I don’t know why this hasn’t been done before: appeal to authority on wikipedia.
As far as I can tell, this definition is what the rest of us are talking about, and it specifically says that appealing to authority only becomes a fallacy if a) the authority is not a legitimate expert, or b) it is used to prove the conclusion must be true. If you disagree with WP’s definition, could you lay out your own?
I don’t know why this hasn’t been done before: appeal to authority on wikipedia.
As far as I can tell, this definition is what the rest of us are talking about, and it specifically says that appealing to authority only becomes a fallacy if a) the authority is not a legitimate expert, or b) it is used to prove the conclusion must be true. If you disagree with WP’s definition, could you lay out your own?
An appeal to authority is the use of an authority’s statements as a valid argument in the absence of corroborating materials to support that argument.
Note that arguments here refer to specific, instantiated claims. And as such are not subject to probabilistic assessments.