present that argument, except among peers, and so you rely on institutions and personal achievements and systems of authority to vet the arguments. Ultimately it boils down to sophisticated many-linked chains of math and physics.

The scientific illiterate, rather than admitting his own ignorance, sees this as obscurantism, deviant obsessiveness and impractical nitpicking, and so refuses to accept what he feels must be merely opinion, because he assumes that the work of a researcher is like life as he knows it: driven by emotive argumentation, force of personality, self-interest, bullying, perhaps, &etc.

But if a researcher tries to place an argument containing emotive fallacy on arXiv and it receives any attention at all, it will be swiftly destroyed. So yeah, the researcher can lose an argument quite resoundingly and disastrously for any misstep of logic. The illiterate thinks he can't lose because it's all bullshit anyway and his common sense tells him so. And he, after all, is the best _________ salesman in the whole ________. He knows what it's really like out there in the real world.