There is no Fallacy ofArguing from Authority

EDWIN COLEMAN University ofMelbourne

Keywords: fallacy, argument, authority, speech act.

Abstract: I argue that there is no fallacy of argument from authority. I first show the weakness
of the case for there being such a fallacy: text-book presentations are confused, alleged
examples are not genuinely exemplary, reasons given for its alleged fallaciousness are not
convincing. Then I analyse arguing from authority as a complex speech act. R~iecting the
popular but unjustified category of the "part-time fallacy", I show that bad arguments which
appeal to authority are defective through breach of some felicity condition on argument as a
speech act, not through employing a bad principle of inference.

1. Introduction/Summary

There's never been a satisfactory theory of fallacy, as Hamblin pointed out in his
book of 1970, in what is still the least unsatisfactory discussion. Things have not
much improved in the last 25 years, despite fallacies getting more attention as
interest in informal logic has grown. We still lack good answers to simple
questions like what is a fallacy?, what fallacies are there? and how should we
classifY fallacies?
The idea that argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam) is a
fallacy, is well-established in logical tradition. I argue that it is no such thing. The
second main part of the paper is negative: I show the weakness of the case made
in the literature for there being such a fallacy as argument from authority. First,
text-book presentation of the fallacy is confused, second, the examples given are
not genuinely exemplary and third, reasons given for its alleged fallaciousness are
not convincing. Fourth, attempts to improve on the text-book accounts in recent
literature are not much help. The third main part is positive: I propose that
consideration of arguing from authority as a complex speech act illuminates
existing discussion and points toward a clear and simple positive argument for
there being no such fallacy. Specifically, I suggest that such an analysis enables us
to reject the unjustified category of the "part-time fallacy" (which has
increasingly shown up in texts recently), by showing that bad arguments which
appeal to authority are defective through breach of some felicity condition on
argument as a speech act rather than through employing a bad principle of
inference. The variety of ways such an argument can go wrong reflects the
complex structure of felicity conditions on it, not a long and unprincipled list of
unexpressed premises, as some authors have argued. Arguing from authority uses
a good principle of inference: after all, some arguments of this kind are good.
There is no fallacy of argument from authority.
366 Edwin Coleman

2. The weakness of the case for there being a fallacy

It is commonly said that argument from authority is a fallacy, and a fallacy is

generally said to be a type of argument which seems good but is notl. Now an
argument (in this sense) can be bad in two ways, through having a false or
unacceptable premise or through having a bad inference. Many logicians put
aside the unacceptable premises with the sense of 'fallacy' as a false belief,
emphasising logic's concern with inference. It is having a defective inference that
makes a fallacy bad; it is a bad type of argument. To say that the inference of an
argument is bad is to say that the premises give no support to the conclusion. So a
fallacy is a type of argument whose premises, even if true, give no support to the
conclusion, though they may seem to. (Some informal logicians do want to treat
false premises as sources of fallacy, and I will discuss some below; I think this is
a mistake and give some argument against it, but this paper is mainly intended to
counter the idea that arguing from authority is a fallacy in the narrower sense just
given.)
The argument from authority is this kind of argument:
Aristotle says that the earth does not move. so the earth does not move.
But this form
A says p. so p
is not worth using instead of the plain assertion
p
unless challenges like 'who's A?' or 'how would A know?' can be met with a
response giving some kind of credential to A. So I think it is reasonable to say
that this form is enthymematic, that there is a standard omitted premise and that
the form of the argument should be taken as
A says p. A is authoritative on sllch things. so p
These days expertise is as often taken as authority so we may also put it
E says p. E is expert on p. so p

raj Confused Presentation

Most authors these days grant that some appeals to authority are legitimate, which
may seem to suggest that I am beating on an open door: few current authors are
so incautious as to claim that there is a fallacy of arguing from authority
simpliciter. However things are not so simple. Writers on fallacy still mostly
manage to convey the message that argument from authority is a bad thing.
Older logic books unabashedly declare there is a fallacy of argumentum ad
verecundiam, or appealing to authority; but judging from their ways of presenting
their discussions, it seems that many authors are rather uncertain that there really
is a fallacy. The better recent books tend to imply that there is such a fallacy by
their section headings but to say in their discussion that appealing to authority is
"sometimes a fallacy." The notion of a part-time fallacy is not much discussed,
but some have marked this shift by referring instead to the fallacy of appealing to
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 367

inappropriate authority, or something similar. For example, Copi's Introduction

to logic, second edition [1961] has "Argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to
authority)" as a section heading, in a chapter labelled "Informal fallacies", but
says in the body of the text "This method of argument is not always strictly
fallacious". Perhaps he means that it is sometimes loosely fallacious; but as to
what a loosely fallacious argument is, no hint is given. In the eighth edition [Copi
and Cohen, 1990] by contrast, the section heading has become "The appeal to
inappropriate authority - argumentum ad verecundiam". This is nowadays quite a
common tack. Good authors also can be found listing not one but various kinds of
fallacious argument from authority; only they rarely agree on what kinds there are
or what makes them fallacious. For example, having pointed out earlier on that
many appeals to authority are legitimate, Barry and Rudinow [1989] distinguish a
variety of "fallacious" ways to appeal to authority, but under a heading "Appeal to
authority" in a chapter called "Informal fallacies of relevance". Similarly Engel
[1986: 212ft] has a big heading "The fallacy of appeal to authority" which clearly
implies that just appealing to authority is fallacious. But in the body text he
immediately says that "appeals to authority are often valid [sic], as when we tell
someone to use a certain medicine because the doctor prescribed it."
The impression given by the way the alleged fallacy is introduced in these
and most other recent logic texts is that arguing from authority is fallacious really,
th
but there are exceptions-rather as in the 19 century some mathematicians used
to talk about theorems with exceptions.

