Critical Thinking by Example

Fallacy of Appeal to Tradition This fallacy occurs when it is asserted that a position P is true because it has always been believed, and the tradition is not relevant to the acceptability of P.
Example 6.11 “Of course it is right to spank your children when they misbehave. My parents spanked me; their parents spanked them, and so on.”
Fallacy of Improper Appeal to an Epistemic Authority This fallacy occurs when one or more of the following conditions are not met. 1. The authority must be identified. 2. The authority must be respected in her field. 3. The authority must be speaking about a matter in her field of expertise. 4. The matter must be one in which there is a reasonable consensus amongst the relevant experts. In example 6.12 the first condition is not met: the authority is not identified sufficiently to identify him or her (there is more than one famous British physicist). Without knowing the identity of the physicist, it is impossible to ascertain whether he or she is respected in the field. The third condition is not met, since the question of whether we ought to genetically engineer humans is an ethical question, and there is no indication that the physicist is an expert in the realm of ethics. Finally, the fourth condition is not met, since there is no consensus amongst ethicists as to whether we ought to genetically engineer humans.	Example 6.12 “We need to genetically engineer humans to be much smarter. Don’t take my word for it, I saw a famous British physicist make this claim on television last night.”

Chapter 7: Sufficiency