You're misunderstanding my intent. I'm not trying to argue from authority, but how should I, as a layman, understand which authorities should be believed and which should not, especially when my own observations already match what they're saying?
Especially when considering that the sheer volume of those who disagree with me is just another form of argument from authority.
So, this is IMO a critically important skill for skeptics that we have neglected organizationally for various reasons. To the point where I walked away from organized skepticism, as I am convinced that until we get closer consensus on how to evaluate expert claims, we have nothing to offer the public. I wrote about it for years, posted on this forum and its JREF predecessor, but it's never achieved much. I sort of moved on.
Specifically, the evaluation of expert claims is usually evaluating a scientific claim (although of course there are other domains of expertise that come up). This is sadly exactly where skeptics fall down the hardest. We're ****** at it.
When an argument with a fallacy backs up our opponent, we mock them. When an argument with a fallacy backs us up, we pretend we didn't notice the philosophical problem. It's bad critical thinking, bad practice, internally inconsistent, muddled thinking, and disastrous when exercised in an attempt at public education.
The core problem is confusion about whether Argument from Authority is such a knock down fallacy that it has to be dismissed a priori, or is the argument still somehow salvageable under certain circumstances?
:: analogy ::
Just as a comparison... we have a fallacy that describes observing something in a small group and just jumping ahead and saying it will apply to everybody: Fallacy of Composition
WP.
Can we always dismiss these claims outright? Well, no, there are circumstances where it's actually a good argument. Some of them are called 'clinical trials'.
Some fallacies are not *terrible* arguments, if specific circumstances are met, such as in this example, controlled randomization and representative sampling.
:: back to claims on expert topics ::
Officially, if you take more advanced courses in critical thinking beyond the 101 level... the 101 is a good start and fallacies are a core topic in the syllabus, so I'm not knocking it. But it's sort of like when we get that guy here who took grade 10 physics and is arguing with a PhD about the speed of light. The fallacy people are sort of the new guy and ideally appreciate there's more to learn, but not all do, and it's a problem I don't know how to address.
Evaluating expertise has some criteria that soften the blow of Argument from Authority. To the point where there's a push to rename the fallacy "Argument from Questionable Authority".
Among other criteria, critical analysts are asked to consider:
* is the claimant an expert in the field in question
* is the claimant regarded as a current expert by his peers
* is there any sort of consensus on this topic within the field yet
* is the claimant aligned with this consensus
* does the claimant have a strong conflict of interest
The critical analyst would have to weigh and compare the mixed results in order to assign a degree of confidence toward the claim being true.
This is not a complete list, but it hits what I've seen in most critical thinking / logic textbooks that deal with medical ethics, expert decisionmaking, and laypersons' strategies for making sense of claims that are out of our scope of expertise.
:: internal consistency ::
Here's where the internal consistency breaks down... there's skeptics who say, nah, we need to do our own research, ignore the white tower eggheads, just bone up on the subject ourselves, no authority involved.
So that's quite the project if we can't discriminate among claimants. We need to treat Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, or Dr. Wakefield, Aunt Mildred, and four hundred thousand Google hits the same as a peer reviewed study in the NEJM. That's a lot of reading. It's also going to be a lot of misinformation.
My opinion is that it just shoves the Authority around.
* Anybody citing a paper from, say, JAMA or NEJM or Lancet is assigning that journal as an authority.
* Anybody digging deeper and doing their own study in their own lab is assigning previous researchers whose (untested by themselves) assumptions they treat as baseline as an authority
* And the manufacturers of the equipment
* And the people who calibrate and maintain the equipment
* And their elementary, highschool, and university instructors who taught them the background assumptions they've never independently validated, oh, and the authors of all those textbooks with formulas and values for constants and so on.
My proposal is that shifting to thinking in terms of Argument from Questionable Authority as being the fallacy restores internal consistency about how we are assigning truth value to all the pieces we bring to the table when evaluating a claim. Textbooks have been wrong, but they're probably not. NEJM has been wrong, but it's probably not. Dr. X could be wrong, but based on the criteria, he's probably not.