[bJ The Examples in Text Books Don i Exemplify2

Barry and Rudinow [1990: 233ft] give examples which differentiate what they
call six "varieties of this fallacy", as follows.
[1] "Invincible authority. When an appeal to authority wipes out all other
considerations, it constitutes a fallacious appeal to authority." They give an
example from Galileo:
But can you doubt that air has weight when you have the clear testimony of
Aristotle affirming that all the elements have weight including air, and
excepting only fire?
The argument they seem to have in mind here is the air has weight since
Aristotle says the air has weight [and Aristotle is never wrong). Galileo does not
actually give this second premise, but since no authority is indefeasible, if this
were the argument Galileo intended, then his argument has a false premise, not a
bad inference. If Aristotle were never wrong, this argument would be fine.
What in any case do they mean when they say "when an appeal to authority
wipes out all other considerations"? In explication they point to religious groups
like the Jonestown group who committed suicide at their leader's behest. It was
no doubt highly irrational of these people to believe everything Jim Jones said,
but it is inaccurate to imply that Jones made an irrelevant appeal to authority in
suggesting they commit suicide. In fact he used his own authority, no doubt
stupidly or madly or evilly, but he did not appeal to it. If someone else made the
368 Edwin Coleman

claim 'everything Jim Jones says is so' this was simply making a false claim. It
cannot be the type of argument that wipes out all other considerations but rather
the blame is on the participants' attitudes to Jones, to arguments etc. Fallacy is not
necessarily involved just because irrationality is.
So, if the type of argument intended here is characterised by a premise of the
kind 'everything X says is so' its fault is just having a false premise; but if the
fault adverted to is blind faith, that is no fallacy either.
[2] "Irrelevant expertise. When the appeal is to an authority whose expertise
is in some field other than the one at issue, the appeal is to irrelevant expertise.
For example, quoting the political or economic opinions of a distinguished
physicist like Oppenheimer or Einstein is fallacious because the massive weight
of an Einstein's opinion in the field of physics may not transfer to other fields."
Here again the problem is a simple mistaken belief-that Einstein is
authoritative about politics; not a mistaken inference of appealing to authority.
(Incidentally to say that Einstein's views about politics should not be given
weight just because he is an expert on physics, clearly presupposes that appeal to
a genuine authority is fine.)
[3] The third kind of example they give is so-called testimonials, for
example:
Don Meredith for Lipton's tea: "What makes me a Lipton's tea lover? Lipton
tastes so damn good."
As it stands, there is no argument here, so no fallacy. To invent an argument
equivalent to the ad we might try something like You should drink Lipton:s tea,
because Don Meredith says it:~ good and we will have to impute to the advertisers
the implied premise If tea tastes good to Don Meredith it will taste good to you.
Thus the idea is that the ad is equivalent to the argument
Lipton S tea lastes good to Don Meredith
/flea tastes good 10 Don Meredith it will laste good to you, so
You should drink Lipton s lea
The artificiality and lack of real equivalence of the result is obvious. It
derives from trying to find in the ad an attempt to prove something, as though the
advertisers want to prove that Lipton's tea is good, and offer as evidence Don's
statement. But an ad is not an attempt at proof; this one is really urging:
Be like Don Meredith, drink Lipton s tea.
If Don Meredith, whoever he is, says Lipton's tea tastes good to him, then if
true, this might be a good reason for my drinking it if I want to ape him, or might
not, if I don't. Most likely it's simply a lie. If there is something wrong here it is it
is his lying or the advertisers' wrongly thinking I want to ape him, not a mistaken
inference. Nobody believes the imputed premise and there is no reason to impute
it because there is not even an attempt at argument, so how can there be a fallacy?
[4] "Unidentified experts. Frequently expert opinion is merely alluded to, or
is identified in such a vague or incomplete way that its reliability, accuracy, and
weight are impossible to verify... phrases like "experts agree"." The example they
give is
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 369
Doctors recommend one pain reliever most: the one you get in Anacin.
This is a pretty bad example because the main thing wrong here is the misleading
implication that the pain reliever in question, namely aspirin, is only found in
Anacin. If we remove this distraction we get
Doctors recommend one pain reliever most: Anacin.
This is no longer a real example and probably no longer true, but never mind: is it
a fallacy?
It is not yet an argument, so let's make it one:
Doctors recommend one pain reliever most: Anacin. So Anacin is best.
Now this is certainly not a very good argument for the very simple reason that the
term 'doctors' is too vague. But
Most physicians recommend one pain reliever most: Anacin. So Anacin is best.
would be a (fairly) good argument if the premise were true, and it isn't good just
because that premise is false. On the other hand
Most physicians recommend one pain reliever most: aspirin. So aspirin is best.
is not an argument for the conClusion wanted although it is an acceptable though
weak argument from authority. But even then it is weak because we have 'most
physicians' not' 'all physicians'. Neither version is bad because it appeals to
authority.
[5] "Experts with axes to grind. Sometimes claims are advanced by appeal to
experts who do have impressive and genuinely relevant credentials. but whose
testimony may legitimately be suspected due to demonstrable conflict of
interest ... Suppose our attention is directed to an inconclusive study of the effects
of second-hand tobacco smoke conducted at a reputable institution under the
direction of someone with genuine scientific credentials. Now suppose we learn
that the study was underwritten by a research grant supplied by the Tobacco
Institute. We should at least look for other studies to compare this one with."
I agree entirely with the conclusion here. Only I don't see what fallacy is
being alluded to. Incidentally it is noteworthy that discussions of this "fallacy"
generally go in for these vague descriptions rather than concrete examples.
Presumably the idea intended here is that someone might say
Expert E says passive smoking is harmless. so passive smoking is harmless
where E is the recipient of the dubious funding. (Of course, no-one would
actually say
E says smoking is harmless and E is an expert but E has ajinancial interest in
people believing smoking is harmless, so smoking is harmless.
If the third premise is left out the argument might well be contested by pointing it
out; but that shows that it is part of the opposite case not of this argument.) But
there may well be nothing wrong with an argument of this kind even when such a
clause is true: most proponents of theories have an interest in other people
believing them, even physicists. We don't ignore Einstein's views in physics
because it was to his advantage to become a widely respected physicist.
If there is something wrong with the argument it must boil down to the fact
that E says passive smoking is harmless but E is lying because E knows the
370 Edwin Coleman

