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"You’re basis for truth often relies on authority of your source." No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (

"You’re basis for truth often relies on authority of your source." No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (often shortened to Verecundiam, or Appeal to Authority in English.) Saying "I know this because authority X said so" - you don't know it at all. It has the epistemological status of outright faith. What counts is the connection of statements to reality and their logical integrated cohesion as a whole. And that's regardless of the source. Experts/Authorities are neither automatically right or wrong. No honest expert or authority ever demands that their statements be taken on faith. If they actually know what they're talking about, their statements can be logically defended and tied to reality. This is the standard that everyone should be held to.

andrewflnr 3y ago
When you can personally verify all the facts about biology, physics, and distant places that you rely on to make decisions every day, then you can throw stones about arguments from authority. The rest of us use a little bit of faith.
- Jensson 3y ago
  You can trim that down quite a lot by assuming things aren't magic and use some minimal trust. If people say that cars are designed using newtonian physics, and you see your car is working, then you can say you have tested newtonian physics even if you don't understand the calculations. Basically you test what you have and trust the description of the implementation. If it works you can trust the whole chain. This is of course not 100%, but it is about as reliable as it can get for an individual. What you shouldn't do is assume that stuff that aren't 100% for sure are equally bad.
  - soulofmischief 3y ago
    It's quite easy to test this very assumption against chaos theory in a controlled environment and demonstrate why a system involving a complex chain of dependencies is increasingly unpredictable down the chain. As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works. So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge. For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    "Minimal trust" is still distinctly non-zero, which is my point. GP was trying to tell us we should get to zero, which is obviously not feasible.
- xorcist 3y ago
  Too much reductionism can be a dangerous thing. This is pretty much the Sophist argument and it is not enough to build a scientific foundation on. No, you don't need to personally verify all facts. But you need to be able to observe several indepedent validations. Yes, somewhere you have to take someone's word for fact, but multiple independent observations is a close approximation to the perfect scientific method. Related to that is the fact that science is not a democracy, and these observations have to be weighed against how they fit in our generally accepted worldview. Theory is more than just facts. Every little detail of science has to be questioned, just not by everyone personally. Where that limit for healthy skepticism is drawn is not something can answer logically, but we can recognize if it is completely wrong.
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    Yes, balance is needed. But you're not really disputing my thesis, either. There continue to be no shortcuts to truth.
- theclansman 3y ago
  People compare the laws of physics to unproven sociological hypothesis way too much. Yes I'm using the word law to exaggerate my point.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It's perfectly okay to stay agnostic on things you don't know about. It's always okay to say "I don't know." If you were forced to take a position on something you don't know about yourself, then looking to relevant authorities may be a decent enough plan, but who's forcing you to take positions on things?
Dudelander 3y ago
If it worked that way, the Gallic Wars wouldn't have happened because Caesar's account would be considered "argument from authority".
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  This is a very confused argument. Historians know that they can't take written sources at face value. For them, Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars is just another piece of evidence, not a Definite Proof of Everything That Was. Caesar is not considered an infallible authority, but that has no bearing on the general consensus that Gallic Wars actually took place.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It would be foolish to think the Gallic Wars happened precisely as Caesar wrote because his book was overt self-aggrandizing propaganda intended to boost his standing with the Roman public. But as to the Gallic Wars happening at all? There is corroborating evidence. Other Romans wrote about it, often to damn it, and they treated the existence of the war as a fact. He brought tons of Gallic slaves back to Rome which would corroborate the most basic facts of the claim (e.g. that there had been wars with Gallic people) to other Romans who weren't there to personally witness it. Furthermore there is modern archeological evidence of battles and massacres which roughly line up with some of what Caesar claimed to have done.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Everything boils down to faith eventually, though. Even trusting the evidence of your senses is a kind of faith. So the logical error isn't an epistemological error in all cases - you can see it as someone trying to minimize some distance metric they are operating on between Reality As It Is and Reality As I Know It by making a single hop to someone who, it is believed, has already done a lot of work investigating the ground claims.
- aeonik 3y ago
  This was the conclusion of René Descartes and the meaning behind "I think, therefore I am". It was the only safe conclusion he could come to after a deep series of introspection. Once he got there, he systematically built up a new framework of thought and reasoning, and we got modern science and philosophy from it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum?wprov=sfla1
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance. Even with softer topics like history, I think it should be essential to include context explaining how we know these things to be true. On what evidence are these beliefs based on? What is the level of epistemic uncertainty of the information we're being given?
- michpoch 3y ago
  > This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. Could you give some example of what would you like to prove, from your college curriculum?
  - TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
    Honestly, after reflecting on it I do think that I had more courses cover how to prove things ourselves than I was initially remembering. In particular, my physics and electronics labs were the most thorough. When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about chemistry. It's really been too long since I last studied the topic, so I can't remember any exact details. I just remember a vague sense of thinking "how did we figure this out in the first place?". Part of the responsibility definitely falls on me, I should've been more inquisitive when I was younger. Maybe the professors would've been willing to explain if I'd been more self-confident and courageous to visit their office hours to inquire further.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  My calc 2 professor would start every new concept by first describing (briefly) how the greeks would have done it with pure geometry, then how classic mathematics came to the solution from a different angle. Probably the only higher math course I took that I was excited to go to lecture every day.
quickthrower2 3y ago
TFA agrees with you, and explains why experts can disappoint.
RandomLensman 3y ago
In a lot of cases you cannot check the connection to reality. And things being plausible (or following some "logic") means little to nothing when it comes to being correct.

andrewflnr 3y ago

When you can personally verify all the facts about biology, physics, and distant places that you rely on to make decisions every day, then you can throw stones about arguments from authority. The rest of us use a little bit of faith.

