5 ms·

You lost me at "experts". Blatant appeal to authority. The story should be able to stand on its own.

• smoldesu 5y ago
  To be fair, a good argument only needs to appeal to two sides of the rhetorical triangle. Logos and Ethos are two perfectly viable platforms to make a statement on.
• pharrington 5y ago
  Even formal mathematical proofs "appeal to authority" when they invoke theorems without re-deriving them every time. It's a shorthand reference to knowledge that time and energy has already been spent discovering. The parallel for this in society, where the present cumulative scope of knowledge is completely impossible for a single person to independently discover on their own, is called expertise. When you are denigrating experts, you are denigrating acquired, shared knowledge. Pure reason has limits, but one of the neat things about rational argumentation is that it can be applied to itself to discover what alot of its own limits are.
  • iratic0 5y ago
    No, because with mathematical proof you can realistically go through the derivations to approve/refute them. It is a short hand referencing something which can be disproven, therefore not an appeal to authority. Using "experts" here IS an appeal to authority. Bias is at play here in a way that it is not in mathematical proofs. "Experts" is used here to provide cognitive ease to the reader, as a way of encouraging them not to examine deeper.