Logic Lessons: Appeal to Authority
This article is a bit tricky because there are gray areas. The fallacy of Appeal to Authority (sometimes called argumentum ad verecundiam) can be rather obvious. It can be like children arguing, "Plumbers have secret hiding places for guns in their shoes. The guy at the newsstand said so!" If "the guy at the newsstand" is not a former plumber revealing well-guarded secrets to kids, he is not an authority to which they can appeal. In the simplest sense, argumentum ad verecundiam appears when the "authority" is discussing something outside his or her field of expertise. When zoologist Clinton Richard Dawkins says , "They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened, by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book — Genesis.…the fact that half o