evidence is bogus. After all there are always perfectly proper studies which give
evidence for or against anything you like.
This example is one where a presupposition of appealing to authority fails,
namely the sincerity of the cited authority; but that is not the same thing as a
fallacy being committed. There is no fallacy here if a fallacy is a bad type of
argument. The type of argument is appealing to authority, which is a good type of
argument; only in this instance it has been badly executed. I will enlarge on this
contrast in the second part of the paper.
[6] "Division of expert opinion ... When the experts disagree, citing the
authority of representatives of one side or the other fails to settle the issue and
constitutes a fallacy". They mention controversy about how AIDS spreads and
say "In such a climate of controversy it would be inadequate simply to quote [one
expert]".
This is a peculiar way to deal with a genuine problem which has been widely
discussed in the literature (for example Willard 1990, Cederblom and Paulsen
1988). Indeed for some writers this is the only real problem about argument from
authority. Once again Barry and Rudinow do not give an actual example of an
argument committing a fallacy, but presumably if I said
AIDS is easily caught from mosquitos. because Masters et al. say so
this would be an example of what they have in mind. Would it be a fallacy for me
to do that? I grant that it would be "inadequate," if this means that I would be
disingenuous, even misleading, if I pretended that there was no controversy
andlor that I would be ripe for contestation by someone citing other experts with
the contrary view. My argument would be weak because it would be easily
countered, it would or should certainly "fail to settle the issue." But does that
make it fallacious? Compare this case with a case of unproblematic appeal to
authority; say I claim
AIDS is caused by a virus. because Masters et al. say so?
This is just the kind of argument which just about all text-book authors
accept as being a non-fallacious appeal to authority. All the experts agree about
the matter, or nearly. Actually even this example should be ruled out by the
authors presently under discussion because there are a few experts like Peter
Duesberg who dispute that AIDS is virological. This in itself shows that there is
something wrong with claiming that a fallacy is committed by an example where
there is no expert unanimity. There never is. Clearly I might be wrong in either of
these cases, or even in the unlikely case of unanimity, since sometimes the experts
are all wrong, this type of argument is never conclusive. But why would one be a
fallacy and the other not? Would the latter argument somehow become a fallacy if
suddenly Duesberg's view became prevalent? Surely the type of argument would
not have changed.
To sum up, the examples given prove to be: two arguments bad through
having a false premise, one not an argument at all, one an argument weak through
vagueness, one an argument bad only in the way that any piece of testimony can
turn out to be unreliable, and one an atgument which is simply weak but not
fallacious. The examples given in logic texts all seem to be like these! Either they
 There is no Fallacy ofArguing from Authority 371

are not arguments at all, or they are not bad arguments, or if they are bad, they are
bad because of a false premise or presupposition. (The examples alluded to by
Copi and Cohen-no argument is actually given-are testimonials and Einstein
on politics: they clearly take the fallacy to be just use of a non-authority as if an
authority, which is the false premise case.)

