The folly of "authority"

... or from a degree ...

Well, there are some cases in which an appeal to qualifications is legitimate.Case (1): Creationist says "look, here's someone who you never heard of who back in 1959 said something against evolution, and he was a professor of biology. Hah!"In this case, it is reasonable to list all the academies of science and Nobel Prize winners who've said something in favor of evolution, and then ask to see the actual arguments of the isolated crank who no-one's ever heard of. That is, an argument from authority can be used to destroy an argument from authority, and to demand that the playing field should at least be level.Case (2): Creationist says: "It follows from this well-known scientific fact that ..." For example, a claim that the Big Bang contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics.Now, if the creationist backed this up with actual math, then it would be possible to find an actual flaw in the math, but he won't 'cos of being a creationist, and wrong (but I repeat myself).Faced with this non-argument argument, I think it is fair enough to point out various physicists who are all for the Big Bang, and to ask: "Do you suppose that these guys with Ph.Ds in physics, these professors of physics, the people with Nobel Prizes, do you really suppose that they don't know about a fundamental law of physics which you learned when you were in high school? Really? Is this something they could all have overlooked?"One might then ask to see the actual math.An interesting historical non-creationist example of this form of fatuity is given by the infamous New York Times editorial lampooning Robert Goddard's early work on rockets: It might have occurred to the anonymous author of this editorial that maybe a man with a Ph.D. in physics and the support of the Smithsonian did know stuff that was taught in high schools.Case (3): A creationist says "The scientific facts are (something creationists have made up) rather than what scientists say they are."For example, I recently had the pleasure of talking to someone who exalted Ann Coulter's opinions on the fossil record over those of geologists and paleontologists, whom my interlocutor described as "stuffed shirts".Now, my reply had nothing to do with academic qualifications as such. However, there is still an argument that the professionals know better, and it is this. Everything we know originates with someone's direct experience. For example, everything we know about the mating rituals of grebes originates with people who have looked at the mating rituals of grebes. We might suspect that all the grebe-watchers are liars or fools, but we cannot know better than them without going and looking at some grebes.Now, in the same way, neither Ann Coulter nor her acolyte can know more about rocks than people who spend their lives looking at rocks without spending some of their own time looking at rocks. As I say, this does not rest on academic qualifications, a dedicated amateur could perfectly well meet this criterion. However, professional geologists do in fact spend their working lives studying rocks, and so uniformly do meet this criterion, and therefore do have an epistemological superiority over people who have never done so but are strongly opinionated on the subject.---One common feature of all these cases are that they are responses to what I have called "non-argument arguments". That is, they would be irrelevant if, in the first case, the creationist produced the reasoning concerning evolution; if, in the second case, the creationist produced the math concerning the Big Bang; or if, in the third case, the creationist produced some evidence about geology. Then we could talk about that instead. But when a creationist produces an argument too vague and inchoate to assess on its nonexistent merits, then responses such as I have described are valid.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Pretty much all reasonable arguments are logically invalid."No-one has ever seen a fire-breathing wombat. Therefore, wombats can't breathe fire." Oh look, this is the logical fallacy known as "Affirming The Consequent".A reasonable argument can rest on a premise that is merely reasonable; for example in case (2) in my previous post it is reasonable to suppose that the world's most eminent physicists haven't all overlooked a law of physics that appears in high school textbooks.---The Argument From Authority strictu sensu is not merely illogical, it is also unreasonable --- "An person with scientific qualifications has said this. Therefore it must be true"; this is of course illogical, that goes without saying, but it is also unreasonable because in fact there can hardly be anything so false that it has not at some time or another been said by someone with scientific qualifications. We know not merely that it is logically invalid, but that as a matter of common experience it doesn't work; unlike the claim about wombats not breathing fire, which is strictly speaking an illogical inference, but which does work.