Argumentum ad populum

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In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for 'appeal to the people') [1] is a fallacious argument which is based on claiming a truth or affirming something is good or correct because many people think so. [2]

Contents

Alternative names

Other names for the fallacy include:

Description

Argumentum ad populum is a type of informal fallacy, [1] [14] specifically a fallacy of relevance, [15] [16] and is similar to an argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam). [14] [4] [9] It uses an appeal to the beliefs, tastes, or values of a group of people, [12] stating that because a certain opinion or attitude is held by a majority, or even everyone, it is therefore correct. [12] [17]

Appeals to popularity are common in commercial advertising that portrays products as desirable because they are used by many people [9] or associated with popular sentiments [18] instead of communicating the merits of the products themselves.

The inverse argument, that something that is unpopular must be flawed, is also a form of this fallacy. [6]

The fallacy is similar in structure to certain other fallacies that involve a confusion between the "justification" of a belief and its "widespread acceptance" by a given group of people. When an argument uses the appeal to the beliefs of a group of experts, it takes on the form of an appeal to authority; if the appeal relates to the beliefs of a group of respected elders or the members of one's community over a long time, then it takes on the form of an appeal to tradition.

Scholarship

The philosopher Irving Copi defined argumentum ad populum differently from an appeal to popular opinion itself, [19] as an attempt to rouse the "emotions and enthusiasms of the multitude". [19] [20]

Douglas N. Walton argues that appeals to popular opinion can be logically valid in some cases, such as in political dialogue within a democracy. [21]

Reversals

In some circumstances, a person may argue that the fact that Y people believe X to be true implies that X is false. This line of thought is closely related to the appeal to spite fallacy given that it invokes a person's contempt for the general populace or something about the general populace to persuade them that most are wrong about X. This ad populum reversal commits the same logical flaw as the original fallacy given that the idea "X is true" is inherently separate from the idea that "Y people believe X": "Y people believe in X as true, purely because Y people believe in it, and not because of any further considerations. Therefore X must be false." While Y people can believe X to be true for fallacious reasons, X might still be true. Their motivations for believing X do not affect whether X is true or false.

Y = most people, a given quantity of people, people of a particular demographic.

X = a statement that can be true or false.

Examples:

In general, the reversal usually goes: "Most people believe A and B are both true. B is false. Thus, A is false." The similar fallacy of chronological snobbery is not to be confused with the ad populum reversal. Chronological snobbery is the claim that if belief in both X and Y was popularly held in the past and if Y was recently proved to be untrue then X must also be untrue. That line of argument is based on a belief in historical progress and not—like the ad populum reversal is—on whether or not X and/or Y is currently popular.

Valid uses

Appeals to public opinion are valid in situations where consensus is the determining factor for the validity of a statement, such as linguistic usage and definitions of words.

Language

Linguistic descriptivists argue that correct grammar, spelling, and expressions are defined by the language's speakers, especially in languages which do not have a central governing body. According to this viewpoint, if an incorrect expression is commonly used, it becomes correct. In contrast, linguistic prescriptivists believe that incorrect expressions are incorrect regardless of how many people use them. [22]

Mathematics

Special functions are mathematical functions that have well-established names and mathematical notations due to their significance in mathematics and other scientific fields.

There is no formal definition of what makes a function a special function; instead, the term special function is defined by consensus. Functions generally considered to be special functions include logarithms, trigonometric functions, and the Bessel functions.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ These ideas are paraphrased from this presentation by authors Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath in which they state:
    • "For example, everybody would love to listen to fabulous underground bands that nobody has ever head of before, but not all of us can do this. Once too many people find out about this great band, then they are no longer underground. And so we say that it's sold out or 'mainstream' or even 'co-opted by the system'. What has really happened is simply that too many people have started buying their albums so that listening to them no longer serves as a source of distinction. The real rebels therefore have to go off and find some new band to listen to that nobody else knows about in order to preserve this distinction and their sense of superiority over others."
  2. ↑ These ideas are paraphrased from the 'Baader Meinhof Gang' article at the True Crime Library, which states:
    • "Gudrun Ensslin may have been wrong about many or most things, she was not speaking foolishly when she spoke of the middle-aged folk of her era as "the Auschwitz generation". Not all of them had been Nazis, of course, but a great many had supported Hitler. Many had been in the Hitler Youth and served in the armed forces, fighting Nazi wars of conquest. A minority had ineffectively resisted Nazism but, as a whole, it was a generation coping with an extraordinary burden of guilt and shame ... many of the people who joined what would come to be known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang were motivated by an unconscious desire to prove to themselves that they would have risked their lives to defeat Nazism ... West Germans well knew. Many of them had relatives in East Germany and were well aware that life under communism was regimented and puritanical at best and often monstrously oppressive."

