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16. Appeal to the People

 

Wireless Philosophy, Fallacies, 4:25. Original title: CRITICAL THINKING - Fallacies: Appeal to the People [HD]

Summary​

Jordan Mackenzie (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) explains the argumentum ad populum, or appeal to the people fallacy: the attempt to establish that a claim P is true on the grounds that a lot of people believe P to be true.

The cliff question​

Mackenzie opens with a childhood scene: pestering your parents to buy a fad toy like a Furby because "everyone at school" thinks it is the best toy ever. Parents respond with the classic "if everyone at school jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?", a fair call-out of an appeal to the people. Because this is an informal rather than a formal fallacy, the problem lies in the content of the argument: what is offered as support is not sufficient, or even necessarily relevant, to the conclusion.

The Justin Bieber argument​

An argument over whether Justin Bieber has musical talent supplies the formal example:

Premise 1: Millions of people think Justin Bieber has musical talent.
Conclusion: Therefore, Justin Bieber has musical talent.

The premise does not establish the conclusion, because something can be true even if everyone believes it false, and something can be false even if everyone believes it true.

Mackenzie does not want popular opinion dismissed altogether. If 98% of a sociology class answered "C" on an exam question, that is a reasonable basis for thinking "C" probably is correct, since so many people arriving at the same answer suggests they studied properly. The fallacy would be to think the answer is "C" because 98% chose it, rather than treating that agreement as a reason to believe it is "C". Popular support can be evidence for a claim without being what makes the claim true.

Two genuine exceptions​

Mackenzie names two cases where an appeal to popularity is not fallacious, because the popular opinion is itself the relevant content: etiquette, where the fact that most people in India regard leaving shoes on indoors as rude is itself what settles that it is rude there, and linguistic convention, where the fact that most people in Canada pronounce the letter "zed" settles what the correct Canadian pronunciation is.

Key takeaway​

Popular belief is very rarely what makes a claim true, even though it is often a reason to believe it; outside a few cases like etiquette and convention, arguments that appeal to popularity to establish truth should be treated with suspicion.