[cl Arguments Given for Fallaciousness are Poor

Reasons have been put forward why appealing to authority is or can be fallacious,
but they are not very convincing.
Appealing to authority is sometimes said to be irrational. Irrationality is a lot
broader than the committing of fallacy, and some kinds of irrationality positively
preclude fallacy (see Coleman [1996]). We need a specification of what is
irrational about it. One common suggestion is that one is substituting authority for
evidence, and this is irrational. Such a suggestion presupposes that citing
authority is not giving evidence, and this seems hard to square with accepting that
sometimes it is a good way to argue. Either argument requires giving evidence, in
which case if argument from authority is sometimes not fallacious it must give
evidence; or else, as I would say, argument requires giving reason to believe
which may be evidence but need not, as in the case of argument from authority.
Either way this provides no reason for calling argument from authority a fallacy.
One certainly is substituting authority for evidence if we take the narrow
construal of what is evidence, but that's the point of the exercise: the question is
precisely whether this is at least sometimes the rational thing to do, and accepting
argument from authority as sometimes non-fallacious is to say that it is. So this
suggestion just begs the question.
Another suggestion is that argument from authority forecloses debate, which
is irrational (see Cederblom and Paulsen [1988]). This also seems to beg several
questions: Is it not rational to close debate? Does appealing to authority foreclose
debate? Does using 'foreclose' rather than 'close' not falsely aSSLlme that debates
have a natural closing point? In fact, argument from authority need not close
debate; what often happens is that the topic of debate shifts from the original
claim to the expertise of the claimant. This is hardly irrational; we see it
happening frequently in courts of law when expert witnesses are being used: the
opponent will dispute the fact. extent or nature of the witness' expertise. It is true
that the debate cannot be about the evidence for a claim if that evidence is not put
torward. and it is also true that historically, appeals to authority have been used to
avoid considering other evidence, but nothing indicates that this is intrinsic to its
use.' In any case, authority can be and often is pitted against authority, hardly
closing debate.
Again, Salmon [1989: 355] says "To argue that a conclusion is correct
merely because some authority figure accepts it is fallacious." Such a way of
putting things is ambiguous between "arguing p, because E accepts if' - i.e. going
in for arguing p. for that reason - and "arguing [p, because E accepts p]", i.e.
arguing that E's acceptance is the reason, the explanation, for p's being so. This
372 Edwin Coleman

simply confuses the knowledge of the fact and the knowledge of the reasoned
fact, as Aristotle puts it. That some authority accepts a fact is a good, though
defeasible reason to believe it; but it does not of course explain why it is so. p is
rarely correct as a result of E's thinking it so. Other reasons for believing p might
make plain why it is so, but this does not mean that authority cannot show it to be
so. What "arguing [p, since E accepts pJ" means is never "p, merely because E
accepts p" so Salmon is engaging in travesty to report this form of argument in
these terms.
These attempts to argue that appealing to authority is irrational are not very
convincing ways to show that it is a fallacy. The other main argument is
commonly implied in the course of discussion of examples: the fact is that such
arguments are not conclusive: the desired conclusion could be false even though
the premises are true. Despite what authors say a fallacy is, this tends to become
the test for it. This "test" is applied to examples of other alleged fallacies too; and
if one examines what is said about other fallacies one finds that quite a few are
also claimed to be only sometimes fallacious, and that the examples given of
other alleged fallacies are also frequently not even arguments, not bad arguments,
or if bad are bad for reasons other than the one alleged. This all suggests that it is
important to examine what exactly a fallacy is said, in general, to be. I will not go
into this matter here because there is a long and complicated historical story to be
told; although this is particularly relevant to explaining why and when it has been
claimed that there is a fallacy of arguing from authority - since, and consequent
on, the successful struggle of science to wrest intellectual authority from the
Church - in this paper I confine myself to arguing that there is no such fallacy. I
will take up these related issues on another occasion.

[d] The Enthymeme Approach is Unprincipled

Since all accounts agree at some point that not every argument from authority is
fallacious, let us return to the idea of a part-time fallacy. In the journal literature
some attempt has been made to determine when an argument of this kind is
acceptable and when not, by identifying implicit premises for the "true form" of
this type of argument, any of whose breach can lead to a "fallacious" use. The
idea of treating argument from authority as an enthymeme is a natural one as I
said at the beginning.
A saysp, sop
is commonly cited. though the real form of the argument is
A says p, A is authoritative on such things, so p.
But I want to contrast this recognition of a commonly suppressed premise
with a strategy followed by some writers, for example Woods and Walton
[1979a,b], which I think is misguided. It consists in attempting to identify a list of
conditions which must be met if argument from authority is to be good, and
building them into the form of the argument as further suppressed premises. The
idea is that the real form of argument from authority is something like
1. E is an expert on domain 0
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 373
2. E says p
3. P is in D
4. Other experts say p too
5. p does not conflict with available "objective" evidence.
So plausibly, p.
The idea is that if, and only if, all these supplementary premises hold, the
argument is good.
I have three objections to this. First, this kind of attempt to give a form for
argument from authority is wrong-headed since it subscribes to the mistaken idea
of formal logic that underneath the manifest argument there is a better one trying
to get out. Second, I doubt whether clauses 4 and 5 reflect conditions which
argument from authority need satisfy. I have argued against 4 already and I will
make two points briefly against 5. First, 'objective' begs many questions if the
shudder-quotes are dropped, and 'objective evidence' presupposes or insinuates
that testimony is not evidence, an idea which I have questioned already and which
is explicitly disputed by some writers [Coady 1992, Hardwig 1985]. (Woods and
Walton write 'direct evidence' but I don't know what that is; Walton [J989a p61],
writes 'objective'.) Further, there are certainly cases where one will rightly prefer
the testimony of an expert which conflicts with so-called objective evidence, for
example when having mechanical faults diagnosed. But thirdly, whatever the
merits of these clauses, this general idea cannot in any case serve the purpose of
pinning down in what exactly consists the fallacy of argument from authority,
since if it were successful it would turn every case of a bad argument from
authority into an argument with a false premise. But a fallacy is not an argument
with a false premise, but an argument in which the support offered by the
premises to the conclusion is delusory. At least, that is what logicians generally
claim (including our example text-book authors), because it is part of the standard
account that logic is about the evaluation of entailments, not of premises.
Nevertheless, let us put aside the issue whether we should allow that a
fallacy may be a kind of false premise because even if we do, there is a deeper
problem with this kind of account. The list of allegedly implicit premises of
Woods and Walton roughly corresponds to the lists of varieties of the fallacy, or
ways to argue fallaciously, of textbook authors like Barry and Rudinow or Engel,
or the lists of conditions for acceptable appeal to authority of other authors like
Salmon, or the rather interesting list of test questions proposed by Ennis [1974] to
ask in deciding of some testimony if one should accept it. But what is common to
all of them is the lack of any reason for supposing that such an account is
complete: on what basis can it be claimed that these and only these are the ways
you can commit this fallacy? Or that these and only these are the conditions
which must be satisfied or these and only these the suppressed premises that must
hold? These writers all just produce their lists with no attempt to assure us that
there are no other ways to go wrong, no other missing premises or conditions to
satisfy. Perhaps this reflects the general shapelessness of discussions of fallacy,
but it is not conducive to confidence since the lists all differ from one another. I
present in Part 3 what I think is a better suggestion.
374 Edwin Coleman