Related Research Articles

Ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments that are fallacious. Often nowadays this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion often using a totally irrelevant, but often highly charged attribute of the opponent's character or background. The most common form of this fallacy is "A" makes a claim of "fact", to which "B" asserts that "A" has a personal trait, quality or physical attribute that is repugnant thereby going off-topic, and hence "B" concludes that "A" has their "fact" wrong – without ever addressing the point of the debate. Many contemporary politicians routinely use ad hominem attacks, some of which can be encapsulated to a derogatory nickname for a political opponent used instead of political argumentation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Argument from ignorance</span> Informal fallacy

Argument from ignorance, also known as appeal to ignorance, is a fallacy in informal logic. The fallacy is committed when one asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true. If a proposition has not yet been proven true, one is not entitled to conclude, solely on that basis, that it is false, and if a proposition has not yet been proven false, one is not entitled to conclude, solely on that basis, that it is true. Another way of expressing this is that a proposition is true only if proven true, and a proposition is false only if proven false. If no proof is offered, then the proposition can be called unproven, undecided, inconclusive, an open problem or a conjecture. In debates, appealing to ignorance is sometimes an attempt to shift the burden of proof. The term was likely coined by philosopher John Locke in the late 17th century.

In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question or assuming the conclusion is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. Historically, begging the question refers to a fault in a dialectical argument in which the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true. In modern usage, it has come to refer to an argument in which the premises assume the conclusion without supporting it. This makes it an example of circular reasoning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fallacy</span> Argument that uses faulty reasoning

A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument that may appear to be well-reasoned if unnoticed. The term was introduced in the Western intellectual tradition by the Aristotelian De Sophisticis Elenchis.

Poisoning the well is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say. Poisoning the well can be a special case of argumentum ad hominem, and the term was first used with this sense by John Henry Newman in his work Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864).

Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam, is an argument that concludes a hypothesis to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true. Moreover, in categorizing consequences as either desirable or undesirable, such arguments inherently contain subjective points of view.

Argument to moderation —also known as the false compromise, argument from middle ground, fallacy of gray, middle ground fallacy, or golden mean fallacy—is the fallacy that the truth is always in the middle of two opposites. It does not necessarily suggest that an argument for the middle solution or for a compromise is always fallacious, but rather applies primarily in cases where such a position is ill-informed, unfeasible, or impossible, or where an argument is incorrectly made that a position is correct simply because it is in the middle.

Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false. It is also called argument to logic, the fallacy fallacy, the fallacist's fallacy, and the bad reasons fallacy.

The association fallacy is a formal logical fallacy that asserts that properties of one thing must also be properties of another thing if both things belong to the same group. For example, a fallacious arguer may claim that "bears are animals, and bears are dangerous; therefore your dog, which is also an animal, must be dangerous."

A complex question, trick question, multiple question, fallacy of presupposition, or plurium interrogationum is a question that has a complex presupposition. The presupposition is a proposition that is presumed to be acceptable to the respondent when the question is asked. The respondent becomes committed to this proposition when they give any direct answer. When a presupposition includes an admission of wrongdoing, it is called a "loaded question" and is a form of entrapment in legal trials or debates. The presupposition is called "complex" if it is a conjunctive proposition, a disjunctive proposition, or a conditional proposition. It could also be another type of proposition that contains some logical connective in a way that makes it have several parts that are component propositions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Informal fallacy</span> Form of incorrect argument in natural language

Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not just due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but can also be due to their content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them. These misleading appearances are often connected to various aspects of natural language, such as ambiguous or vague expressions, or the assumption of implicit premises instead of making them explicit.

"Three men make a tiger" is a Chinese proverb or chengyu. "Three men make a tiger" refers to an individual's tendency to accept absurd information as long as it is repeated by enough people. It refers to the idea that if an unfounded premise or urban legend is mentioned and repeated by many individuals, the premise will be erroneously accepted as the truth. This concept is related to communal reinforcement or the fallacy of argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad nauseam.

In logic and philosophy, a formal fallacy is a pattern of reasoning rendered invalid by a flaw in its logical structure that can neatly be expressed in a standard logic system, for example propositional logic. It is defined as a deductive argument that is invalid. The argument itself could have true premises, but still have a false conclusion. Thus, a formal fallacy is a fallacy in which deduction goes wrong, and is no longer a logical process. This may not affect the truth of the conclusion, since validity and truth are separate in formal logic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas N. Walton</span> Canadian academic and author (1942–2020)

Douglas Neil Walton was a Canadian academic and author, known for his books and papers on argumentation, logical fallacies and informal logic. He was a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and before that (2008–2014), he held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor. Walton's work has been used to better prepare legal arguments and to help develop artificial intelligence.

