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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (585123)	9/13/2010 12:37:45 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572259

The "appeal to authority" is not universally fallacious. As a matter of formal deductive logic it is. Nothing is right because of who says it. That's particuarly the case when your saying that a logical argument is valid because of the person making it, but also holds true for claims of facts. In informal logic or inductive reasoning it isn't. Pointing out that someone in a certain area is an authority or otherwise has good reason to know, and to be honest about a specific point of information, and then suggesting because of that, we should seriously consider what they are saying, and even under certain circumstances probably just accept it in the absence of any reason not to, is not a logical fallacy. (But basing the claim on a false authority is an informal fallacy.) Informally as a method of screening who you are going to spend your time listening to or reading ad-hominem isn't a fallacy either, esp not for claims of fact, when the source is seen as biased or unreliable, deductive logic stands or falls on its own, but claims of fact, from highly unreliable sources deserve some degree of discounting, certainly not blind acceptance. So, given the choice between the CBO, who have actual economists on staff, and Tenchu or you, it isn't fallacious to take the CBO over you two. For claims of fact yes. For logical arguments not so much. I'm not disputing any actual factual points laid out by the CBO, I'm talking about their reasoning and methodology. Their estimates of the benefit to the economy are built in to their models. Spend $X government dollars, on Y, and get an economic benefit of Z. They aren't cases of researching the actual facts, they are just following a formula which assumes the general conclusion they arrive out. If an amazing authority, the best authority you can find about any subject at all (and the CBO on question like this is far from that, in fact it could reasonably said there is no real authority on such an issue so any argument from authority is based on a false authority), assumes their conclusion, than their argument shows us nothing important to the overall question.