Justified True Belief

(●) An appeal to authority accepts a claim on someone's say-so when their expertise does not reach the claim. + Nobody checks everything. You take the pharmacist's word on the dose and the pilot's word on the weather, and you are right to. The fallacy is not trusting an expert. It is trusting the wrong expert, or the right one on the wrong question. (1) The shape of the move is a credential standing where a reason should be. - Your neighbour, a retired surgeon, tells you over the fence that the new bypass will ruin the town's trade. He may be right. But the reason you have been handed is the word "surgeon", and surgery says nothing about traffic and shopfronts. - Two words help here. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they are meant to support is the conclusion. Here the premise is that a surgeon said it, and the conclusion is about a road. - Patrick Hurley's logic textbook files it among the fallacies of weak induction, where the premise does bear on the conclusion, only nowhere near enough to carry it. An ad hominem, which goes after the speaker rather than the argument, does not bear on the claim at all. - His name for it is the appeal to unqualified authority. The authority is real. It is simply not qualified here. (2) It tempts because nearly everything we know rests on trusting somebody. - The philosopher John Hardwig made the point in a 1985 paper called "Epistemic Dependence" (epistemic means having to do with knowledge). His example was a particle-physics paper with ninety-nine co-authors. Not one could vouch for every measurement in it, and each trusted the rest. Refuse to believe anything on authority and you would know almost nothing. - So the habit is sound. It fails at the edge of the expert's field, where the white coat is still on and the training has run out. Trust feels the same there as in the middle, which is why the move is so easy to make in good faith. - The people of Berea heard an apostle, took him seriously, and still went home and checked, "examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11). Trusting is right. Checking keeps it honest. (3) The name is Locke's, and the family has three cousins. - John Locke gave the move its Latin name in 1690, argumentum ad verecundiam, "argument to modesty". It feels immodest to set your own judgment against a learned man's, so you don't. Locke's verdict was that the move may silence an opponent, but only evidence advances knowledge. - Appeal to popularity (argumentum ad populum) puts a crowd where the expert stood. "Everyone on the street uses that builder." Crowds can be competent, and crowds can be uniformly wrong. - Appeal to consensus is the crowd dressed as experts. "Most economists think" is real evidence about the economy and none about God, a question economists were never trained on. - Anonymous authority leaves the name off. "Studies show" and "scientists say" ask for the trust an expert earns without saying who the expert is. Therefore, an appeal to authority is not a mistake about trusting people. It is a mistake about what a particular person's word is good for.

(●) Simple example: "My dentist says the central bank should cut interest rates." + She is a fine dentist, and she reads the papers. The question is what her degree contributes. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is about monetary policy. The support offered is that a dentist holds it. Both may be true, and the second has nothing to do with the first. (2) Why the support does no work. - Try the swap. Keep the dentist and change the claim: "my dentist says my molar needs a crown." Now the credential does real work. Move back to interest rates and it goes quiet. A credential covers a territory, and a claim has to sit inside that territory before the credential can vouch for it. Molars are inside. Interest rates are not. - What would bear on the claim is an economist, the bank's inflation report, or an argument about what cheaper borrowing does to prices. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It was borrowing the trust a white coat earns in one room and spending it in another. That is a comfortable way to hold an opinion on rates without having to think about rates.

(●) A critic says: "Stephen Hawking said philosophy is dead and the universe created itself from nothing. Are you smarter than Stephen Hawking?" + Hawking was the most famous scientist alive when The Grand Design came out in 2010, and both sentences are in it. The question is which of them his training reaches. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the universe needs no creator. The support is that the greatest physicist of his generation said so, and a layman has no business disagreeing. - The source is real. Hawking and Mlodinow open the book by declaring that "philosophy is dead", and close it with the claim that "because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." - The strongest form of the point: cosmology has learned things about the early universe that armchair reasoning never could, and anyone arguing about origins ought to know them. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - It sits in "are you smarter than Stephen Hawking?", which offers his standing as the reason. Douglas Walton, the logician who wrote the standard book on appeals to expertise, asks whether the expert is an expert in the field the claim belongs to. - Both of Hawking's sentences fail that test. "Philosophy is dead" is a claim in philosophy. Whether a law of nature can bring a universe out of nothing is a question in metaphysics, the part of philosophy that asks what exists and what it takes for anything to exist at all. It is not the mathematics of spacetime that Hawking spent his life on. - The mirror from our side: "Francis Collins ran the Human Genome Project and he is a Christian." Every skeptic can see that a geneticist's standing says nothing about whether God exists. A cosmologist's says exactly as much. - The head-count usually arrives next: "Most philosophers are atheists." Bourget and Chalmers's survey of professional philosophers puts it at 72.8 percent, and since philosophers are trained to weigh arguments, the number is not nothing. But the same survey found the philosophers who specialise in religion leaning the other way. A poll shows where the arguments are being fought, not who won. (3) The sound version. - Inside the book is a physics claim that deserves an answer on its own terms: given a law like gravity, a universe can arise from a quantum vacuum with no further cause. A quantum vacuum is empty space as physics describes it, which is not quite empty: it has fields in it, and laws governing them. - John Lennox's reply in God and Stephen Hawking is the one to engage. A law describes what happens when something is already there to act on. It does not bring anything into being, any more than the laws of arithmetic put money in a bank account. - A vacuum governed by laws is not nothing either. That argument, not Hawking's fame, belongs on the table. (4) How to answer it. - "Hawking was a better physicist than either of us, so let's take his physics seriously. What does a law of gravity actually do, and how do we get from a law describing a universe to a law producing one? I'd rather argue about that than about who's cleverer." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Natural Theology: Leibniz' Contingency Argument