[eJ Walton 1989

Walton's discussion of argument from authority in [1989b] seems to me to

improve on his earlier enthymematic approach. He discusses examples of the
various kind of flaws which argument from authority can have some of which we
have already seen: the Einstein syndrome, the lack of citation, the advertising
testimonial, the conflict of experts, interpreting what they say. He refrains in most
cases from saying that a fallacy is committed, and avoids talking about "varieties
of a fallacy," as Barry and Rudinow do. Rather he proposes a list of questions to
ask (rather like Ennis's) and writes of questioning an argument, giving it little
weight and so on, rather than dubbing it a fallacy. This general idea of "argument
criticisms" rather than fallacies is the right direction to go.
However Walton still wants there to be fallacy of arguing from authority, and
it is interesting to see how he finds one. He has taken up from Hamblin's
historical discussion the need to go back to Locke, and asserts in his introductory
remarks that "Locke did not claim that all appeals to authority in argumentation
are fallacious" [1989: 173]. Locke called appeal to authority argumentum ad
verecundiam (appeal to shame) because he was indeed concerned with
intimidatory tactics in debate. Walton now identifies the fallacy in argument from
authority as trying to use an appeal to authority to silence opposition.
J have three objections to this move. First, in point of fact Locke did not just
not claim that not all arguments from authority are fallacious; he didn't claim that
any were fallacious. He does not use the term fallacy in the relevant passage at
alL Walton is being at least misleading in suggesting that he does. Second, in
order to call a fallacy the practice which he has in mind, Walton defines fallacy
[1989b: 19] as "important kinds of error or deceptive tactics of argumentation."
As far as J know such a dichotomous definition is peculiar to Walton, although it
is related to that of van Eemeren and Grootendorst (which I discuss next), through
the notion of argumentation as reasoned dialogue. I am not suggesting that we do
not want systematic discussion of deceptive tactics in argumentation, we do; but it
seems to me very odd to describe the tactic in question as a fallacy. The attempts
to cow the opposition in the examples given by Locke and the Port-Royal Logic,
like
He is of high birth, therefore what he advances is true
rely at least as much on prestige, wealth, social position and in general political
authority (which Walton wrongly dismisses as irrelevant [1989: 174)), as they do
on alleged cognitive authority. One can criticize someone who acts so for
hectoring or browbeating or even, though I'd prefer not to use this myself, for
sophistry. But fallacy is surely at minimum some kind of error. If not, why
doesn't Walton want to call all the other kinds of criticizability of arguments
fallacies too? Finally, someone who tries to cow the opposition may well not be
trying to or succeeding in deceiving them at all. The various churchmen who
cited the authority of Aristotle and the Bible to Galileo were not trying to deceive
him but to shut him up.
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 375

[j] van Eemeren and Grootendorst s Speech Act Approach

These authors have tried to conceptualise "argumentative discussions" as

dialogues consisting of various specifiable kinds of speech act organised in a
specifiable way into a complex structure. They give a lengthy list of rules ideally
governing such discussions (seventeen, most with subclauses) and in a bold
stroke propose to replace the traditional mess about fallacies by declaring that a
fallacy is any breach of any of these rules governing reasoned dialogue. This
proposal has two great merits: it recognizes that many flaws in arguments are not
really in them but in their context, and it recognizes that argument flaws come in
many different kinds.
I have a number of reservations about their overall scheme which I will
discuss on another occasion (Coleman, forthcoming) because their approach is
complex and subtle. All that I want to argue here is that this characterization of
fallacy as a breach of a rule of reasoned dialogue is of little help for our present
problem. In their [1987], which introduces a slightly different formulation of what
the rules of rational discussion are, arguing from authority is simply declared to
be an inappropriate method of argumentation, which therefore breaches a rule
banning such methods. But I don't think that this will do, since it doesn't allow
for the generally accepted fact that there are good cases of such argument.
Further, unsuitability is a rather vague property which would need to be made
considerably more specific to discriminate among appeals to authority and to
explain why some are unacceptable.

3. A Speech Act Analysis of Arguing from Authority

I suggest that a speech act analysis of arguing by appeal to authority might be

more systematic than the extant discussions. Such an analysis will make plain two
dimensions of systematicity in the variety of ways in which argument from
authority can go wrong without being fallacious, some of which we have seen in
the examples discussed above.
Argument from authority is a doubly complex speech act because on the one
hand it involves its utterer in arguing, which is itself already a complex speech
act, and second because it involves the utterer in reporting someone else's
attestation, which is a kind of indirect speech act (indirect in the sense of indirect
or reported speech, not the sense in which Searle writes of indirect speech acts4.)

