Appeals to authority are some of the most common uses of invalid arguments or beliefs stemming from a lack of alignment with reason. It is easy for unintelligent people to just default to what someone else says about an issue, especially if they have some strong level of emotional appreciation for that person for arbitrary reasons. The grand irony other than people thinking something is true just because someone else says so, as opposed to because of logical proof (not even evidences are proof and hearsay is scarcely evidence in plenty of cases) is that people will believe in conflicting ideas based on appeals to authority. When expressed in words, this looks like two people both arguing that the other one is wrong because someone they subjectively and probably needlessly respect says so.
Instead of imitating the fools who respond to someone else's idiotic appeal to authority with their own idiotic appeal to authority--as if a person's social standing, cultural background, age, gender, professional credentials, or any other such factor means they are not stupid or lying--a rational person just looks to reason. They do not pretend any person, regardless of their societal standing or experiences, can know what is locked outside of human epistemological limitations or that someone's words are necessary to understand logical truths that cannot have been any other way (logical axioms and so on), which are then used to reason out other knowable truths.
There are only two possibilities when it comes to logical facts, the only kind of fact that underpins all others and is inherently knowable by default: either one can prove a logical fact to oneself just by reasoning it out, like the fact that some things logically follow from others or that every idea is either true or false, or logic reveals one cannot prove something because it is beyond human epistemological limitations, like whether I am in a simulation that originates in the baseline external world. In none of these cases does the testimony or expressed belief of someone else give one new knowledge about concepts or metaphysics that is not already within the grasp of rationalists except when it comes to encountering information that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, such as the supposed "evidence" for a multiverse.
If one cannot presently prove with the light of reason that something is true, false, or possible based on the concept alone, then one needs to come to rationalism so that one understands what it means to logically prove something in the first place or recognize an idea as unprovable. Since many things fall into the category of logical possibility but ultimate unverifiability, from specific events that will happen in the future to whether the external world is even as it appears or whether other people even exist at all, the words or beliefs of alleged authorities are irrelevant on these matters. At most they can bring to light evidences that cannot be proven to establish anything more than that the evidences are there, while purely logical truths and the only facts about concepts and experiences reason reveals are accessible to literally anyone who seeks them.
There are no special authority figures who can deserve to have their worldviews believed because of credentials or social influence, but this is not about something as petty as conservatives or liberals responding to each other's appeals to authority with more appeals to authority; it is the very nature of epistemology. The things that authorities focus on are either knowable without their help or unknowable by all humans bound to ordinary epistemological limitations line the inability to confirm if one's memories are of real events, meaning that they are philosophically unnecessary. Anything they say that is logically possible could be true, but that does not mean it is, and in either case their endorsement, beliefs, or urging is epistemologically irrelevant. All appeals to all authorities are fallacies held to out of subjective longing and persuasion instead of proof.
No comments:
Post a Comment