(●) A Christian says: "Dr Smith has a doctorate, and he says the earth is only six thousand years old. Are you going to argue with a PhD?" + Here is the same move from our side of the table. The age of the earth is a question Christians in good standing answer differently, and it stays open. What is at issue is only what the doctorate is being asked to do. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the earth is young. The support is that a man with a doctorate says so, and the rhetorical question does the rest: a PhD outranks a layman, so the layman should yield. - The point has a real core. Credentials are a fair first filter, and a Christian is right to want a skeptic to notice that trained scientists exist on both sides of that dispute. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - It sits in the word "doctorate" with the field left off. The age of the earth is a question for geology, radiometric dating and astrophysics. If the degree is in engineering, medicine or theology, the credential has been carried out of the room where it was earned, exactly like the dentist on interest rates. - If the degree is in geology, the fallacy moves rather than vanishes. Walton's consistency question asks whether the expert agrees with the rest of the field. A lone dissenter, however qualified, is a reason to look at his evidence, not a reason to skip looking. - The popularity cousin comes next: "Two billion Christians can't all be wrong." Two billion people can be wrong. What the number honestly earns is a hearing: a belief held by intelligent people in every culture and century is not stupidity, and a skeptic who treats it as such has stopped thinking. It earns nothing more. (3) The sound version. - If the aim was the age of the earth, the sound version is whatever evidence Dr Smith has, laid out so a geologist could check it. The degree adds nothing once the evidence is on the table. - If the aim was the larger claim, that God made the world, then the age of the earth was never the road to it. The arguments that carry that claim, one from the universe having a beginning and one from its fine-tuning for life, do not depend on how old the earth is, so neither side of the in-house dispute has to win before they can be made. - An apologist who reaches for a doctorate has usually reached past a better argument. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "What's his doctorate in? If it's in the rocks, let's hear what he found in the rocks. If it isn't, the degree is doing the talking, and the person we're talking to will notice before we do." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Natural Theology: Cosmic Fine-Tuning

(●) A charge that misses: "Citing 'most scholars agree' on the minimal facts is an appeal to authority. Apologists count heads and call it evidence." + The charge is aimed at Gary Habermas's minimal facts argument, a case for the resurrection built only on well-evidenced facts that nearly all specialists grant, skeptics included. It sounds like the dentist again. It is not. (1) What the charge claims. - Habermas's 2005 survey of the literature since 1975 found broad agreement among specialists that Jesus died by crucifixion, that his disciples sincerely believed they saw him afterwards, that Paul and James were converted by what they took to be appearances, and, with less agreement, that the tomb was empty. - The charge says treating agreement as evidence is counting heads, and heads are not evidence. (2) Why the charge misses. - Douglas Walton treats an appeal to an expert as an argumentation scheme, a standard pattern of reasoning, good or bad depending on the case. He tests it with six questions. Is the source an expert? An expert in this field? Actually saying this? Reliable? In agreement with other experts? Resting on evidence? - The minimal facts pass every one. These are historians and New Testament scholars, the claims are historical (what a first-century group believed and did, not whether God raised anyone), the survey is of their published work, and agreement is what it found. - The sixth question is where the charge goes wrong. Consensus is not the reason for the facts. The reasons are what the scholars themselves looked at: the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, the multiple independent accounts, the opponents who explained the empty tomb rather than denying it. Agreement signals those reasons have been checked by people with no motive to be generous. - So this is the scheme's legitimate version, the way Hardwig says knowledge normally travels. Walton treats an appeal to expert opinion as presumptive: it holds until one of the six questions knocks it down, and here none does. - The test to carry away has two halves. Would this person's opinion count if they were not famous? And is the question one their training answers? The dentist fails the second. A New Testament scholar on what the disciples believed passes both. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need to show the appeal reaching past the field. If an apologist says "most scholars agree, therefore Jesus rose", the charge lands: many of those scholars do not grant the resurrection, and their agreement cannot be stretched over a conclusion they reject. - Habermas says as much himself. The survey describes what scholars hold and cannot settle whether the events happened. The second step, that the resurrection explains those facts better than any rival, has to be argued on its own, and it is. - The charge partly lands on the percentage. A figure from a literature survey gets quoted as though it were a vote, and the vote as though it were the truth. The number should never be the weapon. (4) How to answer it. - "You're right that a head-count proves nothing about whether the tomb was empty. The count tells you which facts the specialists have stopped fighting over. Pick one, and let's look at the evidence they looked at." See also: CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas) CE / Resurrection: Core Facts Argument (Craig)