Argument from Authority as a Speech Act

Here is my suggestion.
First, to argue is already a complex speech act:
W argues to R for p on the basis of q if
[i} W asserts q to R; [where q may be several premises}
[ii} W asserts p to R;
376 Edwin Coleman

and [iii] W indicates to R that q is reason to accept p.

Second, arguing from authority is a particular kind of arguing:
W argues to R for p by appeal to the authority ofE by arguing thus
[ia] W asserts to R that E attests to p and [ib] W asserts that E is expert for
p;
[ii] W asserts p to R;
and [ii] W indicates to R that [E attests to p and E is expert for p) is reason
to accept p.
The global speech act of argument from authority thus has five constituent speech
acts. They are:
three assertions,
[1] W asserts that E attests to p;
[2] W asserts that E is expert for p;
[3] W asserts that p;
an attestation,
[4] E attests to p;
and an indication,
[5] W indicates that [E attests to p and E is expert for p] is reason to accept
p.
These five compose the whole complex speech act argument from authority,
which is itself a sixth speech act, one of argument. Thus we have in a case of
argument from authority six speech acts of four different kinds, namely assertion,
attestation, indication and argument.
According to the theory of speech acts, all linguistic acts, whether making a
definition or marrying two people or argument from authority, have a set of
felicity conditions which provide natural kinds of possible ways they can go
wrong.
The felicity conditions on any speech act originally given by Austin are
these:
AI: There must be conventional/institutional setting and procedure
involving a certain kind of utterance for effecting the speech act.
A2: The participants must all be suitably entitled for their roles.
B 1: The procedure must be done properly.
B2 The procedure must be done completely.
n: Participants must have the right intentions.
[2: Participants must act appropriately afterwards.
(These are vague and overlapping but will suffice for present purposes. The
points I want to make will survive an improvement to the analysis of felicity
conditions.)
Each of the five acts involved in argument from authority will have felicity
conditions of these six kinds, five local sets for the constituent speech acts and
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 377

another global set for the whole act of argument. So there are thirty-six ways, not
all equally important no doubt, in which the speech act of argument from
authority might go wrong. And each of these will itself be possible in various
ways. None of them deserves to be called committing a fallacy, but fortunately in
order to see that we shall not need to look at all thirty-six of them in detail.
Instead I shall argue in turn for some simple consequences of argument from
authority's being a speech act, of its being a complex speech act, and of its being
a speech act of argument.

Implications ofArgument from Authority Being a Speech Act

The prevalent uncertainty about the role of deception in fallacy seems to me to

have a rather simple explanation. If we think of an argument as a speech act and
not as a mere propositional structure then there can be an uncertainty as to
whether it is W or R or both that is mistaken when a fallacy is committed. The
result of abstracting from dialectical contexts is to remove any possibility of
anyone being deceived other than a transcendental ego contemplating a
propositional structure. Of course, this point has been made before in other ways
by various writers urging a dialectical analysis of argument.
The speech act perspective provides two further illuminations of the extant
discussions of argument from authority. First, it is general feature of speech acts
that they presuppose such things as sincerity as part of condition n. Not all do of
course, but assertion and attestation do. There is no reason whatever to single out
citing an expert with an axe to grind as committing a variety of a fallacy; if the
cited expert was not sincere in attesting to p then that attestation is infelicitous
and inevitably the complex speech act of which it forms a part will be too. But
even if this attestation were not put to use in argument, it would still be flawed by
insincerity and just this flaw could be pointed out anyway. A fallacy is surely a
flaw in arguing; a flaw which can occur even when one is not arguing should not
be called a fallacy even when one is. Or perhaps better, before I am accused of a
fallacy myself, I should say that when we say that a fallacy is a flaw in arguing we
ought to mean a flaw which is a flaw in the arguing per se. Otherwise we shall
have to start counting stuttering and muttering as fallacies, too.
Again, the requirements that the procedure for argument from authority be
carried out completely and correctly are general requirements on speech acts,
conditions Bland B2. So citing authorities too vaguely to enable checking up-a
commonly claimed "variety" or "way" of committing the "fallacy" of arguing
from authority-is just a particular form which breaching these requirements can
take for this particular speech act. The same point applies here too, that we should
not be calling a fallacy what may be a flaw in arguing but which can equally be
just a tlaw in an assertion--or even a curse or an apology.
378 Edwin Coleman
Implications of the Complex Structure ofArgument from Authority as a
Speech Act