Appeal to the stone, also known as argumentum ad lapidem, is a logical fallacy that dismisses an argument as untrue or absurd. The dismissal is made by stating or reiterating that the argument is absurd, without providing further argumentation. This theory is closely tied to proof by assertion due to the lack of evidence behind the statement and its attempt to persuade without providing any evidence.

Flag-waving is a fallacious argument or propaganda technique used to justify an action based on the undue connection to nationalism or patriotism or benefit for an idea, group or country. It is a variant of argumentum ad populum. This fallacy appeals to emotion instead to logic of the audience aiming to manipulate them to win an argument. All ad populum fallacies are based on the presumption that the recipients already have certain beliefs, biases, and prejudices about the issue.

In logic, modus non excipiens is a valid rule of inference that is closely related to modus ponens. This argument form was created by Bart Verheij to address certain arguments which are types of modus ponens arguments, but must be considered to be invalid. An instance of a particular modus ponens type argument is

An argument from authority is a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority figure is used as evidence to support an argument.

References

  1. 1 2 Walton, Douglas N. (1999). Appeal to Popular Opinion. The Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 61–62. ISBN   0-271-01818-6. LCCN   98031384.
  2. ↑ Ayala, Maite (January 11, 2021). "Falacia ad populum: definición, características, ejemplos". Lifeder (in Spanish). Retrieved August 1, 2021.
  3. 1 2 Conway, David; Munson, Ronald (1997). The Elements of Reasoning (2nd ed.). Wadsworth Publishing Company. pp. 127–128. ISBN   0-534-51672-6.
  4. 1 2 3 Epstein, Richard L.; Rooney, Michael (2017). Critical Thinking (5th ed.). Socorro, N.M.: Advanced Reasoning Forum. p. 76. ISBN   978-1-938421-32-7. LCCN   2017471425.
  5. ↑ Walton (1999), p. 123.
  6. 1 2 3 Govier, Trudy (2009). A Practical Study of Argument (7th ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 162. ISBN   978-0-495-60340-5.
  7. ↑ Tittle, Peg (2011). Critical Thinking: An Appeal to Reason. Routledge. p. 136. ISBN   978-0-203-84161-7.
  8. ↑ Walton (1999), pp. 81, 85.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Engel, S. Morris (1994). Fallacies and Pitfalls of Language: The Language Trap. New York: Dover Publications. pp. 145–6. ISBN   0-486-28274-0. LCCN   94019770.
  10. ↑ Hinderer, Drew (2005). Building Arguments. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN   978-1-59752-076-8.
  11. 1 2 McCraw, Benjamin W. (2018). "Appeal to the People". In Arp, Robert; Barbone, Steven; Bruce, Michael (eds.). Bad Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Fallacies in Western Philosophy. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 112–114. ISBN   978-1-119-16790-7.
  12. 1 2 3 Van Vleet, Jacob E. (2011). Informal Logical Fallacies: A Brief Guide. University Press of America. p. 20. ISBN   978-0-7618-5432-6. LCCN   2016448028.
  13. ↑ Walton (1999), p. 197.
  14. 1 2 Hansen, Hans (May 29, 2015). "Fallacies". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Stanford University.
  15. ↑ Rescher, Nicholas; Schagrin, Morton L. "Fallacy". Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved December 21, 2019.
  16. ↑ Hitchcock, David (2017). On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking. Springer. p. 406. ISBN   978-3-319-53561-6. LCCN   2017930649.
  17. ↑ Woods, John (2012). "A History of the Fallacies in Western Logic". In Gabbay, D.M.; Pelletier, F.J.; Woods, J. (eds.). Logic: A History of its Central Concepts. Handbook of the History of Logic. North-Holland. p. 561. ISBN   978-0-08-093170-8.
  18. ↑ Walton, Douglas N. (1989). "Appeals to emotion". Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation. Cambridge University Press. p. 84. ISBN   0-521-37032-9. LCCN   88030762.
  19. 1 2 Freeman, James B. (1995). "The Appeal to Popularity and Presumption by Common Knowledge". In Hansen, Hans V.; Pinto, Robert C. (eds.). Fallacies: Classical and Contemporary Readings. The Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 266. ISBN   0-271-01416-4.
  20. ↑ Walton, Douglas N. (1992). "Argumentum Ad Populum". The Place of Emotion in Argument. The Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 66–7. ISBN   0-271-00833-4. LCCN   91030515.
  21. ↑ Walton (1992), p. 65.
  22. ↑ "Editing Tips: Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism". April 15, 2021.

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