We didn't skip over it. We just recognized it as a fallacious appeal to authority.FBM wrote:Emphasis mine. Sorry for re-citing the same source I posted on a previous page, but maybe you skipped over it.
Exactly.Seraph wrote:The topic is about logical fallacies. Haven't you noticed? It's a logical fallacy to argue that something is true on the grounds that an authoritative source says that it is, for the simple reason that past authoritative sources have turned out to be wrong. Appeals to subsequent authoritative sources encounter the same problem: How do we know they are right on account of their authority? It's turtles all the way down once more.Tyrannical wrote:You see, the problem is that some people don't understand what the meaning of the word fallacy is.
If you find that a legitimate authority agrees with you, does it make it more likely that you are correct? Yes, it may. Does it prove that you are correct? No, it does not; the authority may still be in error.
Formal logic is about proofs, not probabilities. Therefore appealing to an authority, which may affect probabilities but does not provide proof, is a logical fallacy.
Exactly the same situation pertains to many of the other logical fallacies mentioned in the original link. For example, take "false cause", also known as "a correlation does not prove a causation."
If two things are closely correlated, does it make it more likely that one causes the other? Yes, it does. Does it prove that one causes the other? No, it does not.
Just like appeal to authority, then, citing of correlations is a logical fallacy, because it does not provide a proof, only a probability.
If you don't know enough to reproduce the authority's data and reasoning, you probably don't know enough to be arguing the point in the first place.