Let us now consider some implications of the complexity of argument from

authority as a speech act.
The first is that the textbook obsession with so-called "testimonials"-well-
known people praising products in advertisements-actually confuses two
different speech acts. Testimony (see Coady 1992) is not appeal to authority at all,
it is an exercise of authority: in argument from authority, W makes use of a prior
testimony by E, someone different. Don Meredith may be arguing if he is offering
viewers reasons to buy tea-bags in his ads for them but he is not arguing by
appeal to authority since it would have to be his own authority he would be
appealing to. To speak authoritatively is not the same thing as the appeal to
authority-it could not be since the point of appealing to authority is to back up
what you say with what someone weightier says.
Second, there are many possible flaws in argument from authority not
remarked on in textbooks.
For example if I claim
I am very wise. I say so, and I am expert on myself
then if the second premise is true then I am speaking authoritatively but I am not
appealing to authority. I am not usually entitled to appeal to myself as authority
(pains being, controversially, a possible exception). Many other novel ways to
botch appealing to authority can be devised.
Third, the various different so-called varieties of the fallacies of argument
from authority, and problems about the use of experts discussed in the literature,
can be systematically attributed to failures of the various conditions on the
various constituent speech acts. We have already seen how breach of the fifth
condition through insincerity can. invalidate the cited expert attestation and vitiate
the argument. Recall that in every speech act, one of the felicity conditions (A2)
is that the participants must be appropriately entitled to take their roles for
example not just you or I can conduct a wedding or launch a ship. This applies
equally to the assertions by W of E's expertise and E's having attested to p.
Consider first the question when W is entitled to assert that E attests to p.
First, W must be able to back this claim up, so must have available what we
might call a citatory trail. W must be able to supply potential objectors with
means to verify that E did indeed attest to p. This in turn typically presupposes the
existence of writing, archives, bibliographical conventions and a whole social
infrastructure organised around the practice of serious public depositions such as
Aristotle's and Einstein's works. Although argument from authority is used in the
court situation using verbal testimony from authorities, this is not the typical
situation. Rather, typically argument from authority involves citation of published
statements. (In any case court records are kept to overcome this difference.)
A second implication of the entitlement requirement, or perhaps of the
proper execution requirement (8 I) depending on the case, is that W should not be
 There is no Fallacy ofA rguing from Authority 379

misinterpreting or misquoting the expert. This is a common problem which many

texts quite rightly discuss, though far too many call it a fallacy. It is not a fallacy
because once again precisely this flaw can arise in citing for non-argumentative
purposes.
In argument from authority, W also asserts that E is expert for p. Such an
assertion can also be flawed in any of the usual six dimensions. W must be
entitled to assert that E is expert for p. If we ask what such entitlement consists in,
we open a large can of worms. W must have some grounds for believing that
there is some domain of expertise to which p belongs and that E is qualified with
respect to that domain. What counts as a domain of expertise is a difficult
question - though we should not proceed, as do many authors, to identify
argument from authority with appealing to so-called technical expertise. Often
people are qualified to attest to matters through mere position or accident. For
example:
Tom:S on the phone from Adelaide; he says it:S raining there.
is quite sufficient to justify my claiming that it is raining in Adelaide and is a
genuine if humble argument from authority. In most circumstances I would have
good reason to think that Tom was qualified to attest to the weather in Adelaide if
that is where he was, and I was not. But of course the difficult cases are those
where some kind of technical expertise is claimed. Are there really experts on
insanity? What kind of thing do they know? How do you identify such a person?
There is a lot of discussion of this kind of question in the literature, though it
doesn't come to very useful conclusions. My point here is simply that
unsatisfactory answers to such questions in a particular case of argument from
authority are no reason for crying 'fallacy', they are once again just evidence of
the enormous complexity of argument from authority as a speech act. In many
cases there is a quite crucial role of documentation in the establishment of
domains of expertise and the credentials of authorities. This brings out again the
importance of writing for the social practice of argument from authority.'

Implications of Argument from Authority Being a Speech Act of Argument

I have been using a general argument against calling various possible flaws in
argument from authority fallacies, which consists in pointing out that they can
obtain when one of the constituent speech acts is used for non-argumentative
purposes. This provides us with one positive argument for there being no such
fallacy. If we now consider the implications of the fact that argument from
authority is a speech act of argument we can make clear another positive
argument. It is this: if we are going to identify any way in which argument from
authority in going wrong is a fallacy it will have to be in virtue of argument from
authority'S being a speech act of argument; and we know that it cannot be in
asserting the premises that one may make a fallacy. only in the further claim that
they support the conclusion. Thus it can only be in the conditions on the
embedded speech act of indication that we need look for fallacy. Flaws in the acts
of assertion of the premises by Wand the doubly embedded act of attestation by
380 Edwin Coleman

E are problems with the premises and cannot be the source of fallacy (though they
can be and often are the source of other ways of going wrong).

Felicity Conditions for Argument

W argues for p to R if
[i] W asserts to R that q; [q may be several premises]
[ii] W asserts to R that p;
[iii] W indicates to R that q is reason to accept p.
Indication is a speech act which is in general less explicit than is assertion.
In many of its uses its point depends on its being less than fully explicit (here I
part company with Searle's expressibility principle). However this is not the case
in argument, where within reason the more explicit the logical signposting the
better: to say 'q, so p' is clearer and generally better than a mere 'q;p', though
many arguments are given without explicit warranting connectives. So I will
amend this account for present purposes and replace clause [iii] with
[iii*] W asserts to R that q is reason to accept p
with the caveat that what counts as assertion must be interpreted reasonably
charitably here.
Felicity conditions for arguing are then:
[II] The assertion of the premises must be felicitous.
[12] The indication or assertion of the support-claim must be felicitous.
[13] The assertion of the conclusion must be felicitous.

