Saturday, December 2, 2017

Appeal To Future Experience

When people try to support a claim by asserting that their listeners will one day know that the claim is correct although no current proof exists, they have committed a fallacy that, to my knowledge, does not have a formal title.  I do not know what else to call it, so I will refer to it as the fallacy of "appeal to future experience".  Have you ever noticed this fallacy before?

Instead of presenting actual proof or evidence, someone who appeals to future experience tries to escape the burden of proof by telling the other person that there will come a time when he or she will understand, and thus the claimer does not need to immediately verify the proposition.  In arguing this way, the claimer is explicitly or implicitly admitting that there is nothing else with which to demonstrate the veracity of the claim (unless the claimer is just withholding legitimate information in favor of arguing fallaciously).  There is no need to argue like this if actual proof exists.  If this is the whole of the argument, then the argument is unsound.

What might examples of this fallacy be?  One can see it surface in debates about theism and atheism when either side claims that after death the opponent "will know" that the other position was correct.  As another example, consider a person who thinks that scientific "laws" must by necessity not differ between the past, present, and future: an appeal to future experience is the only way to argue that one knows for sure that things like scientific laws will remain constant in the future.  The solution to this is simple: make probabilistic estimates about these future events without making outright claims about them, and the fallacy can be avoided.

Many fallacies overlap, and to commit one often means more than one has been committed.  Clearly, other fallacies are involved in making this "appeal to future experience" (begging the question, appeal to probability, and so on); even so, this appeal involves a specific error that, if it has a name at all, I do not know the specific title of.  Thus I have called it here the appeal to future experience and may call it this in future posts.

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