[extropy-chat] Appeal to Authority

[gts]

corrected for a serious grammatical error... -gts

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:13:08 -0500, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:

Moreover, [arguments against appeals to authority are] *officially* a  
logical error! An irony that did
not escape Ian himself in a later post:

Appeal to authority must be a fallacy, after all it's listed as such by  
authorities on argument! ;^)

Not sure, but I think Ian's emoticon means 'tongue firmly implanted in  
cheek' which is in any case
exactly how I took it. Surely these authorities on argument have presented  
valid arguments as to why
appeals to authority are fallacious. If so then this rule of valid  
argument is not an appeal to authority or
in any other way a fallacious argument, but rather a conclusion to a valid  
argument.

Personally I am not very interested in this subject, per se. Arguments  
 from authority seem clearly
fallacious to me, even if I am not immune from sometimes presenting them.  
More interesting to me, and
the reason I mentioned your name, Lee, is the idea that even so-called  
valid logical arguments might
sometimes be fallacious. This idea comes to me from evolutionary  
epistemology, especially this essay
that I found very illuminating:

Cracking the Dogmatic Framework of Thought
http://www.the-rathouse.com/bartdogmatic.html

-gts