Arguing from authority

Here's an educational example of someone misusing argument from authority as a fallacy.

Now, I fully agree that specialists should stick to what they know and that we shouldn't rely on the opinion of, say, full-time tennis players to tell us how to learn to play the saxophone, or neurologists to tell us about the best place to search for valuable minerals. But there are two serious caveats to remember :

• It is possible, albeit rare, to be expert in multiple disciplines. Someone being a tennis player does not preclude them from also being a virtuoso saxophonist, nor does being a brain surgeon automatically disqualify you from knowing about rocket science. Not to mention that people have hobbies - they may not be fully expert in multiple areas, but they may still know more than the average.
• Expertise itself isn't binary. Certain knowledge useful in one area can be directly applicable in others. Knowledge can also be related but not exact, e.g. meteorology is more similar to climatology than, say, taxidermy. And even more obliquely, skills can be transferred too. Take a detective specialising in homicide cases and a random fashion designer, and ask them to solve the mystery of who stole the cookies. Who do you think's going to come out on top ?

On to the Atlantic piece then.

...a petition that crossed my line of sight the other day: “Historians’ Statement on the Impeachment of President Drumpf.” It appeared a few days before the House of Representatives went ahead and impeached Drumpf, and Nancy Pelosi even cited it in her own remarks on the House floor. Though impeachment is accomplished, the petition lives on, still collecting signatures. By now it has the endorsement of more than 1,500 people who identify themselves as historians, most of them professors of one rank or another, at universities of various reputation.

Which would seem to be self-evidently fine and dandy, but apparently not.

 It is a reflexive form of what logic-choppers call an argumentum ab auctoritate, or argument from authority. The idea is to prove a disputed claim by pointing out that some expert or other authority believes the claim to be true. It’s a bogus but very popular trick. Trump loves it, and uses it more adamantly the more outlandish his assertions get. The authority he cites most often is “everybody.” “Many, many dogs can be taught to play poker,” he will yell to reporters on the White House lawn, his hand slicing the air as a waiting helicopter whirrs away. “Everybody knows it.” The historians are not much more reassuring. Their authority for their statement is them.

Fair enough using Trump's examples - they are indeed fallacious, using non-existent or wildly inappropriate "authorities" is indeed a logical error. But historians ?

...Historians, he said, “have a civic role, as keepers in some ways of the nation’s heritage, as people who have devoted our lives to studying this country.” Historians claim expertise about the past; Drumpf’s impeachment is of the present. The study of history is crucial to a well-rounded intellect, it’s true, but neither a cultivated intellect nor a knowledge of history is a replacement for good judgement, which is what politics calls for. 

Yeah, ummm.... no ? The author appears to be suggesting that we cannot learn from similar examples in the past, that history has nothing to teach us about current society. That's absurd. Whatever happened to that quote about those who forget the past and all that ? History isn't just something you study to be well-rounded. Historians study people. Yes, knowledge is not a replacement for good judgement, but knowledge of people would seem to a prerequisite for good judgement about human behaviour.

Now it's true that not all historians study human behaviour in the same way : those who are experts in, say, Viking shipbuilding techniques are not going to be as helpful here as those who study political disasters. But I'd still expect someone who specialised in Viking shipbuilding techniques to also know a hell of a lot more about the general conditions of the Viking era than I do - it would be a weird individual indeed who wanted to know about the ships but cared not for why they sailed them. So yes, as a rule, I'd expect a group of historians to know a lot more about whether impeachment was a good idea than, say, a group of violinists. I'm not saying their authority is perfect or total, but the opinion of one group clearly carries more weight than the other.

The whole democratic enchilada rests on the assumption that when it comes to prudential matters of public importance, the view of the stevedore is as valuable as that of the Princeton professor.

Again no. See previous example. And especially so in this case, where the democratic group that have the power of impeachment (mostly lawyers) is not in the slightest bit representative of the country as a whole (mostly not lawyers). It's absolutely true that when it comes to issues of morality, anyone can provide valuable input. But that doesn't mean that all opinions are equal, otherwise, what would be the point of having professionals who are expert in the study of the humanities ?

The lasting question the petition raises is: “So what?” Put another way: “Should we care what these historians think about Drumpf’s impeachment?” In important ways the petition is as predictable as Halley’s Comet. Historians, no less than other academics, are deeply resentful of the public’s lack of interest in what they do, and understandably lunge at a turn in the popular spotlight. And the profession itself, like all the humanities, is ideologically monochromatic. Surveys show that the percentage of academic historians who say they’re Republicans ranges between 4 and 8 percent. If we set aside Hillsdale College, Bob Jones University, Thomas Aquinas College, and a couple of others, the more accurate percentage is probably half that. We can’t know how many within the other 98 percent consider themselves Democrats first and historians second. We can guess that many of them ache to think of themselves as “keepers of the nation’s heritage.” Not necessarily an authoritative bunch.

The author is confusing "representative" with "authoritative". The voting preferences of a group tell you about their representativeness, but authority flows from their specialisation and nothing else.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this category mistake used to advance a partisan purpose. In the 1980s, leftish nuclear physicists enjoyed great praise and attention for their petitions in favour of unilateral disarmament—as if knowing how to build a bomb was the same as knowing whether it should be used. A decade ago, many medical doctors signed petitions telling the rest of us that harvesting human stem cells for research was just fine—trying to shut down an argument over morality and metaphysics far beyond the scope of their medical training.

So, the people who actually know the bomb and best understand its effects are not worth listening to ? Don't you think the people who understand how nuclear weapons work and harvesting stem cells are likely to have spent more time considering the morality than someone plucked at random in the street ? Surely it's again a question of weighting opinions, not accepting or rejecting them. Of course, we don't necessarily give total deference to those whose jobs depend on what they're advocating, but we shouldn't dismiss them completely - and we should absolutely look to those in closely related fields (e.g. physicists who don't actually design nuclear weapons, doctors who don't actually use stem cell treatments).

If I want to understand the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, Sean Wilentz will be my go-to guy, I promise. But Drumpf’s impeachment, and contemporary politics in general? Nah. My TV went on the blink last week, but I didn’t call Amy Poehler to fix it just because she knows how to act.

That's stupid. Acting and TV maintenance are not in the slightest bit related. Knowledge of how people and societies behaved in the past, however, is closely tied to have they behave in the present. With it comes to issues of contemporary morality and political decision-making, historians do not have literal authority - otherwise we'd have a histororcracy, not a democracy. But neither are they committing the argument from authority fallacy. Rather, they are arguing from a position of expertise, which is exactly the best kind of argument, not a fallacy.

Historians Should Stay Out of Politics

Why was I so chagrined? A spasm of self-importance creates a terrible hangover. I have been alive many decades, and my memory is that no one, outside family members and close friends, has ever expressed the slightest interest in which presidential candidate got my vote, and I'm certain that no one had ever solicited that information from me in order to make his own decision on the subject.