Flawed Argument

We have two constituent acts which can go wrong independently corresponding

to the usual distinction between arguments with bad premises and those with bad
inferences. And there is a third possibility because the speech act of argument is a
complex one constituted by the (at least) two assertions: it is not simply a
sequence of assertions.
[It flaws] Any argument in which the assertion of the premises is
infelicitous is ungrounded-the premises are unacceptable in some way, not
necessarily through falsity.
[12 flaws] An argument in which the indication of support goes awry mayor
may not be a non sequitur. But even a non sequitur is not yet a fallacy, so we
need to consider just what felicity condition's failure might make flawed support-
indication into a fallacy. Let us leave aside for the moment contexts in which
indicating support is not a socially recognised practice (failure of felicity
condition A I); in any case one would hardly speak of fallacy then. Perhaps we
can see circumstances in which A2 might fail, a participant's not being entitled to
make indications, for example witnesses are just supposed to answer questions
but not draw inferences from these answers. But no fallacy is involved in such
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 381

over-eagerness. Failing to carry out the procedure of indication properly or

completely (B I or B2) may well make the argument weak because the audience is
not clear exactly what the argument is. But this is still not even a nonsequitur.
Finally we come to the possibility that the participants' attitudes or actions are
inappropriate and it is only here that the possibility of fallacy may arise. Only if
W is mistaken in believing that the premises offer support for the conclusion do
we have a nonsequitur and possibly a fallacy.
[13 flaws] Interestingly, there is a second way in which a fallacy might
possibly arise, namely by defective assertion of the conclusion. For example, if
there is some difference between the premises asserted and those believed by W
to give the conclusion support. Asserting a conclusion is not just asserting some
claim, but a claim as a conclusion.
We have then two candidates for the fallacy of arguing by appeal to
authority: mistakenly believing that the premises support the conclusion, and
confusing the issue somehow between premises and conclusion. This latter will
be some classical fallacy such as irrelevant conclusion or equivocation-and thus
not that other alleged fallacy, appealing to authority. So we are reduced to asking
ifthere is a mistake which consists in believing
[*J that the premises [E allests to p and E is expertfor p} if true give support
to the conclusion p.
And the answer is simply no, because virtually everyone admits that sometimes
argument from authority is a good argument. Consider for example the kind of
argument allegedly put to Galileo:
Aristotle says that the earth does not move, so the earth does not move.
The argument which was actually used in the Galileo affair and related disputes is
actually much better represented as
The Bible says that the earth does not move, so the earth does not move.
which is enthymematic for
The Bible says the earth does not move and the Bible is the 1V0rd of God, so
the earth does not move
and this in turn seems to have been taken as equivalent to
God says the earth does not move. so the earth does not move
This argument must surely be good: what better reason could one have for
accepting p than God's asserting it? Of course. the truth of the premise
presupposes the existence of God with the usual Christian properties, but if it is
true it is surely completely unthinkable that the earth does not move should be
false and that this should not be a good argument for it.
So that it cannot be this belief [*] which is at fault. On the contrary, if [E
attests 10 p and E is expert jor p} is true then it does give support to p. Those
premises, if true, do give support to that conclusion. I do not claim that they show
it to be true, only that they support it: they give one good reason to believe it.
Arguing from authority is not a conclusive form of argument. Of course, the
premises only give any support to the conclusion if they are true; but this is
equally true for demonstrative arguments like,
382 Edwin Coleman

if it is night. it is light. it is night, so it is light.

which has an inference of the form modus ponens, the paradigm valid form of
inference. To say it is valid, however, is not to say that the premises of such an
inference do support the conclusion but only that if they were true they would
support the conclusion; in fact if they were true they would support it so well that
the conclusion must also be true. That is what validity means. The point logicians
emphasise, that the inference can be good while the premises are not, as in this
example, applies just as well to non-conclusive arguments like argument from
authority. The inference can be good, while the premises are wanting, as indeed
they often are.
There is another way to put the point. It is generally agreed that some
arguments of this form are good. But they cannot be good if the principle of
inference on which they rely is bad. Since there are two ways an argument can be
bad, there are two virtues it must have if it is to be good, good premises and a
good principle of inference. Therefore the principle of inference of a good
argument is good. But some arguments from authority are good arguments.
Therefore the principle of inference of argument from authority is good.
What the preceding discussion shows is that among the very many ways in
which the speech act of arguing by appeal to authority could go wrong, only one
is even a candidate for being a fallacy; but precisely that way is not a way to go
wrong at all. So although fallacies like irrelevant conclusion can be committed in
argument from authority, there is no fallacy of argument from authority.
In summary, the case for thinking there is a fallacy of argument from
authority is weak, resting on confused presentation, non-exemplary examples, and
feeble arguments, while a speech act analysis of argument from authority shows
that among the many ways it might possibly go wrong, the only one that might
constitute fallacy is actually a good principle of inference. So there is no such
fallacy as argument from authority.

Notes

I This is not a very good definition but its defects don't affect my arguments in this paper.
2 I take as exemplary two texts used in the two South Australian Universities other than my
own at the time of writing.
J This may seem to assume that considering the evidence would overthro\\i the appeal to
authority. It would perhaps be better to say that appealing to authority may sometimes lead
one to disdain the use of evidence. The famous cases. like Galileo's. were like that. the timlt
was in the weighing of different kinds of evidence. But no doubt this blind and unmerited
substitution of one kind of evidence for another explains much animus against appeal to
authority.
4 I am adopting the original analysis of Austin (1972]: I do not agree with some authors that
Searle's revisions count as improvements. but nothing much turns on this for present
purposes.
; In fact I think it is quite essential to the existence of this particular kind of argument. and I
would prefer to write of 'language acts' not 'speech acts'. but I will not pursue this complex
issue here, This is part of the reason why I have been content with Austin's formulation of
 There is no Fallacy ofArguingfrom Authority 383

felicity: we really need to develop an account of "speech" acts which takes documentation
seriously. This is a large task.

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EDWIN COLEMAN
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
PARKVILLE, AUSTRALIA 3052
o