One important concept that I believe should be discussed a little bit more is the concept of "bad appealing to authority". An appeal to authority is when we accept a claim because of who said it. Bad appealing to authority is important in arguments because when people believe in bad appeal to authority they are believing in false information. Bad appeal of authority can sometimes be a claim made by someone who does not know much about the claim they are making. People usually fall for bad appeals to authority because other people believe the claim is true. The example I used in my previous blog post about bad appeal to authority was the product Airborne. Airborne is a product that is advertised to cure the common cold. This is a bad appeal to authority because everyone believes this product simply because Airborne says it works. There has been no real clinical testing to prove the claims that Airborne has made.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html
http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/itl/graphics/adhom/author.html
Hey! I agree with you! We often give too much trust into one source and we forget to ask ourselves if it is a valid source. We can't well very much trust all that we read on the internet. I liked the exercise where we had to pick an ad and dissect it and its claims. We can't always trust their customer reviews on their own website because they could be filtering people who said bad things and only put the few good things. In my previous post I used the example of an antivirus software. There's so many now that you don't know which one is trustworthy. It claimed to be the best.
ReplyDeleteHello!
ReplyDeleteI agree too that people tend to fall into believing anything that is said by people. I believe that people often believe what certain companies say about products because it's what the audience wants to hear. They are lured into it because it's what the audience is looking for. And it's true we can't always trust what we hear. The example you used for Airborne is a good example. Some individuals don't want to get sick and if they feel a little sniffle or cough they'll go out of their way to take anything that will prevent them from being sick. Sources found on the internet are not always the best ways of accepting claims since most information on the internet nowadays are made by the general public who random people that their opinion or false information.