Appeal to authority

An argument from authority, also called an appeal to authority, is a form of logical and persuasive argument using expert opinion to defend the likelihood of the truth of the matter asserted. More precisely, it is a defeasible argument and a statistical syllogism taking this form:

The argument can lead to an informal fallacy when misused.

Historically, opinion on the appeal to authority has been divided as it is listed as a valid argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources.

John Locke, in his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was the first recorded to identify argumentum ad verecundiam as a specific category of argument. He noted that it can be misused by taking advantage of the "respect" and "submission" of the reader or listener to persuade them to accept the conclusion. Over time, logic textbooks started to adopt and change from Locke's terminology to refer more specifically to fallacious uses of the argument from authority. By the mid-twentieth century, it was common for logic textbooks to refer to the "Fallacy of appealing to authority," even while noting that "this method of argument is not always strictly fallacious."

In the Western rationalistic tradition and in early modern philosophy, appealing to authority was considered a logical fallacy.

More recently, logic textbooks have shifted to a more specific approach to these arguments, now often referring to the fallacy as the "Argument from Unqualified Authority" or the "Argument from Unreliable Authority".

However, these are still not the only recognized forms of appeal to authority. For example, a 2012 guidebook on philosophical logic describes appeals to authority not merely as arguments from unqualified or unreliable authority, but as arguments from authority in general. In addition to appeals lacking evidence of the authority's reliability, the book states that arguments from authority are fallacious if there is a lack of "good evidence" that the authorities appealed to possess "adequate justification for their views."

And there are other recognized fallacious arguments from authority. Among them, the "Fallacies" entry by Bradley Dowden in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that "appealing to authority as a reason to believe something is fallacious ... when authorities disagree on this subject (except for the occasional lone wolf)" The "Fallacies" entry by Hans Hansen in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy similarly states that "when there is controversy, and authorities are divided, it is an error to base one’s view on the authority of just some of them." However, Hansen's entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not appear to share Dowden's exception regarding "lone wolf" dissenting authorities.

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