11.8 Tutorial: Prima Facie Reasonable vs. Prima Facie Unreasonable Appeals to Authority

by | Oct 28, 2018

In the text, we laid out ten criteria for assessing appeals to authority. We saw that the authority needs to be: (1) identified; (2) qualified; (3) personally credible; (4) testifying in his/her field; (5) current; (6) quoted in full; (7) base his/her testimony upon open evidence; (8) use only method and theories generally accepted in the field; (9) the more numerous the experts the better; and (10) the more varied the experts the better. But when we are making a quick judgment about a case in front of us, the first questions we ask are about the expert’s personal credibility, especially any overt biases, whether the expert is testifying in his/her field, and the qualification of the expert. We look for broad indicators of expertise, the ones we can see without doing research.

For each of the following, indicate whether it is a prima facie reasonable or prima facie unreasonable/fallacious appeal to authority, and why.