Jensson 3y ago
You can trim that down quite a lot by assuming things aren't magic and use some minimal trust. If people say that cars are designed using newtonian physics, and you see your car is working, then you can say you have tested newtonian physics even if you don't understand the calculations. Basically you test what you have and trust the description of the implementation. If it works you can trust the whole chain. This is of course not 100%, but it is about as reliable as it can get for an individual. What you shouldn't do is assume that stuff that aren't 100% for sure are equally bad.
- soulofmischief 3y ago
  It's quite easy to test this very assumption against chaos theory in a controlled environment and demonstrate why a system involving a complex chain of dependencies is increasingly unpredictable down the chain. As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.
- cornholio 3y ago
  This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works. So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge. For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  "Minimal trust" is still distinctly non-zero, which is my point. GP was trying to tell us we should get to zero, which is obviously not feasible.
xorcist 3y ago
Too much reductionism can be a dangerous thing. This is pretty much the Sophist argument and it is not enough to build a scientific foundation on. No, you don't need to personally verify all facts. But you need to be able to observe several indepedent validations. Yes, somewhere you have to take someone's word for fact, but multiple independent observations is a close approximation to the perfect scientific method. Related to that is the fact that science is not a democracy, and these observations have to be weighed against how they fit in our generally accepted worldview. Theory is more than just facts. Every little detail of science has to be questioned, just not by everyone personally. Where that limit for healthy skepticism is drawn is not something can answer logically, but we can recognize if it is completely wrong.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  Yes, balance is needed. But you're not really disputing my thesis, either. There continue to be no shortcuts to truth.
theclansman 3y ago
People compare the laws of physics to unproven sociological hypothesis way too much. Yes I'm using the word law to exaggerate my point.
mcpackieh 3y ago
It's perfectly okay to stay agnostic on things you don't know about. It's always okay to say "I don't know." If you were forced to take a position on something you don't know about yourself, then looking to relevant authorities may be a decent enough plan, but who's forcing you to take positions on things?

Dudelander 3y ago

If it worked that way, the Gallic Wars wouldn't have happened because Caesar's account would be considered "argument from authority".

inglor_cz 3y ago
This is a very confused argument. Historians know that they can't take written sources at face value. For them, Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars is just another piece of evidence, not a Definite Proof of Everything That Was. Caesar is not considered an infallible authority, but that has no bearing on the general consensus that Gallic Wars actually took place.
mcpackieh 3y ago
It would be foolish to think the Gallic Wars happened precisely as Caesar wrote because his book was overt self-aggrandizing propaganda intended to boost his standing with the Roman public. But as to the Gallic Wars happening at all? There is corroborating evidence. Other Romans wrote about it, often to damn it, and they treated the existence of the war as a fact. He brought tons of Gallic slaves back to Rome which would corroborate the most basic facts of the claim (e.g. that there had been wars with Gallic people) to other Romans who weren't there to personally witness it. Furthermore there is modern archeological evidence of battles and massacres which roughly line up with some of what Caesar claimed to have done.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Everything boils down to faith eventually, though. Even trusting the evidence of your senses is a kind of faith. So the logical error isn't an epistemological error in all cases - you can see it as someone trying to minimize some distance metric they are operating on between Reality As It Is and Reality As I Know It by making a single hop to someone who, it is believed, has already done a lot of work investigating the ground claims.

aeonik 3y ago
This was the conclusion of René Descartes and the meaning behind "I think, therefore I am". It was the only safe conclusion he could come to after a deep series of introspection. Once he got there, he systematically built up a new framework of thought and reasoning, and we got modern science and philosophy from it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum?wprov=sfla1

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance. Even with softer topics like history, I think it should be essential to include context explaining how we know these things to be true. On what evidence are these beliefs based on? What is the level of epistemic uncertainty of the information we're being given?

michpoch 3y ago
> This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself. Could you give some example of what would you like to prove, from your college curriculum?
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  Honestly, after reflecting on it I do think that I had more courses cover how to prove things ourselves than I was initially remembering. In particular, my physics and electronics labs were the most thorough. When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about chemistry. It's really been too long since I last studied the topic, so I can't remember any exact details. I just remember a vague sense of thinking "how did we figure this out in the first place?". Part of the responsibility definitely falls on me, I should've been more inquisitive when I was younger. Maybe the professors would've been willing to explain if I'd been more self-confident and courageous to visit their office hours to inquire further.
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
My calc 2 professor would start every new concept by first describing (briefly) how the greeks would have done it with pure geometry, then how classic mathematics came to the solution from a different angle. Probably the only higher math course I took that I was excited to go to lecture every day.

quickthrower2 3y ago

TFA agrees with you, and explains why experts can disappoint.

RandomLensman 3y ago

In a lot of cases you cannot check the connection to reality. And things being plausible (or following some "logic") means little to nothing when it comes to being correct.