Appeal to Authority: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

This fallacy name is commonly applied to two similar but ''distinctly different'' fallacies: Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Irrelevant Authority. It's more-or-less the opposite of [[Ad Hominem]].

 

==== Tropes which rely on or use this fallacy ====

* [[Because I Said So]]

 

== [[Live-Action TV]] ==

* On ''[[Quite Interesting|QI]]'', when discussing the fact if you fire a bullet parallel to the ground and drop a bullet from the same height at the same time, they will hit the ground at the same time, [[Stephen Fry]] appeals to the audience, saying, "Are there any scientists here who will back me up on this?" Rich Hall then seems to [[Lampshade Hanging|point out]] this fallacy by following up with, "Or any assassins?"

== Real Life ==

* A product called "Vitamins Of Linus Pauling, Two Times Nobel Prize winner" is marketed. His first Nobel was for Chemistry, on the nature of chemical bonds. That's great, but it has rather little to do with vitamins. His second Nobel is the Peace Prize, which has nothing at all to do with vitamins. His connection with vitamins is that he became rather ...obsessed... with mega-doses of vitamin C in his later years, but that part of his work caused much controversy and his results were unreproducible.

* Marketers of pseudoscience do this quite frequently by appealing to Dr. So-And-So, who is possibly [[Not That Kind of Doctor]] or else regarded as a crank by his or her colleagues. For example, Deepak Chopra may have a legitimate medical degree, but his focus has moved on to pure pseudoscience and most practitioners of science-based, evidence-based medicine consider him to have gone over to the dark side. Saying, "Deepak Chopra said X, therefore it's true," is an [[Appeal to Authority]]. Saying, "Deepak Chopra is a quack, therefore this claim is false," is another fallacy, the [[Ad Hominem]]. The claim stands or falls based on ''evidence.''

*** Penn and Teller's show [[Penn and Teller Bullshit|Bulls--t!]] did an episode on multilevel marketing. A proprietary drink was marketed with Dr. Chopra's name getting dropped in the pitch. It did not impress the customer, who did not know who Dr. Chopra was.

[[Category:Logical Fallacies]]

[[Category:Appeal To Authority]]