Fallacy Fallacious Thinking -- Appeals

Fallacy Fallacious Thinking -- Appeals to Authority and Ignorance, and the False Analogy Although the infamous tagline of the cult classic TV series the X-files proclaimed "trust no one," in real life people are often apt to trust figures in positions of authority, even when these authority figures advocate specious statements or have specious credentials. It is only natural, one might say, to do so, given that no person within any organization can be an expert on everything from bioethics to accounting.

Occasionally, we must trust the expert opinion on others in matters we do not understand. This can be true in everything from forensic pathology when one is a juror during a murder trial, to a CEO who trusts his or her legal counsel about the legality of a particular business merger.

But when engaged in critical acts of decision-making for an organization one must be careful one does not fall prey to an easy appeal to authority, and believe an argument merely because of the persona figure who advocates the position, without evidence at hand to back up the authority's claim. An excellent recent example of this false appeal to authority is found in the crossing of the pharmaceutical industry with the entertainment industry. Lorainne Bracco, who plays the popular character of Dr.

Melfi on the Sopranos, and evidently suffered from depression herself (the complaint she is treating Tony Soprano for) in her own personal life, has become an advertisement spokesperson for the treatment of depression with antidepressant medication from Pfizer. Medication helped her, so it can help others, Bracco believes -- or so she says, for Bracco is not a disinterested celebrity. "Bracco will appear in a series of commercials for the drug company Pfizer, and is also involved in a website highlighting the campaign," notes the BBC News in 2005.

While not to minimize Bracco's own struggle or the struggle of millions who suffer with depression, it is worth remembering that Bracco is not a psychiatrist, skilled in diagnosing the remedy for all depression sufferer's ailments. She is an actress. Even the letterhead of the Pfizer campaign on its website "Why life with depression?" is a question that places Bracco in a position of authority, as she queries the reader as if she is a therapist, like the one she plays in the Sopranos.

Perhaps Bracco's lack of expertise in critical thinking and scientific reasoning can be found in her rationale for why one should take Pfizer's drugs. To the BBC, she stated: "If you break your leg, you have it fixed," she said.

If you have a toothache, you go to the dentist." But mental health, unlike a broken limb or tooth decay has a more complicated series of causes, and varies from person to person -- also it is often a chronic condition, rather than a sudden ailment like a bone break or tooth ache. Thus Bracco employs the logical fallacy of the false analogy.

An effect can have multiple causes, and thus analogies are often faulty ways of reasoning, especially when dealing with critical thinking in complicated situations -- such as treating the human mind vs. The human body alone. The appeals to authority as well as the use of a false analogy are both seductive fallacies. So is the appeal to ignorance.

One need look no further than Fox News to find such an appeal -- what else can one say about a news site that has a regular featured financial columnist called "the capitalist pig?" Jonathan Hoenig who proudly calls himself by this title, plays into the readers' likely assumptions that greed is good is lauded for selecting the highest yield profile over one year, regardless of the fact that many readers may really want to be long-term investors -- the one with the most money wins, proclaims the "Cash it in Challenge" of Fox.

The fine print of the challenge, however, reads that "is FOX News' policy that contributors disclose positions they hold in stocks they discuss, though positions may change.

Readers of "Cashin' in Challenge" must take responsibility for their own investment decisions." Yet even though one might snidely observe that Fox News strikes the casual viewer as little else but a 24-hour exhibition of the appeal to ignorance fallacy, no less illustrious a publication than the New York Times also plays to a different set of reader biases, upholding conservative Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's fondness for cigars, and making fun of anti-smoking advocates as zealous health nuts (note the additional use of hyperbole, in addition to the appeal to ignorance): "Along with sharing an uncommonly pleasurable pastime, we aficionados share a common paranoia that transcends class, creed, race, gender or the national origin of one's cigars.

We fear that if past is prelude; the antismoking infidels will keep waging their jihad until they snuff us out forever. So in the spirit of sustaining the current cigar renaissance, I took it upon myself to seek sage advice for smoking safely through these perilous times." The language is more highfalutin than the cash it in challenge, but it still appeals to the reader's lowest.