Some Signs Of Our Era

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It is no longer surprising, for me and for a minority of others, how many people in this modern technological age:

§ seem to lack the ability to use logical reasoning when writing about or discussing a subject;

§ do not research a subject for themselves using scholarly methodology and primary sources;

§ commit fallacies of reasoning such as appeal to authority and ad populum;

§ use an Internet resource such as ‘wikipedia’ as a source of information about a subject even though it is a tertiary source and thus is based on interpretive secondary sources.

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Some Signs Of Our Era

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Fairness And Fallacies: A Conspectus

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For centuries in the lands of the West, as often elsewhere in the world, the virtue of fairness has been admired with its cultivation in the individual regarded as a necessity for a civilized, cultured, society, based as the virtue was on restrained personal behaviour. The virtue was enshrined in one of the principles of Western jurisprudence: that the burden of proof is on the person who accuses not on the accused. Hence the fairness of the presumption of innocence until probative evidence proves otherwise.

Fairness, Fallacies, And The Cræft Of Research: A Conspectus

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The Fallacy Of Appeal To Authority

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The Fallacy Of Appeal To Authority
(pdf)

The fallacy of appeal to authority, also known as the fallacy of Argumentum ad Verecundiam, is somewhat misunderstood in this age of the Internet. It is not only citing or quoting a person or persons who is the regarded, by the person citing or quoting or by others, as an authority or ‘expert’ on a subject but also citing or quoting the opinion given by some institution, or ‘policy/advisory group’ or similar, on a subject, regardless of whether or not the ‘expert’ or institution or whatever has their opinion published by some means or some medium regarded as ‘mainstream’, academic, or ‘respectable’ or authoritative.

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